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Taking Michael Friedman's A Parting of the Ways as a rough guide, this course will examine some major texts in (mostly German) philosophy from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Our aim is to trace the relationship that early analytic philosophy and early continental philosophy have to Kant and Neo-Kantianism. Primary readings from Cohen, Natorp, Frege, Husserl, Cassirer, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Carnap and Sellars. Pre-requisite: at least one philosophy class.

This course covers the development of analytic philosophy in its early stage: from Frege's logical revolution to logical positivism at its highest point, before critiques by Quine and Wittgenstein fundamentally transformed the analytic tradition in the early 1950s. We begin with Frege's attempt to address traditional metaphysical and epistemological problems about numbers through the logical analysis of language and then trace how this project - the analysis of language with formal logic to resolve philosophical questions - develops through Russell, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle, particularly Carnap. We then consider how Gödel and Tarski's logical work forces a reinterpretation of the project and conclude with Carnap and Quine's debate "on what there is".

For Ph.D. students in their first or second year who are or are about to be teaching assistants for the department. May be repeated for credit.

May be repeated for credit.

Required of second-year Philosophy Ph.D. students; restricted to Stanford Philosophy Ph.D. students. Prerequisite: consent of instructor. This seminar will focus on helping students complete their second year paper.

(Graduate students register for 241F.)

An introduction to the concepts and techniques used in mathematical logic, focusing on propositional, modal, and predicate logic. Highlights connections with philosophy, mathematics, computer science, linguistics, and neighboring fields.

In this course we will go through some of the seminal ideas, constructions, and results from modern logic, focusing especially on classical first-order ("predicate") logic. After introducing general ideas of induction and recursion, we will study a bit of elementary (axiomatic) set theory before then covering basic definability theory, viz. assessing the theoretical limits of what can and cannot be expressed in a first-order language. The centerpiece result of the class is the completeness - and closely related compactness - of first-order logic, a result with a number of momentous consequences, some useful, some philosophically puzzling. We will then study a connection with game theory, whereby a certain type of game characterizes precisely the expressive power of first-order logic. Further topics may include: the 0-1 law in finite model theory, second-order logic, and the algebraic approach to logic. Prerequisite: 150 or consent of instructor.

Graduate students enroll in 251D.