180076 LPS Penelope Maddy's Philosophical Naturalism (2023S)

A traditional view sees philosophy as the 'first science'. The foundation of all knowledge, theory or understanding. On this view, it's the role of philosophy to ultimately justify or motivate all other branches of inquiry. In her book "Second Philosophy", Penelope Maddy challenges this. She proposes an alternative view of the relationship between philosophy and wider inquiry. On her view, the so-called second philosopher comes into philosophy already armed with knowledge and methods learned from doing science. From this perspective, Maddy shows how progress can be made on a number of traditional philosophical questions: the problem of scepticism and the nature of truth, logic, science and mathematics.

In this course, we'll consider Maddy's proposed method of philosophical naturalism. In the first half of the course, we look at chapter 1 of "Second Philosophy", Maddy's treatment of the problem of scepticism. In the second half of the course, we read the more challenging chapter 3, with deals with the philosophy of logic, though no prior knowledge of logic is assumed.

The purpose of this course is to develop skills in reading philosophy. Consequently, there's a focus not merely on learning and understanding the content but on developing skills in reading philosophy. These skills will be put to the test in the second half of the course, where we'll be focusing on how to approach reading difficult philosophy.