Lecture Description
Professor Gendler begins by recapping the topic of state legitimacy and then offers a way of understanding the disagreement between Rawls and Nozick as one over what states ought to do given the phenomena of moral luck. She then turns to a discussion of how social and cultural structures influence both our characters and our perception of the world. She begins by discussing ways in which this theme plays a role in the work of Aristotle and John Stuart Mill. She then discusses recent empirical work on this question, including a body of anthropological and psychological literature that suggests that individuals raised in societies that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic have highly atypical responses in a wide range of cases.
Course Index
- Introduction
- The Ring of Gyges: Morality and Hypocrisy
- Parts of the Soul I
- Parts of the Soul II
- The Well-Ordered Soul: Happiness and Harmony
- The Disordered Soul: Thémis and PTSD
- Flourishing and Attachment
- Flourishing and Detachment
- Virtue and Habit I
- Virtue and Habit II
- Weakness of the Will and Procrastination
- Utilitarianism and its Critiques
- Deontology
- The Trolley Problem
- Empirically-informed Responses
- Philosophical Puzzles
- Punishment I
- Punishment II
- Contract & Commonwealth: Thomas Hobbes
- The Prisoner's Dilemma
- Equality
- Equality II
- Social Structures
- Censorship
- Tying up Loose Ends
- Concluding Lecture
Course Description
Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature pairs central texts from Western philosophical tradition (including works by Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, Hobbes, Kant, Mill, Rawls, and Nozick) with recent findings in cognitive science and related fields. The course is structured around three intertwined sets of topics: Happiness and Flourishing; Morality and Justice; and Political Legitimacy and Social Structures.