PHILOSOPHY::
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| COURSES::OCCIDENTAL COLLEGE Office::Johnson Hall 303 Spring 2009
This seminar for first-year
students emphasizes research and writing. The objective is to provide
students with a comprehensive introduction to the ethical and economic
dimensions of the war on drugs. This policy was unofficially launched
in the 1930’s, explicitly sanctioned by Nixon in the 1960’s, and
continues today with no foreseeable resolution. Practically speaking,
“wars” are won or lost. Yet forty years and billions of dollars later,
there is still no “victory” in sight. Therefore, one looming question
is whether this description of our national policy is misleading and
forecloses alternative solutions. Topics include the science of drugs,
the history of drugs in modern society, recreational drug use, the
science and politics of medical marijuana, addiction and rationality,
and the social and economic costs of prohibition.
A close reading of classical
works by the major figures of German Idealism and their critics. Works
include selections from Kant’s Critique
of Pure Reason, Fichte’s Science
of Knowledge,
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,
Marx’s 1844
Manuscripts, and Nietzsche’s Gay
Science. The philosophical problems to
be investigated in these works include the problem of universals, the
objectivity of knowledge,
the problem of free will, and whether a philosophical account of
idealism
reconciles mind and world. The course assumes no prior knowledge of the
subject matter, and aims to provide students with an introductory,
working knowledge of post-Kantian German philosophy.
Ethics and Economics. This course
investigates the intersection of ethical and economic decision-making.
The first part of the course considers some core methodological issues
of
economics, including the positive/normative distinction, objectivity of
economic explanation, normative and empirical models of
decision-making, and the compatibility of ethical and economic
principles. The second part of the course then evaluates two policy
areas with these methodological issues in mind: gun control and
drug prohibition. In particular, we will evaluate two recent hypotheses
in these policy debates, including “more guns, less crime” and the
supply-side strategy of “prohibition” economics in the drug war.
Fall 2008
Centre for Philosophy of
Natural and Social Science
Lakatos Building London School of Economics Houghton Street London WC2A 2AE UK Spring 2008
The course considers various
theories of justice in international relations, and evaluates them
according to a range of practical problems facing globalization. Topics
to be discussed include war and peace, distributive justice, the
concept of human rights, interventions in genocide and civil war,
immigration, terrorism, pandemics, climate change, and global
capitalism.
Philosophy of law is the
study of
the nature, principles, and justification of legal systems. This course
focuses exclusively on the legal system found in broadly democratic and
constitutional states, and covers basic topics in analytical and
constitutional jurisprudence respectively. Analytical jurisprudence
defines the objectivity of law, its justification within the legal
system, and considers alternative frameworks for legal reasoning and
interpretation. In constitutional jurisprudence, the complex
relationship between morality, law and constitutional principles is
considered through close examination of court cases on individual
liberty, civil rights, and criminal sanction. The course is designed
for undergraduate students to have a broad, working knowledge of legal
theory regardless of whether they pursue formal legal training in law
school.
Fall 2007
The course meets to read,
discuss, and evaluate critically several classical texts in the history
of Western philosophy. Close attention is paid to situating the
arguments of these texts in their social, cultural, and historical
contexts.
This topics course in the
Continental tradition of philosophy focuses on human sexuality.
Applying the standard methodological distinction between a concept and
its conceptions, it is clear that the ordinary concept of “sexuality”
is contested by various ideological interpretations of how to define
it. In the Continental tradition these interpretations include the
psychoanalytic doctrine of Sigmund Freud, the sociology of Wilhelm
Reich, the Marxism of Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School, and the
so-called “post-structuralism” of Michel Foucault. Each of these
traditions offers a competing description and/or definition of the
concept “sexuality,” some of which are incompatible, but all of which
must, in one way or another, share key features of its ordinary
concept. The goal of this course will be to apply the
concept/conception distinction to several classical texts of these
traditions in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the
complex phenomena associated with human sexual behavior. In doing so,
we shall read, discuss, and critically evaluate the arguments of these
texts closely, identifying the various ways in which they presuppose
shared features of the ordinary concept of sexuality while offering
competing accounts of how we ought to conceptualize and act on human
sexuality in our interpersonal relations and public policy.
The senior seminar meets
regularly to plan, discuss, and present individual comprehensive
projects for Spring 2008.
Spring 2007
This class is designed to
investigate and evaluate current scientific data on the role biology
plays in determining sexual orientation. We shall investigate and
evaluate these data in order to pursue the social and legal
implications of their interpretation. The class is co-taught by a
philosopher and a biologist, and the class environment will be one of
open discourse. While biological findings on the science of sexual
orientation will be presented and explained, the level of instruction
will be geared for non-biology majors. Furthermore, no prior
familiarity with law and social policy on the topic of sexual
orientation will be presupposed.
Fall 2006Some questions that will guide our inquiry include: What is the data that supports biological predisposition? Is sexual orientation genetic? Is it epigenetic? Is it immutable or a matter of choice? How should the law treat sexual orientation as a classification? How should the benefits and burdens of the law be distributed according to this classification? What effect do stereotypes of sexual orientation have on science and social policy, for example, in AIDS research? This class is designed to promote an understanding of the biological impact on complex behaviors such as sexual orientation and to discuss the social and legal implications of that relationship.
This course provides
students
with a survey of the basic problems of
the human experience reflected in the philosophical tradition. We shall
examine self-knowledge and personal integrity in Plato’s dialogues,
free will and the problem of evil in Augustine’s Confessions,
whether knowledge of external reality and god are justified according
to Descartes’ Meditations, Marx’s philosophical anthropology,
Mill’s defense of individual liberty, and Nietzsche on the origins of
morality.
This course examines the
major
figures of post-Kantian German Idealism
and their critics, including Fichte, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche.
Special attention will be paid to the central problem of this tradition
to justify the concept of freedom. Topics to be discussed include free
will and determinism, non-metaphysical conceptions of freedom, the
concept of recognition, the sociality of reason, and the relationship
between naturalism and ethical theory. The course assumes no prior
knowledge of subject matter or familiarity with these figures, and aims
to provide students with an introductory, working knowledge of German
philosophy after Kant.
Spring 2006
This research seminar for
first-year students critically examines the problem of illegal drugs in
America. The aim is to provide with sufficient understanding for
evaluating arguments both for and against current policy concerning
drugs, which is, for better or worse, called the “drug war.” We shall
read about and discuss issues such as the nature and history of drugs
in modern societies, individual autonomy and recreational drug use,
consequences of prohibition on civil rights and liberties, the science
and politics of marijuana, the manipulation and distortion of
information concerning drugs, and complex connections between addiction
and rationality. Practically speaking, “wars” are won or lost. The
“war” on illegal drugs was unofficially launched in the 1930’s,
officially sanctioned as a national policy by President Nixon in the
1960’s, and escalates every year. Forty years and hundreds of billions
of dollars later, there is still no victory in sight. Therefore, a
looming question is whether the “war” on drugs is really a “war” in the
conventional sense, or whether this description of current drug policy
misleads the public about the nature and problems of illegal drugs.
The seminar investigates the
relationship between ideology (systems of concepts, values, and
beliefs) and technology (systems of production). More specifically, we
shall focus on the question whether there is a “bias” in the
development of technology that reproduces dominant systems of ideology
in “late” or advanced capitalism. Another way of asking this question
is whether technology favors the power relations of the status quo. To
investigate this question we shall reconstruct the central themes of a
debate among members of the Frankfurt School of Social Research, and
explore some implications of their attempt to establish a “critical
theory” of technology between philosophy and the social sciences.
Topics to be discussed include the concept of ideology (in both the
descriptive and normative sense), the impact of technology on social
and political institutions and their rationalization, and individual
and collective consequences of living in advanced technological society.
This course provides
students
with a survey of the basic problems of
the human experience reflected in the philosophical tradition. We shall
examine self-knowledge and personal integrity in Plato’s dialogues,
free will and the problem of evil in Augustine’s Confessions,
whether knowledge of external reality and god are justified according
to Descartes’ Meditations, Marx’s philosophical anthropology,
Mill’s defense of individual liberty, and Nietzsche on the origins of
morality.
Philosophy of law is the
study of
the nature, principles, and justification of legal systems. This course
focuses exclusively on the legal system found in broadly democratic and
constitutional states, and covers basic topics in analytical and
constitutional jurisprudence respectively. Analytical jurisprudence
defines the objectivity of law, its justification within the legal
system, and considers alternative frameworks for legal reasoning and
interpretation. In constitutional jurisprudence, the complex
relationship between morality, law and constitutional principles is
considered through close examination of court cases on individual
liberty, civil rights, and criminal sanction. The course is designed
for undergraduate students to have a broad, working knowledge of legal
theory regardless of whether they pursue formal legal training in law
school.
2002-2005 |
PUBLICATIONS:: Book Editor, Philosophy and the Problems of Work: A Reader (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). Articles "The Wørd: Fearless Speech and the Politics of Language," with Michael Tiboris, Stephen Colbert and Philosophy, ed. Aaron Schiller (Open Court, forthcoming 2009). “Equal Protection and Same-Sex Marriage,” Journal of Social Philosophy 35, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 133-47. "Agency and Institutional Rationality: Foucault's Critique of Normativity," Philosophy and Social Criticism 30, no. 1 (2004): 75-95. "Hate Speech and the Problems of Agency: A Critique of Butler," Race, Social Identity, and Human Dignity, ed. Cheryl Hughes (Bowling Green: PDRC, 2002): 185-201. "Foucault and the Critical Tradition," Human Studies 25, no. 3 (2002): 323-32. "Kant, Political Liberalism, and the Ethics of Same-Sex Relations," Journal of Social Philosophy 32, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 446-62. Reviews “Are There Human Rights? Reflections on Carol Gould’s Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights,” in Radical Philosophy Today, Vol. 4 (Bowling Green: PDRC, 2006). Jeffrey Reiman, Critical Moral Liberalism: Theory and Practice, in Social Theory and Practice 25, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 161-64. Finn Collin, Social Reality, in Philosophy 73, no. 286 (Oct 1998): 643-47. |
Kory P. Schaff, Ph.D. (O) 323.259.2824 Note:
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