Graduate Seminar, 2022W1: September–December 2022
Course Meetings: Wednesdays 10am–1pm (in-person), department seminar room
Instructor: Jonathan Ichikawa
Office Hours: by appointment
the latest version of this syllabus will always be available at bit.ly/phil540-2022.
This is a graduate seminar, primarily intended for graduate students in philosophy. The topic is the ethics of belief — including questions about the degree to which epistemology is a normative discipline, to be understood via an analogy with ethics, as well as questions about the moral significance of belief itself.
The selection of topics and readings for this seminar is still in progress and subject to change, both because I’m still working on planning things and because we may wish to shape the reading list around student interests.
I have a new draft book manuscript; I will make it available to the seminar, and we will work through some or all of it together. Please do not distribute my draft outside the seminar without my permission. Unspecified references to “Ichikawa” in the reading list below are chapter numbers from that manuscript.
This course is primarily for UBC MA and PhD philosophy students. I am also open to including others on a case-by-case basis. If you are an advanced undergraduate or a graduate student in another discipline, you may require instructor approval to join the seminar; please get in touch with me before registering.
If you are interested in auditing the course you should also contact me.
This is a discussion-driven graduate seminar. The seminar meetings will be structured around student presentations and discussion, so it is essential that you attend all course meetings, read all required readings, come prepared to discuss them and ready to participate. Don’t expect to merely listen and learn.
Because of the emphasis on discussion, in-person synchronous participation is required. (If scheduling or public health constraints make this difficult, we may end up moving some meetings online; these would still be synchronous.)
Seminar meetings will not be recorded.
Each student will make a main presentation of 10–15 minutes of some of their thoughts about a required reading to the seminar. The use of visual aids such as handouts or slides is encouraged. The point of these presentations is to share ideas and prompt discussions about the material we’re all reading. We’ll schedule student presentations in advance. Most weeks will have two students presenting a main presentation.
Students will also do a supplemental presentation, based on a reading that is not required on the syllabus. These are different from main presentations in important ways. They are shorter — aim for five minutes — and, because in general, we won’t all have read the readings in question, they should be more informative and less argumentative/discussion-based. You are making a brief report about a paper, giving a rough idea of what it is about, and explaining what it has to offer. Think of it as a scouting report: help us decide whether we ourselves would find it useful to read. These will also be scheduled near the start of term.
Subject to change. Links to articles will either take you directly to pdfs, or to PhilPapers pages or UBC library pages that provide links. Everything should be accessible for free with UBC library access. If you don’t have a PhilPapers account I recommend that you create one, indicating your UBC affiliation. Links from that site will take you to the UBC library website where you’ll be prompted to enter your UBC credentials for access to electronic resources.
(note that these selections do not all correspond neatly to section breaks, but these contain the key parts I’d like us to be prepared to talk about. feel free to read a bit more of the surrounding context if you find it useful.)
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