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

Learning outcomes

The student learns to read and critically analyze philosophical texts and to write a philosophical essay.

Course contents

Classification and Taxonomy in Pre-Modern Science

This course will explore the relationships between classification, philosophy, and language by analyzing and contextualizing primary textual sources from the ancient world through early modernity. What role does language play in the classification of the natural world? Can nature be said to have an ordering system that is independent of human culture?

Readings/Bibliography

Readings and Topics

We will begin in the ancient world with cuneiform "determinatives." Determinatives were unpronounced markers that, in the cuneiform writing system (ca. 3100 BC–AD 69), preceded Akkadian and Sumerian nouns and provided information regarding the semantic groupings of those terms. Within the cuneiform determinative system, shells and metals are “stones,” bats are “birds,” and there is no distinction between “genuine” and “artificial” gems. Contending with the challenge of cuneiform determinatives—a non-Western and ancient system of classification—will give rise to a broader set of questions (historical, philosophical, and linguistic) regarding the nature of classification itself.

Primary readings will focus principally on pre-modern concepts of classification, and will include cuneiform scholarly texts from ancient Iraq, and selections from the works of Aristotle and Albertus Magnus. Comparative philosophical and historical questions on classification and taxonomy will also be considered in light of the work of the early 19th century naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

Bibliography

Primary Sources:

Selected Akkadian readings in translation concerning lexicography,  and on the properties and morphology of plants and stones (the Series Ura, Šammu Šikinšu, and Abnu Šikinšu)

Aristotle. 1963. Categories, translated with notes by J. L. Ackrill, Oxford: Clarendon Press

[selections from] Albertus Magnus. Questions concerning Aristotle’s On Animals and Book of Minerals.

[selections from] Lamarck, Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet de, and Hugh Elliot. 1963. Zoological philosophy: an exposition with regard to the natural history of animals. New York: Hafner.

Secondary Sources:

Campbell, Joseph Keim, Michael O’Rourke, and Matthew H. Slater, eds. 2011. Carving Nature at Its Joints. Natural Kinds in Metaphysics and Science. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Dear, Peter. 2006. The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Grieco, Allen J. 1991. "The Social Politics of Pre-Linnaean Botanical Classification." I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 4:131–149.

Hacking, Ian. 2007. "Natural Kinds: Rosy Dawn, Scholastic Twilight." Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 61:203–239.

Rochberg, Francesca. 2016. Before Nature: Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Teaching methods

The course will focus on developing analytical and historiographical skills through readings in pre-modern scholarly and philosophical texts. Students will be provided with the tools to develop both their research skills and their ability to draw conceptual and historical parallels between texts from a broad set of cultural and chronological contexts. Student discussion is encouraged and required.

Assessment methods

The Lab course requires continuous participation on the part of students. Therefore, attendance is compulsory and will constitute a necessary prerequisite for being admitted to the final exam. In particular, students will be required to attend at least 12 out of 15 classes (24 hours out of 30).

Students will be asked to present and discuss a brief essay dealing with a primary text(s) analyzed within the Lab. The essay will be submitted at least two weeks before the date of the oral exam.

The criteria adopted for the evaluation of the essay will be:

1. Familiarity with the content of the texts;

2. The ability to understand and analyze textual sources;

3. The ability to construct an argument and use evidence appropriately to support that argument in writing.

Office hours

See the website of Eduardo Andres Escobar Briones