Syllabus-like Document

Philosophy 399, Dichotomies: Mondays 4-5:30 in UANX 151

Spring 1999, one credit, J.W. Powell (x5753, 110 UANX)

Description: Dichotomies are pairs of opposing terms, like good/evil, true/false, yin/yang, eros/thanatos, rational/emotional, valid/invalid, changing/permanent, pregnant/non-pregnant, sense/nonsense, dichotomous/nondichotomous. There is some reason to think that dichotomies play a crucial role in philosophical thinking. We'll look and see.

In Plato's Phaedo, Socrates has some arguments, allegedly for the immortality of the soul, which turn on the nature of dichotomies. Aristotle's "Laws of Thought" (including "a statement must be either true or false") seem to require us to agree to something about dichotomous thinking. Nietzsche suggests that the applicability of the dichotomy good/evil is a result of some suspect thinking or suspect choice of attitudes. A little more recently, some insights about how language works have been put in terms of the necessity for us to think in dichotomous ways or to move beyond dichotomies. In the last fifty years the subject of dichotomies has been subjected to some scrutiny, and some writers have become suspicious that dichotomies are to blame for various occupational illnesses among philosophers--such things as sexism and oversimplification (unless, as J.L. Austin says, these are not the occupational illnesses but instead are just the occupation). Some writers claim that some Eastern philosophies have the cure for these problems. Among several topics in postmodernist philosophy are analyses of the political and psychological consequences of thinking in dichotomous ways, and claims then that these consequences were the hidden agendas of philosophers or those for whom philosophers are the running dog lackeys. Some philosophers have recently claimed that only in contexts in which the statements make sense can those statements be either true or false, and that this is in fact an important discovery that is corrosive of much of the work philosophers have done. And some recent works on philosophical methods reach toward alternative methods for philosophers to do their work which supposedly avoid the problems brought on by uncritically applying dichotomous methods. If any of this sounds scarey or exciting, consider this seminar.

Readings: Readings will be made available as handouts in class. They will include readings from among the following, though this list is way too long: Plato, Phaedo; Aristotle, selections on laws of thought and their lack of provability from Metaphysics; Friedrich Nietzsche, from his Genealogy of Morals, or maybe Ecce Homo; C.S. Peirce, letter to Lady Viola Welby 12 Oct 1904; selections on alternation from Ferdinand de la Saussure, Course in General Linguistics; selections on presuppositions of formal logic from Andrea Nye, Words of Power; "Nature and Office of the Copula" and subsequent selections from John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic; "Formal and Informal Logic" from Gilbert Ryle's Dilemmas; "A Lecture on Ethics" by Ludwig Wittgenstein; "limited inc." from Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc.; "The Blue Book" by O.K. Bouwsma; "Systematically Misleading Expressions" by Gilbert Ryle, "Three Ways of Spilling Ink" by J.L. Austin, and others to be added based on our developing interests.

Course Requirements: Students will write a half page every other week, without being reminded by me or requiring me to keep track, and of that half page they will make copies available to all others in the seminar. They will take turns leading discussion for half of a seminar meeting. At the end they will write a four to six page paper. This is a lot of work for one credit; the reason is that the credit is not what the seminar is for--instead we are after making some kinds of progress--clarification and rooting out mistakes. I'll share everyone's e-mail addresses for those who want to participate that way.

Prerequisites: This is difficult work, slow and painstaking. Students interested in this should have taken at least a couple of courses in western philosophy or something equivalent. For part of the semester, we are going to work with examples of philosophical problems, chosen after conferring. In each problem we look at, we will move into the (standard) philosophical problem and then try out insights about dichotomies as if they were our spools of thread to find the way back out. Further, you need to have a certain measure of stubbornness in the face of complexity and confusion. If you've done much philosophy you may have to have a willingness to consider that much of that stuff is mistaken or based on mistakes. This includes those who have been nurtured in traditions which do dichotomy-bashing, such as the Continental tradition or feminism or Wittgensteinianism or Eastern traditions ("it's not this and it's not that either so it must be nothing"). Of course some of those might be right too, so if you just have to prove they are wrong, skip it.