Big, Deep, and New: Recent Works in Moral, Political, and Legal Philosophy

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Prerequisite: prior experience in philosophy, political theory, or a kindred discipline While important trends in contemporary culture and politics seem to promise not only “the death of philosophy” but also the arrival of a “"post-truth epoch,” the oldest discipline itself seems not to have gotten the memo. Instead, the last 50 years witnessed a blossoming of original, important, exciting, and genuinely new work in systematic philosophy. Spanning different traditions (analytic and continental) and locations (Anglo-American, German, French, Italian, postcolonial, etc.), the reemergence of systematic philosophy revisits many of the most important questions that occupied the grand tradition for much of the last 2,500 years: What matters in life? What do we owe to each other? What do we mean by the truth? In what does human agency consist? Does human morality stem primarily from reason or emotion or from their combined operation? What is the nature of justice? Is it always wrong to lie? Can all aspects of human experience be accounted for in terms of biological processes, or do some escape reductive scientific explanation? At the same time, new issues of race, gender, identity, and, ultimately, the claim to universal knowledge and authority made on behalf of philosophy itself have been added to the range of traditional issues addressed by contemporary philosophers. This course is for any student interested in coming up to speed with important developments in recent philosophy and will focus on the big ideas from some of the most important recent thinkers. We will not only survey some of the most important and challenging works in contemporary philosophy but also put these thinkers in dialogue with each other, testing the insights they generate and also, by comparing them with one another, the blind spots they produce. Same as