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Grads enroll in 204. In this course, we shall examine some basic issues in metaethics in the context of Plato's and Aristotle's philosophy. First-order ethics asks questions such as 'What makes an action right?', 'What are virtues and vices?', 'Do I have, ceteris paribus, a duty to obey the laws?', and 'What is the best theory of social justice?'. Metaethics takes moral or ethical judgments as its subject matter and inquires into their nature. Basic metaethical questions include: 'What do moral or ethical judgments mean?'. When we say 'X is right', do we mean that X is objectively right?', 'Do moral judgments make claims about the world or about how we think about the world?' (These are questions about moral semantics.) Moral judgments, as we'll see, seem to involve the notion of evaluating actions, agents, social practices and so on. They are, in a bit of jargon, normative or evaluative. We'll try to get clearer on what such normativity involves by considering two other fundamental sort of metaethical questions. The first concerns the possibility of moral knowledge, includes questions such as 'Can we ever know if a moral claim is true and, if so, how can we know this?', 'In mathematics, chemistry, the history of India, and chess, for example, we think that there are experts who know more than we do and that we should, at least to some extent, defer to their judgments in their areas of expertise. Can there be moral experts to whom we should defer in the same way?' (These are questions about moral epistemology.) Yet other metaethical questions concern the place of morality in the world. Such questions include 'Are moral properties such rightness and wrongness "out there" in the world as we might think mass and electrical charge are (or being a neuron)?', 'Or are moral properties really just properties of our attitudes and beliefs?', 'Or do they simply not exist in the way that there is nothing that is phlogiston or Santa?' (Sorry). We'll start by reading some basic literature in contemporary metaethics and then turn to take up these questions in the context of Plato and Aristotle. By reading our ancient authors carefully, we'll try to work out the differences and similarities between their questions and answers and our own. I'm organizing the course so that both students who've done a good deal of work in metaethics and ancient philosophy and those who have done none at all will both be able to learn from the readings, the lectures, and what I hope will be lively classroom discussions.

We will study ancient Greek skeptics and the views that for any claim there is no more reason to assert it than deny it, and that a suspension of belief is the best route to happiness. There will also be some consideration both of ancient opponents of skepticism and some relations between ancient and modern skepticism.

A close reading of Plato's Theatetus and Parmenides, his two mature dialogues on the topics of knowledge and reality. We will consider various definitions of knowledge, metaphysical problems about the objects of knowledge, and a proposed method for examining and resolving such problems. Some background in ancient Greek philosophy and/or contemporary metaphysics and epistemology is preferred, but not required. Prerequisite: Phil 80.

In this course, we will explore the Timaeus, Plato's account of the nature and creation of the universe. This work, from Plato's late period, with its highly notable postulations of the Demiurge and the receptacle, received the place of prominence in the ancient reception of Plato and contains a number of challenges in interpretation for contemporary scholars of Plato. We will carefully examine the work and its contributions to Platonic metaphysics, physics, psychology, teleology, cosmology, and theology. In so doing, we will also consider questions of how we are to understand it as a likely story, its role within the Platonic corpus, and its engagement with pre-existing traditions of Greek natural philosophy.

An introduction both to Aristotle's own metaphysics and to his treatment of his predecessors on causality, included the early Ionian cosmologists, atomism, Pythagoreans, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras and Plato. Prerequisite: one course in ancient Greek philosophy.

This course investigates the interplay of logic, language, and material textual practices in the Aristotelian tradition. Focusing on selected passages from De Interpretatione, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, the Topics, Metaphysics, and the Rhetoric, we explore how the structure and interpretation of Aristotle's arguments are shaped not only by abstract logical form, but also by syntactic cohesion, negation strategies, and patterns of sentence structure. We examine how these forms are rendered visible and manipulable in diagrams, editorial interventions, and the organization of compendia.

A chapter by chapter analysis of Aristotle's introductory discussions of physical theory. Topics to be considered include Aristotle's treatment of Eleatic monism, the role of opposites in pre-Socratic physics, the role of matter in physics, and an analysis of the elements of changing objects into form, privation and a subject.

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We will consider the interplay between the development and use of logical methods and their deployment in the investigation of foundational problems about the structure of reality.