30413 - Philosophy Laboratory (1) (G.F)

Learning outcomes

The Philosophy Laboratory is focused on building the fundamental skills needed in the philosophical work: critical thinking, careful reading, and essay writing. We will use a masterpiece of the philosophical tradition for training the students in exercising and developing these skills.

Course contents

Class hours

Reading and discussion of Saul Kripke's Naming and necessity (1972/1980).
We will go through one the XX century philosophical works that has most influenced contemporary philosophy.
In Naming and Necessity Saul Kripke presents a novel philosophical view on the nature of reference, on relationship between a posteriori and a priori knowledge and necessity, on the identity relation and the idea that things bear some properties essentially.
We will examine the following points:

• reference of proper names and natural kind terms
• critique to the descriptivist theory of proper names (Frege, Russell, Strawson and Searle)
  
• names as rigid designators and the causal theory of proper names
• epistemic and metaphysical necessity
  
• sharo distinction between epistemic and metaphysical necessity
• existence of necessary truths that are knowable a posteriori only (vs Kant, Carnap)
  
• essentialism
• things bear some properties essentially (while they bear others properties accidentally)
  
• mind/body problem: against identification between mental states and physical states.

Scott Soames has written of Nome e necessità:

In the philosophy of language, Naming and Necessity is among the most important works ever, ranking with the classical work of Frege in the late nineteenth century, and of Russell, Tarski and Wittgenstein in the first half of the twentieth century . . . Naming and Necessity played a large role in the implicit, but widespread, rejection of the view—so popular among ordinary language philosophers—that philosophy is nothing more than the analysis of language (Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century: Volume 2: The Age of Meaning, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003, p.336).

Readings/Bibliography

Main text:
[1] Saul Kripke (1999) Nome e necessità, Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, transl. by M. Santambrogio of Naming and necessity, Oxford : Blackwell, 1980, enlarged and revised edition of 1972. 'Naming and Necessity' in Davidson, Donald and Harman, Gilbert, eds., Semantics of Natural Language. Dordrecht: Reidel: 253-355, 763-769.

Students are advised to read also (one is sufficient):
 
[2] Borghini, Andrea (a cura di), Il genio incompreso. la filosofia di Saul Kripke, Roma, 2010.

[3] Noonan, Harold. Kripke and Naming and Necessity, Abington (UK): Routledge, 2013.

[4] Burgess, Saul Kripke: Puzzles and Mysteries. Cambridge: Polity, 2013

 During the the laboratory further readings will be suggested.

Teaching methods

The Philosophy Labatory is articulated into three phases:

Phase 1: Naming and necessity will be presented with its main thesis and arguments and will be explained in relation to the philosophical context in which Kripke worked.

Phase 2: the book will be divided into parts that will be the object, together with some critical literature, of presentations of the students; the teacher will supervise the students in preparing the presentations.

Phase 3: each student will have to write a short essay, the essay will consist in a critical discussion of some the topics of the Naming and Necessity.

Assessment methods

The assessment will be 50% based on the presentation and 50% based on the essay writing. It is required substantial understanding of the themes of Naming and necessity together with the capacity of critical discussion of these themes. The asessment will be especially sensitive to the clarity of the presentation and of the essay and to the ability to extract argumentative structure of the text.
Attendance is mandatory.

Teaching tools

• Presentations with pc and projector
• Moodle online webplatform
• Online materials with AMS Campus
  

Office hours

See the website of Sebastiano Moruzzi