24.260 Topics in Philosophy
Spring 2010
Instructor: Caspar Hare
Lecture: MW1-2.30 (56-167)
Information:
This is a course for majors and minors in Philosophy. The idea is to look at some central topics in philosophy in greater depth and detail than the pacing of a normal undergraduate philosophy course allows.
The topic of the first half of the course will be identity. We will look at classic and recent literature on the metaphysics of identity (personal identity, in particular) with an eye to how it bears upon ethical issues. Metaphysicians think about how things are. Ethicists think about how things ought to be. But the fields are connected. Positions in metaphysics may support or undermine positions in ethics. This part of the course is about these connections.
The topic of the second half of the course will be rationality. There’s a model of how rational agents behave that may fairly be called standard. In a sentence: rational agents maximize expected utility. But there are various reasons to think that this model is inadequate. We will examine them, and consider how the model might be amended.
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