SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY COURSES

Dangerous Politics, Neglected Issues, 2024: 

Why We Can No Longer Rely on our Institutions to Rescue Us from Our Politics. 

Prof. David Peritz

Course description

American politics have long fallen short of the liberal and democratic ideals expressed in our founding documents, often deeply betraying the promise of equality and freedom that ring out in the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, or Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. But until quite recently it was possible to detect in our history an unsteady but nevertheless progressive trajectory in slowly creating a “more perfect union.” This uneven progressive dynamic was driven by the organized efforts of those demanding that we live up to our promises (abolitionists, suffragettes, progressives, labor unions, social movements, etc.), but also often assisted by more formal institutions like political parties, the media, the courts and legal system, and the very promise and structure of our Constitutional system. As we enter the heart of the 2024 national elections, it seems increasingly likely that these sources alone will be unable or unwilling to protect many of the fragile gains we’ve made if our politics turn against them. An increasingly large portion of our population appears so disenchanted with the decay in our institutions that they are willing to give a populist strongman another try, especially in light of the absence of a credible alternative. The result is that in 2024 electoral dynamics and substantive issues intersect more than they have in recent contests, not in the sense that the election focuses on the issues, but because a failure to address adequately the most pressing issues we face undermines confidence in all mainstream institutions. This drives many further into the brace of the anti-institutionalism of Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, despite the fact that they lack credible policies to address many of the issues driving the discontent that propels them.

In this course we will start and end with our current political predicament, but spend most of our time on a sustained discussion of some of the most pressing policy issues we face. We will do so not in accord with the low standards of recent American politics but as they would be debated in a well-functioning democracy in which urgent issues received the serious attention they deserve. Viewed in this way, we see that for the most urgent economic, social, environmental, technological, health and human problems we face, there is no shortage of viable and promising policy approaches that, if effectively implemented, hold the potential to dramatically improve the security and quality of life of many today while adverting genuine global catastrophic threats to the world tomorrow. But the failure of our institutions to implement viable policy approaches on this range of issues leads many in our midst not to press for better policy outcomes but instead for new institutional approaches altogether in the form of authoritarian populism. This course will examine in tandem both the policy issues and the political implications of our recent failures to adequately adopt the promising options available to us. 

Dangerous Politics, Neglected Issues, 2024: 

Why We Can No Longer Rely on our Institutions to Rescue Us from Our Politics. 

Prof. David Peritz

Course Outline

Week 1: Why We Can No Longer Rely on our Institutions to Rescue Us from Our Politics  
(7/23) in the 21st Century  
 
Week 2: From Prosperity to Precariousness: Why the Growth of Inequality and the 
(7/30) Decline of Mobility Foster Populism and What Can be Done About It?  
 
Week 3: Abortion, Gender, Sexuality and Polarization: Christian Nationalism,  
(8/6) Reimposing Traditional Values or Embracing their Transformation? 
 
Week 4: Immigration, Race, Diversity and the Age of Fracture: Can New Identities 
(8/13) be Reconciled with Common Commitments and Social Cohesion? 
 
Week 5: From Out-of-Control Technological Change to the Return of War: Can 
(8/20) National or Global Institutions Manage Global Challenges?  
 
Week 6: Making Democracy Work Better in the 21st Century or Abandoning it in  
(8/27) Favor of Alternatives? Why We Stand at a Critical Juncture 

Fieldnotes from a World on Fire: Understanding Climate Change and our Prospects for Adverting Global Catastrophe

Foundation in the state of the current scientific
knowledge of climate change.

Prof. David Peritz

Course Outline

Lesson 1: The Complex but Certain Science of Global Climate Change.Lesson 2: Climate Change, Pandemic, A Vulnerable World, and the Existential Threat of Inaction.Lesson 3: From Economy to Energy & Technology: The Nature and Limits of the Response to the Climate Crisis Until Now.Lesson 4: The Great Derangement: Why Are We Not Changing in the Face of Climate Change?Lesson 5: Global Interconnectivity, History, and Ethics in the Anthropocene.Lesson 6: The Politics of an Effective Response versus the Consequence of Failure: From Just Climate Action to Desperate Gambits.

Urgent Issues, Dangerous Politics, 2022:

National Elections at a Time of Constitutional Crisis and Radical Partisanship

Explorations in current politics and philosophy

Course Outline

Lecture 1: The Dynamics Driving the 2022 Mid-term Elections and Their Likely Impact A Preliminary Framework for Thinking about the Elections of 2022: Can Midterm Elections Feature a Contest Between Normal and Constitutional Politics? What would it Mean for American Politics to Enter a Constitutional Phase in a Period of Radical Partisanship?

Lecture 2: How to repair a Broken Economy? Is the Global Economy Broken? Can it be Repaired? Policy Debates on Creating a More Just and Humane Economy in a Post-COVID World.

Lecture 3: Can Global Order be rescued? The Russian Invasion of Ukraine and the Question of Whether Global Order can be Secured in the Middle of the 21st Century in Time to Cope with Climate Change, Pandemics, the Rogue States, a New Cold War, and Other Existential Issues.

Lecture 4: Unity or fracture? Race, Gender, Sexuality, Immigration, Religion, and Education: Will the Transition to a Multi-Racial, Post-Traditional Society Fracture the United States?

Lecture 5: Can we control technology or will it control us? Can Unregulated and Radically Accelerated Technological Change be Mastered Before it Completely Disrupts our Knowledge System and Public Sphere, Re-engineers our Attention, Changes our Food and Nutrition, and Alters our Biology?

Lecture 6: Decoding Election Results in U.S. 2022. What Just Happened? Preliminary Reflections on the Outcomes of the 2022 Elections.

The Life of the Mind in the Age of Intelligent Machines:

What Humans & Machines are Doing When We Think, How It Differs, & Why that Matters

Prof. David Peritz

Course Outline

We now live in a world where computational machines built by humans are learning to speak natural human languages in ways that allow them to generate original and convincing forms of communication. This means they now pass the test articulated by one of the fathers of modern computing, Alan Turing, for ascribing the capacity to think to machines. Computers also now exceed human intelligence in a wide variety of domains, for instance, reading medical diagrams, managing electronic communication and commerce, playing chess and go, guiding weapons… And there is no reason to expect that machine intelligence won’t continue to grow at an exponential rate, especially if computers (which currently already train themselves to learn new tasks) become better than humans at programming themselves to learn (designing more sophisticated neural nets or new architectures of cognition) and designing their own hardware. Does all of this mean that we are entering the era of thinking machines? To answer this question, we need to be clear about what we humans mean by thinking and how much the truly impressive capacities of machines to learn and solve problems reflects something akin to human thought. In other words, current developments in AI solicit an investigation that integrates philosophy and psychology, alongside cognitive, brain and computer science. Further, to the extent that the potential take-off of machine intelligence makes it prudent to anticipate the arrival of artificial general super-intelligence (i.e., intelligence across a wide range of domains that exceeds human intelligence) in the current century, practical questions concerning the regulation of the use and control of this technology also require urgent attention.