The Bojack course just got definitively approved this morning, almost to the minute when you posted this! I am so excited!

I teach a course entitled “Philosophy and the Weird.” In the course, we begin by tracing the development of weird ideas like ghosts over the history of philosophy. Most of the course, however, is focused on pessimism, horror, and weird fiction. We read a lot of Lovecraft, Ligotti, Thacker, and Trigg.

I have two (split-level) courses which are perhaps a little out of the ordinary, though perhaps not as way out as some of the others described above.

The first is a ‘Why Be Moral?’ Course which addresses the issue in part by asking what it is like to *be* either an amoralist (like Thrasymachus) or a moral immoralist (like Callicles) – someone who thinks that they have the *right* to overstep the ordinary bounds of good and evil. The first half of the course is largely devoted to Plato (Apology Protagoras, Gorgias, and the first two books of The Republic) and is therefore not particularly unusual. But the second half addresses the issue via a series of works of literature, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Deons/Devils/the Possessed, Shakespeare’s History Plays, specifically Richard III, Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 & 2 and Henry V (who I suggest was deliberately intended by Shakespeare as the model of a Machiavellian Prince), concluding with Jane Austen’s Persuasion, focusing on the figure of Mr Elliot. We also discuss Russell ’s flirtation with what I call humanistic amoralism and my speculation that it was his contact with the Bolsheviks that led him to give this up. I recommend movie version of the selected texts when available and I have a question asking the students to compare Stephen Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons with the Roger Kumble’s Cruel Intentions which tells what is basically the same tale but sets it 1990s New York rather that 18th Century France. The course is one of the most popular that my department puts on and I tend to get good student reviews as well as plenty of student essays which surprise me with their thoughtfulness and intelligence.

The second course focuses on Bertrand Russell specifically but endeavours to combine a selection of topics from his technical philosophy (the philosophy of mathematics, the nature of truth define descriptions and the question of whether external objects are to be construed as logical constructs or inferred entities etc) with a consideration of his work as an ethicist, an activist and a political thinker. The course is based on an earlier Soames-based paper on the history of analytic philosophy. I dropped the material on Wittgenstein (with whom I was becoming increasingly fed up) and much of the material on Moore replacing it with sections on Russell’s critiques of Marxism and Bolshevism (not quite the same things in Russell’s opinion), his arguments for a different form of socialism, his writings on behalf of women’s suffrage, his antiwar activities (and writings) during WWI, his reluctant support for WWII (using Anscombe’s anti-war polemics as a set of compare-and-contrast texts) and his later writings as an anti-nuclear activist. I’ve even got an optional question on why his love-life was such a series of train-wrecks. Part of the object of the exercise was to make the revised course more attractive to Philosophy, Politics and Economics majors who represent a sizeable proportion of our clientele. Russell dealt with many of the big moral and political issues of the Twentieth Century many of which remain with us into the Twenty-First. I have run this course (or this pair of courses) once (this year) and having, as I hope, sorted out some of the teething troubles, I expect to run it again 2020.

Both courses give the class plenty of opportunity to discuss issues of class power and gender power.

The teaching format in both cases is two two-hour seminar/lectures per week for a thirteen week semester with most of the assessment going on three longish essays (about 3000 words maximum). We usually kick off with a five-minute student presentation to which I respond with an impromptu lecture (impromptu because I never know exactly what the student presenter is going to say) which broadens out via Q&A to a general discussion.

I attach detailed syllabuses in separate posts.

Syllabus 239/339: Bertrand Russell: Ethics, Logic, Pacifism and Truth
These papers address a range of issues in ethics, philosophy and politics via a critical engagement with thought of Bertrand Russell (1872-1970). Russell was perhaps the greatest philosopher and one of the greatest logicians of the 20th century, but also a political thinker, a public intellectual and an activist, who was twice imprisoned for his anti-war activities. He was one of the founding fathers of analytic philosophy, one of the co-inventors of symbolic logic and a noted philosopher of mathematics, specifically a proponent of logicism, the thesis that mathematics reduces to logic. He defended the correspondence theory of truth against pragmatists such as William James who thought that truth is what pays and Hegelians such as Harold Joachim who argued the truth consists in coherence. He was interested in our knowledge of the external world, at first reducing physical objects to logical fictions and then redefining them as inferred entities.

Under the influence of G.E. Moore, he began as a believer in the objectivity of ethics but subsequently became a pioneer of both emotivism (moral judgments are neither true nor false) and the error theory (moral judgments are all false). He was philosopher of science, writing about the nature of science as intellectual enterprise and its impact on society and culture. In addition to all this he was an advocate of utilitarianism, a critic of Marxism, an analyst of power, a champion of democracy (especially votes for women), a proponent of socialism, a pacifist during World War I, and a campaigner against both nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War. His books on these and related topics (he wrote over seventy) remain in print, sometimes after more than a century.

In these papers we grapple not only with abstract problems such as the nature of value, the nature of truth and the foundations of mathematics, but also with the issues of war and peace, democracy and capitalism, socialism and communism –- on all of which Russell had something to say.

Week 1
A General Introduction and Historical Background . Russell’s Life and Works
B Sidgwick , Russell and the ‘Dualism of Practical Reason’.
(Is it always rational to do the right thing?)
Week 2
Russell’s Critique of Marxism
Week 3
A The Nature of Truth: Analytic correspondence versus Hegelian coherence
B The Democratic Ideal and Votes for Women:
Russell’s arguments for and against democracy, Edwardian and otherwise
Week 4
Russell, Moore and Metaethics:
Russell, G.E Moore and the ‘Naturalistic Fallacy’. Russell versus Moore: two Kinds of Consequentialism.
Week 5
Logic, Existence and Definite Descriptions:
Non-existent entities, especially the present King of France.
Week 6
Russell versus the Pragmatists:
A Is it OK to believe in God even if the evidence does not support this belief?
B Is Truth what it pays to believe?
Week 7
Logical Atomism:
Are physical objects logical constructions out sense-data? Logical constructions versus inferred entities. Do negative truths require negative facts (such as absences or lacks)? Causality Dismissed.
Week 8
Logicism, Paradox and Type Theory:
Can mathematics be reduced to logic?
Russell’s Paradox and what to do about it.
Week 9
A Against World War I:
Russell’s Consequentialist Pacifism.
B Capitalism and Socialism:
Russell’s Critique of Capitalism and the Case for Guild Socialism.

Week 10
Non-cognitivism and the Error Theory:
Russell’s Arguments Against Objectivism. Emotivism versus the Error Theory. Non-cognitivism and moral commitment.
Week 11
A Russell’s Critique of Bolshevism:
Critical analysis of Russell’s ‘The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism’.
B Problems of War and Peace:
‘I set out with a belief that love, free and courageous, could conquer the world without fighting. I came to support a bitter and terrible war’. Russell’s response to the Rise of Nazism
Week 12
A Russell’s (structural) Scientific Realism:
Inferred Entities rather than Logical Constructions. Non-Deductive Inference. Empiricism Modified. Causality Reinstated. How to talk about the External World.
B. Paradox and the Aftermath of Principia:
Ramsey versus Russell. Logical and Semantic paradoxes. Tarski versus the Ramified Theory of Types. Theories of meaninglessness versus paraconsistent logic.
Week 13
A. The Retreat From Pythagoras:
‘I sought to understand the Pythagorean power by which number held sway above the flux’. But Russell subsequently came to doubt whether numbers had any such powers since numbers themselves were logical fictions and mathematical truths tautologies. Was Russell right to retreat from Pythagoras?
B. Nuclear Weapons and World Government:
Critical analysis of Russell’s ‘Man’s Peril’ and ‘Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare’.