teichmanphilosophy

This course will focus on the nature of gender, and investigate the role of human language in shaping our gender identities. You might think it's straightforward to say what it means to be e.g. a man: you're a man just in case you have a Y chromosome, and a woman just in case you have two X chromosomes. But what about an intersex baby is who arbitrarily assigned a gender at birth? Or someone with Klinefelter syndrome, who according to the above definition would be both? What about someone who was born biologically female, underwent sex reassignment surgery as an adult, and now identifies as a man? Given that the past few decades have seen an explosion of new gender categories (many of which may very well take center stage in our culture sooner than we think), we now face the task of determining whether these new categories should be dismissed as aberrations or acknowledged as an indication that gender is in fact changing. During the first five weeks of the course, we will examine various accounts of what gender is, some on the biologically-oriented end of the spectrum and some on the social-constructionist end of the spectrum. Then, during the second half of the course, we will turn our attention to some recent work in the philosophy of language that explores various ways in which our coversations shape gender identity, through the lens of speech act theory. We will conclude by considering the practical consequences of these observations on how we live, speak, and think. Authors to be discussed will include Beauvoir, Haslanger, Nussbaum, Butler, Barnes, Hacking, McConnell-Ginet, Sveinsdottir, Austin, Searle, and Leslie.

Many philosophers have thought that studying the way we speak can lead to philosophical insight—that investigating language can itself be a way of doing philosophy. This tutorial will investigate whether that is a viable endeavor. We will look at Quine's influential argument to the effect that one can draw philosophical conclusions from linguistic investigations, followed by one its most serious criticisms. Then, to answer that criticism, we will examine two topics in some depth. First, through texts by such authors as Leibniz, Russell, Vendler, and Emmon Bach, we will consider whether tense and grammatical aspect have anything to tell us about the nature of time. Second, through texts by such authors as Aristotle, Kripke, and Carlson, we will consider whether loose commonsense generalizations have anything to tell us about the status of natural or artificial kinds. We will conclude the course by revisiting the major line of criticism against linguistic philosophy and considering whether, based on these two case studies, there is anything to say in response.

This course is a broad survey of different forms the moving image has taken since its inception in 1895, from three-minute experimental animations to feature-length melodramas. As we explore the history of documentary, avant-garde, and commercial narrative cinema, we will also grapple with questions regarding the nature of the medium. What distinguishes a photograph from a painting or drawing? What does it mean for a shot of film to represent or depict an object in the world? What are the sylistic capacities of the film medium that make it distinct from video, digital animation, or the traditional visual arts? Is it possible for a film to affect the way we think? Some authors have even tried to argue that films can affect the way we perceive things in our day to day lives. In this course, we will see whether we can make any headway on these questions.

In this seminar, we investigate how the film medium and literary fiction both resemble and differ from one another through a survey of the French movement known as the New Novel. The New Novel is of interest in this connection because the principal figures in the tradition were both authors and filmmakers. As a result, the movement gives us an opportunity to consider some interesting cases, such as films that could be looked at as `second drafts' of novels. Here, we will turn our attention to the film and literature of Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Georges Perec. We will use their works as an occasion to consider what films can do that novels can't, and what novels can do what books can't. We will also think about whether there is any sense a film can be literary, or in which a novel can be cinematic.

This course is a survey of six commercial film genres: comedy, the western, the music, film noir, melodrama, and wuxia pien. Through close interpretation of films in these genres, we will consider the best philosohical account of what a genre is, whether genre can be defined, and what the cultural function of genres is. Do genre terms denote classes in the same way as other predicates, or is there something more slippery about the way they work? Do genre terms primarily track stylistic features of films themselves, or do they track features of the way those films are marketed and viewed?