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The intended purpose of this Topics Seminar is for the participating student (1) to become familiar with positions taken in the current debates over the specific topic area of the course; (2) to appreciate the arguments for and against the positions; and (3) to develop an independent judgment about the most promising approach in this area.
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This “Topics Seminar” explores in depth issues and texts in the area of metaphysics, including questions of causation, space and time, realism, disposition, modality, physicalism, reduction, determinism, and the constitutive features of life. The specific topic will be different each time, so as to tailor it to current research developments in the field.
Topic for 2016-2017: The Logic and Metaphysics of Time. We will approach this vexing topic with the help of Sebastian Rödl's Categories of the Temporal (Harvard University Press 2012), which offers not only original reflections on many of the central issues of contemporary debates on the metaphysics of time, but also a fresh look at the entire analytic philosophical tradition within which these debates are at home. The following blurb from the book makes this clear: "The publication of Frege’s Begriffsschrift in 1879 forever altered the landscape for many Western philosophers. Here, Sebastian Rödl traces how the Fregean influence, written all over the development and present state of analytic philosophy, led into an unholy alliance of an empiricist conception of sensibility with an inferentialist conception of thought. ... Rödl takes up the challenge by turning to Kant and Aristotle as ancestors of this tradition, and in doing so identifies its unacknowledged question: the relation of judgment and truth to time. Rödl finds in the thought of these two men the answer he urges us to consider: the temporal and the sensible, and the atemporal and the intelligible, are aspects of one reality and cannot be understood independently of one another. In demonstrating that an investigation into the categories of the temporal can be undertaken as a contribution to logic, Rödl seeks to transform simultaneously our philosophical understanding of both logic and time.
This course is for Students History and Philosophy of Science, RMA Philosophy. Students of other MA-programmes, please contact the Course Coordinator.
Interested M.A. exchange students with a strong background in philosophy may qualify to take the course; however, they should first contact the RMA Philosophy coordinator: j.h.anderson@uu.nl
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