PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT

 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

2005 SPRING SEMESTER

(Contact the instructor for information if the course description you are looking for is not provided here.)



PHIL 106.01 (Philosophical Texts)
Instructor: Murat Baç
Description: click here


PHIL 222.01 (Philosophy of Science)
Instructor: Gürol Irzık
Description:

This course is an introduction to the main issues and approaches in philosophy of science. Topics to be covered are the origins, the nature and the aims of science; the problems of meaningfulness, demarcation, and induction; scientific method, theories and their testing; scientific revolutions; realism and anti-realism; science, technology and society; science, ideology and interest.


PHIL 314.01 (History of Modern Philosophy II)
Instructor: Yıldız Silier
Description:

This course will focus on the history of 19th century philosophy. We will make a comparative evaluation of the central ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Mill, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre.  The relationship between morality and politics, freedom, alienation and authenticity will be some of the basic themes. What is common to those philosophers is that they bring back on the agenda some important questions that have been neglected for a long time: What is the meaning of life? What makes us distinctively human? How to live a good, fulfilling life?


PHIL 390.01 (Philosophical Schools)
Instructor: Stephen Voss
Description:

A philosophical school is a unique kind of social arrangement. Two points are primary: it provides for doing philosophy and it does this with the understanding that certain philosophical theses are not questioned. Are these points consistent with each other? That depends on what philosophy is. One aim of this course is for each student to consider whether he or she wants to do philosophy in the context of a school or with no commitment to any school.  Most ancient and medieval philosophy was done within a school. Most eastern philosophy is still done that way. There are philosophical schools today – for example, the Frankfurt School, analytic philosophy, feminism, and other “-isms”. Most western philosophy today falls within Cartesianism and Kantianism, if we construe these in a broad sense.  The history of philosophy is peppered with philosophers who stand outside of any school, such as Socrates, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. Whether post-modernists belong to a school depends on whether they understand the deep syntax as [postmodern]-ism or as post-[modernism]. Similarly for cognitive science.   During the first week I will offer a list of philosophical schools, and ask you which ones you would like to focus on. That will be the main factor in my choice of schools to study.   We will read some important texts, write short philosophical papers based on them, and have a standard final exam.


PHIL 461.01 (Aesthetics)
Instructor: Yıldız Silier
Description:

We will analyse key issues in philosophy of art, by discussing selected texts of prominent figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Collingwood, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Adorno, as well as surveying contemporary debates in aesthetics. What is art? Is it representation of nature, expression of emotions or the embodiment of “significant form”? Is it really possible to define art? Are there universal criteria to distinguish between good and bad art? How does the social function of art change historically? Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? How is the phenomenon of art related to "our world"? Does postmodernism signal the end of art? This course will mainly be based on group presentations and will require active classroom participation.


PHIL 496.01 (Special Topics: Truth)
Instructor: Murat Baç
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PHIL 498.01 (Special Topics: Philosophy in Cinema)
Instructor: İlhan İnan
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PHIL 584.01 (Philosophy of Mathematics)
Instructor: Ali Karatay
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PHIL 585.01 (Special Topics: Philosophical Foundations of Social Policy)
Instructor: Gürol Irzık
Description:

This course aims to discuss current issues in social policy in the context of seminal contributions to political philosophy and economic thought. Major topics covered include theoretical approaches to behavioral and institutional determinants of social cohesion, meaning of social justice in relation to individual needs and rights, and concepts of autonomy and dependency as they appear in the debates around different mechanisms of socioeconomic protection. The role of the state, family and community, as well as religious and secular civil society associations in welfare provisioning will be discussed with reference to different currents of social theory and their policy implications. Limits of social policy in the satisfaction of human needs will be among the questions dissussed.


PHIL 648.01 (Philosophy of Language)
Instructor: İlhan İnan
Description: click here


PHIL 652.01 (Philosophy of Mind)
Instructor: Stephen Voss
Description:

             Perhaps philosophy of mind is the most difficult field in philosophy. Yet I have some views about the right path to take within the field. In this class I would like to present some of them so that we can all work at understanding and evaluating them.

             I don’t want our format to be the one that is usual in graduate classes – namely, a seminar in which students present their views based on texts read in the class. Since philosophy of mind is so difficult, I think that approach will make little progress. Instead, each week I will ask you to read some texts and I will offer my own views about the questions they discuss. Then during the class and the following week I will ask you to think hard about these views. I will ask you frequently to write your thoughts and we may discuss any that seem worth discussing.

             Here is a sample of my current views.

 1. The subject matter of philosophy of mind is beings that have a mind – that is, beings with the capacity to be subjects of mental states, like belief, desire, understanding, sensation, and consciousness. If we call these beings “subjects,” we may say that subjects are a significant metaphysical kind. The central question in philosophy of mind is the metaphysical question what it is to have a mind.

 2. Part of the answer to this question is that there is something it is like for a subject to be a subject. (Nagel) But a deeper formulation of this part of the answer is that a being is a subject if and only if there are facts that are not only facts about that subject but facts for that subject. (Sartre’s “pour-soi” facts) But the nature of this central class of facts is obscure.

 3. Most philosophers of mind say they are functionalists. Functionalism is a kind of account of the nature of mental states: roughly, that the nature of each kind of mental state is specified by its tendencies to cause certain other kinds of mental states and certain kinds of behavior. (Putnam) I think that some version of functionalism is right. The question of precisely which version is right is a great opportunity to make progress on the central question. The question whether functionalism must be amended in some way is a similar opportunity.

 4. All mental states tend to cause or affect or make possible action, and all actions have mental states among their causes. So a being is a subject if and only if it is an agent – a being capable of action. But agency is just as complex as subjecthood and its connections with the mind need careful study.

 5. There is reason to think that one central class of mental states are not entirely functional in nature, namely feelings – both bodily feelings like pain and emotional feelings like fright.

 6. There is no reason to think that sensations are not functional in nature. In particular, a sensation, as when it seems to you that something green is before your eyes, is a kind of tendency to believe something, and functionalism is right about states like belief. (Armstrong)

 7. Functionalism is right about a third class of mental states: cognitive states, like belief, wishing, and doubting. These seem to be directed to intentional objects – objects internal to the states themselves, like the Fountain of Youth I seek – and often they seem to be directed to propositions, like the proposition that the earth is warming which I believe. In fact, though, I believe that there are no intentional objects, and I believe that directedness to propositions is more a problem to be solved than a solution to a problem. (Chisholm, Davidson) The directedness of mental states is to be explained in terms of their tendencies to cause action, but it remains obscure how this can be done.

 8. An important aspect of “pour-soi facts” is that sometimes they make it possible for a subject to be conscious of those very facts. So far this sort of consciousness remains a mystery, but there are ways to study it.

 9. Negatively, the traditional mind-body problem is not central to philosophy of mind, and therefore neither is the question of physicalism or naturalism or materialism. The primary question is simply mind, not mind’s relation to body. Similarly the importance of cognitive science for philosophy of mind is usually exaggerated. So I won’t discuss such things much.