• Rhetoric 10: Reason and Argument--Daniel Coffeen
• Rhetoric 20: Rhetorical Interpretation--Felipe Gutterriez
• Rhetoric 39F: Freshman/Sophomore Seminar--Daniel Melia
• Rhetoric 39G: Freshman/Sophomore Seminiar--David Cohen
• Rhetoric 103A: History of Rhetoric--Daniel Melia
• Rhetoric 110: Advanced Argumentative Writing--Felipe Gutterriez
• Rhetoric 119, Section 1: Genre in Film and Literature: Science Fiction--Felipe Gutterriez
• Rhetoric 119, Section 2: Genre in Film and Literature: Screening Sex--Linda Williams
• Rhetoric 121A: Rhetoric of Fiction--Dale Carrico
• Rhetoric 122: Rhetoric of Drama--Tony Cascardi
• Rhetoric 124: Rhetoric of Poetry: Phenomenal Rhetorics: Poetry, Philosophy and the Argument from Experience--Lohren Green
• Rhetoric 127: Novel and Society--Pheng Cheah
• Rhetoric 131: Rhetoric of Religious Discourse--Adi Ophir
• Rhetoric 132: Rhetoric, Culture and Society--Dale Carrico
• Rhetoric 152AC: Race and Order in the New Republic--Nad Permaul
• Rhetoric 155: Rhetoric of Colonialism and Postcolonialism--Samera Esmeir
• Rhetoric 157B: Rhetoric of Contemporary Political Theory--Matthew Scherer
• Rhetoric 159B: Great Themes in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Political and Legal Theory--Nancy Weston
• Rhetoric 160: Introduction to the Rhetoric of Legal DIscouse--Marianne Constable
• Rhetoric 162AC: Rhetoric of American Culture--Rakesh Bhandari
• Rhetoric 164: Rhetoric of Legal Discourse--David Cohen, Frank Wang and Laura Young
• Rhetoric 165: Rhetoric of Legal Philosophy--Marianne Constable
• Rhetoric 170: Rhetoric of Social Science--Samera Esmeir
• Rhetoric 174: Rhetoric of Scientific Discourse--David Bates
• Rhetoric 189: Special Topics: Literature and Theories of Radical Change--Jennifer Bajorek

Rhetoric is strange. Unlike philosophy, rhetoric eschews the search for universal truths. And yet the rhetorician does not dismiss propriety.   On the contrary, the rhetorician relentlessly seeks it, always trying to say the right thing at the right time. Picture a lawyer: he or she must heed a complex confluence of factors before speaking - the law as it reads, legal precedent, available evidence, the make up of the jury, the disposition of the judge, public opinion, etc.  The lawyer does not enjoy the luxury of the philosopher; the lawyer cannot meditate in solitude discovering eternal truths.   The lawyer, the rhetorician, must reckon a truth that is local,   that changes as the world changes.

This is the art and logic of rhetoric, the art and logic of circumstantial propriety, of knowing the right thing to say and do in this or that circumstance.   In this class, we will read a wide variety of texts - from Plato and Aristotle to Nietzsche, Nabokov, and McLuhan--, exploring what it entails to be a rhetorician, what it entails to make sense of a world, of texts, without stable truths but nevertheless with local laws. We will look at how texts function, how arguments are created, how meaning comes to the fore, and what it entails to read all of these things at once. 

Required Texts:

Raymond Queneau, Exercises in Style; Plato, Phaedrus, Lohren Green, Poetical Dictionary; Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

This course is an introduction to the study of interpretation. Its purpose is to equip you with some basic tools for approaching from a variety of perspectives questions of form and effect in expressive artifacts of various kinds: from fiction and other forms of literature, to politics, to film, to visual and material culture generally. Some of the approaches we will consider are typically viewed as part of the domain of literary criticism, but they actually cut across various disciplines: rhetoric, philosophy, composition, literary criticism, psychology, and others. I consider them to be and will treat them as part of the general practice of rhetorical interpretation. They include new criticism, reader-response criticism, structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalytic criticism, feminism, marxism, dramatism, cultural poetics, cultural studies and thick description. Obviously, given the number of approaches that we will cover, we will not plumb their individual details in all their elaborate intricacies, a task far beyond the scope of a semester long lower division class. Instead we will try to acquire a basic understanding of how to use these interpretive approaches and to gain an appreciation of the sophisticated ways in which critics use them. I hope that this course can be the basis for your increasingly sophisticated explorations in your upper division classes of the interpretive approaches we encounter and of interpretation in general. I also hope that it will help you to make conscious, informed, and intelligent choices about your own methods of interpretation.

Required Texts:

Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Getting Inside the Text: Close Reading and the Art of Rhetoric

The ultimate textual analysis would involve offering explanation(s) for every word used. While it is usually not an effective use of time to do an analysis that close, understanding complex, thickly constructed and layered texts often requires very close attention to verbal texture. This is an anti-speed-reading course that will concentrate on some of the essential practical tools of rhetorical interpretation. We will look extremely closely at some interesting literary works, as well as analyzing some non-literary pieces. Readings will include Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal. Students who want to learn rhetorical strategies from the "ground up", by looking closely at the wording and structure of several books are encouraged to enroll. Enrollment is limited to sixteen students. It is a course in anti-speed reading. This seminar is part of the Food for Thought Seminar Series. This seminar may be used to satisfy the Arts and Literature requirement in Letters and Science.

Required Texts:

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: War, Torture, and Criminal Responsibility in International Law

The seminar will examine the prohibition of torture under international law, with particular reference to the contexts of war, armed conflict, and terrorism. We will begin by examining post-World War II trials in which torture and other forms of mistreatment of prisoners were prosecuted, and then turn to the development of international law in this area through the Geneva Conventions, The Torture Convention, and the case law of contemporary international criminal tribunals. We will then consider the application of this body of law to the US treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo, Iraq, and Afhganistan, as well as in the context of the use of so-called "rendition" (the use of third-party states to carry out proxy interrogations involving torture and other forms of mistreatment).   This seminar may be used to satisfy the Philosophy and Values, International Studies and Social and Behavioral Sciences requirements in Letters and Science.

Required Texts:

TBA

Rhetoric 103A
Instructor: Daniel Melia

Is there anything about rhetoric that was not discovered by 200 B.C.E.? Where did Rhetoric come from, anyway?

Rhetoric 103A provides an introduction to the ancient Greek and Latin sources of Rhetoric and rhetorical theory. Special attention will be paid to ancient and modern objections to rhetoric as a theory and a practice. Readings will cover the period 500 B.C.E. to 500 C.E. Applications of ancient theory to the present will be investigated.

Required Texts:

Selections from P. Matsen (ed.), Readings from Classical Rhetoric
[Readings will include Herodotus, Gorgias, Alcidamas, Isocrates, Plato, Aristotle and others]; Plato, Gorgias and Phaedrus; Aristotle, Rhetoric and Poetics; Aristophanes (ed. Arrowsmith), Three Comedies [The Clouds & The Wasps]; Cicero, Selected Political Speeches

Rhetoric 110
Instructor: Felipe Gutterriez
Area of Concentration: History and Theory, Public Discourse

This is a course of study and practice in advanced techniques of argumentation. It is intended for students with well-developed writing skills; however, we will be reviewing certain basic principles of analysis, writing, and research. The course is discipline based and genre specific. The discipline upon which the course is based is law and the genre upon which we will focus is the legal memorandum in its various forms. Legal writing is often criticized for its tortuous constructions and obscure terminology; however, a well-written legal memorandum, brief, or opinion is both an elegant and a persuasive text. When you have completed this course you will have a better understanding of law and legal argument as well as the ability to make fairly complex legal arguments that are clear and persuasive. This course, however, is not intended simply, or even primarily, for those interested in law or law school. It is intended for anyone interested in developing the ability to quickly master the techniques of advanced argumentation in any discipline or genre. ATTENDANCE IS REQUIRED . There will be written exercises on a weekly basis. In addition, there are at least three major written assignments

Required Texts

Richard K. Neumann, Jr., Legal Reasoning and Legal Writing

The aim of this course is to develop an understanding of theories of film genre in conjunction with an emphasis on science fiction film. We will examine key moments in the history of science fiction film within both a cinematic context as well as a wider societal and cultural context. Participants in the course will be asked to identify dominant themes of the genre and link them to the formal characteristics typical of science fiction films. There will be two short papers and one longer paper. Attendance at lectures and film screenings is required. If this is a problem for you, you should not take this class. 

Required Texts:

As the sexual revolution of the sixties has continued to spread (ebbing and flowing in the manner of most revolutions), increasingly "graphic" and diverse depictions of sex have lent an overall greater visibility to sex acts in the movies. Since the sixties, explicit sex acts have become increasingly visible on movie screens and in videos made for home viewers.  We now expect to learn something from the movies about the quality and kind of sex that characters experience--whether simulated or real, heterosexual or homosexual, hard or soft core.   But how shall we understand the history of the rise of graphic sex in the movies? Does it represent an increasing "liberation" of libido or a greater discipline of bodies and pleasures? In dialogue with major theorists and historians of sexuality, this course examines the post-sixties visibility of sex acts on screen through the various genres of films that have represented sex acts: sexploitation, blaxploitation, European and Asian art films, avant-garde, pornography, and Hollywood's own unique history of occasional sexual interludes. We will understand the term screening as both a revealing projection on a screen and as a concealing screening off.

Possible Films:
Andy Warhol, Kiss, Couch, Blue Movie
Mike Nichols, The Graduate (1967)
Hal Ashby, Coming Home (1978)
Melven Van Peoples, Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song (1971)
Oshima Nagisa, In the Realm of the Senses (1976)
Catherine Breillat, A Ma Soeur (Fat Girl) (1999)
Patrice Chereau, Intimacy (2000)
Bernardo Bertolluci, Last Tango in Paris (1972)
Gerard Damiano, Deep Throat (1972)
Pedro Almodóvar, La Ley del deseo (1987)
Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain (2005)

Required Texts:

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality; Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality; Georges Bataille, Erotism; Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex

"Biopunk" is a fledgling genre of speculative fiction taking up many of the characteristic themes and gestures of cyberpunk literature but reinvigorating them through a focus on the emerging and ongoing pleasures and dangers of genetic science and medicine, bioinformatics, biotechnology, and biowarfare. In this course we will explore some of the provocative and unsettling connections between the wild insurgent speculation of biopunk fictions and the presumably more staid and conservative discourses of corporate futurism and bioethical policy making. How do the curious conversations, wary resistences, and imaginative interdependencies between these textual modes produce the argumentative resources available to each?

We will be reading novels like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, and Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire, as well as short stories by Octavia Butler, Paul di Filippo, Marc Steigler, William Burroughs, and Greg Bear. We will study some of the work of the Critical Arts Ensemble. We are likely to grapple with a film as well, Cronenberg's "The Fly," say, or possibly Almodovar's "All About My Mother." And we will read a number of theoretical pieces, editorials, and position papers by Annalee Newitz, Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, Chris Mooney, James Hughes, Michel Foucault, Eugene Thacker, Arthur Caplan, and others.

Required Texts:

Required Texts:

Engaging the phenomena--elements of experience such as
things, places, and events--a number of thinkers have
blurred distinctions between philosophy and poetry.
Their writings, seemingly infused with the shifting
forms and cadences of the phenomenal world, introduce
some fascinating questions about the
interrelationships of language, world and persuasion.
How might crafting language give insight into
phenomena? Why, when confronted with the phenomenal
world, does philosophy sometimes so eagerly turn to
poetry? Does the lush diversity of happening commend
(and multiply) the protean possibilities of poetic
expression? What are the techniques for making
experience palpable in writing? How does writing well
of the phenomenal world advance arguments about both
visible and invisible dimensions of experience?

The course will be organized around topics including
things, places and events. For each topic we will read
a range of texts by both poets and philosophers to
explore the various dimensions of phenomenal
rhetorics. Readings will likely include works by
Gaston Bachelard, Jorge Luis Borges, Seamus Heaney,
Martin Heidegger, Lyn Hejinian, Lucretius, Frank
O'Hara, Francis Ponge, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the
Presocratics, Lisa Robertson, Gertrude Stein, Wallace
Stevens, and others.

Required Texts:

The dominant geographical focus of postcolonial literary and cultural studies has been on the literature of British Africa, India, the Caribbean, and their various diasporas in the North Atlantic. The historical variety of colonial regimes, however, makes it more appropriate to speak of colonialisms in the plural and different experiences of anti-colonial nationalism and postcoloniality. This course examines the relationship between the novel as a literary form and the imagining of national community through a comparative study of narrative fiction from decolonizing and postcolonial Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa. We will read novels by Jose Rizal (the Spanish Philippines), Pramoedya Ananta Toer (Indonesia), Ayi Kwei Armah (Ghana), Salman Rushdie (Ukania/South Asia), and Ninotchka Rosca (postcolonial Philippines) and critical writings by theorists such as Gyorgy Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Franco Moretti and Benedict Anderson in order to explore questions such as the following: what are the consequences of the encounter of native populations with the ideas, cultural forms and sociological structures of modernity as a result of colonialism, and how are these phenomena used to subjugate native populations? How can we explain the rise of the radical "educated native" who plays a pioneering role in opposing the colonial regime despite the fact that the educated native derives many benefits under colonialism? What role can radical nationalist literature play in the continuing process of political revolution both before and after formal independence? We will also consider the use of the Bildungsroman, magical realism and the tropes of heterosexual romance and reproduction in the representation of the postcolonial nation.

Required Texts:

Jose Rizal, Noli Me Tangere, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, This Earth of Mankind and Child of All Nations; Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born; Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children; Ninotchka Rosca, State of War

The Hebrew Bible has served many modern thinkers as an important source of political theory. God has been conceived as a paradigm of sovereignty, Moses as a paradigm of leadership, justice, and democracy, David and Solomon as paradigms of monarchy, the organization of the Hebrew tribes before kingship as a paradigm of anarchy, and Job as the paradigm of the scapegoat. The Course will survey some of the most intriguing political readings of the Bible, from Hobbes and Spinoza to Freud, Buber, Strauss, and Girard. Reflecting upon these readings, we shall pay special attention to different understandings of the relation between law and violence and point out a recurring omission: the catastrophic aspect of God's attempts to rule the world or intervene in its course. Interpreting disaster as a form of divine governance the course will explore the political-theological consequences implied by the catastrophic aspect of divine power and its narration in the Hebrew Bible.

Required Texts:

Readings will include selections from: Johannes Althusius, Politica; Walter Benjamin, "Critique of Violence," in Selected Writing Vol. 1; Martin Buber, Moses, the Revelation and the Covenant; Martin Buber, On the Bible: Eighteen Studies; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan; Zigmont Freud, Moses and Monotheism; John Locke, Two Treatises on Civil Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration; Benedictus de Spinoza, Political-Theological Treatise; Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem or on Religious Power and Judaism; Rene Girard, Job: The Victim of his People; Leo Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity

We find ourselves in a world we make, and we find that we are made and unmade in the making of it. What are we to make of the abiding artifice that is "the political" in a world of design-objects, of manufactured products, of consumer goods? What are we doing when we are doing design and what do we do when we discern that design has designs on us? Where is the agency in artifice? What are the political possibilities of design?

We will take selections from Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway as points of departure from which we will go on to read design-objects as texts as construed by Roland Barthes, Kobena Mercer, Carol Adams, Daniel Harris, and others. Finally, we will grapple with the politics of some contemporary design movements -- peer-to-peer coding, Green Design -- that would undertake to remake the world in the image of particular ends, like collaborative democracy or sustainability.

Required Texts:

Our texts are likely to include selections from:

Carol Adams, The Pornography of Meat; Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition; Roland Barthes, Mythologies; Janine Benyus, Biomimicry; Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter; Michel Foucault, "Two Lectures," Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality, I
Donna Haraway, Simians Cyborgs and Women; Daniel Harris, The Aesthetics of Consumerism; Lawrence Lessig, Code, Free Culture; William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things; Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle; Bruce Sterling, Tomorrow Now, Shaping Things

Film: V for Vendetta

This course will explore how the issue of race in the new American republic shaped the cultural character of the United States during the ante-bellum, and has affected our contemporary social and political discourse. 

Reading will begin with James Fennimore Cooper's The Pioneers . By using the structure of this romance novel as a model, the class will view the founding of the United States as a formal problem, (not unlike the underlying problem posed in novel), in which the three principal racial groups in North America (i.e., the Native Americans, the European-Americans, and the African-Americans) sought to be included into the social and political order of the new republic. All subsequent readings will be viewed in the context of addressing that formal problem, with an emphasis on what the language and symbolism reveal of fiction reveal about the actual historical events of the period. This is a seminar that begins with a short presentation in each class session and often the use of DVD clips from news, films, documentaries, and television programs, but is focused around class discussion of the reading materials.

Reading includes original texts in American literature and letters (e.g. My Bondage, My Freedom by Frederick Douglass, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, Huckleberry Finn by Samuel Clemens, and readings from D.H. Lawrence, William Carlos Willliams, the New York Review of Books, etc.), history and criticism. Supplementary reading, in a course reader, will analyze the eras from which the literary works emerged, and the problems that shaped the course of the American founding. Contemporary news articles and film clips (ranging from Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing" to Sixty Minutes, to "The American Experience") will supplement formal reading material. There will be a take-home midterm, a paper/project making use of course materials and theme, and a take-home final exam.

Required Texts:

James Fennimore Cooper, The Pioneers; Herman Melville, Moby-Dick ; Donald Jackson, ed., Autobiography of Blackhawk; Frederick Douglas, My Bondage, My Freedom; Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Our course will examine colonial histories and postcolonial lives with an eye for understanding the place of European colonialism in modernity, as well as (post)colonialism’s association with liberalism. Rather than a global historical survey of colonial expansions and post-colonial legacies, we will trace particular colonial and postcolonial sites while investigating key concepts such as “race,” “humanity,” “civilization” and “progress.” We will also explore the centrality of such forces as law, violence, expert knowledge and science to the making of colonial and postcolonial states

Required Texts:

In addition to the course reader, we will read the following books: Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism; Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth; Edward Said, Orientalism; Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought; Gaurav Gajanan Desai, Subject to Colonialism: African Self-Fashioning and the Colonial Library.

This course examines the convergence of knowledge, politics and the self in three of the 20th century’s most creative, provocative and distinctive philosophical voices. We begin by reading Plato’s Apology,  Alcibiades and Symposium to set our bearings: What is self-knowledge? How is the knowledge needed to govern oneself related to the knowledge needed to govern others? How does the self begin to acquire knowledge of itself? What relations must the self establish to other individuals and to society in order to acquire self-knowledge? Having established these questions in their classical form, we will examine how Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell reformulate them in surprising ways. We will explore the rhetorical techniques these authors develop to transform the concepts of knowledge, politics and the self under the pressure of such events as the “death of god,” the “end of man,” the invention of cinema, and the acceleration of pace in a globalizing world.

Readings will include selections from: Plato’s  Apology,  Alcibiades and Symposium; Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality vol. 1 and vol. 2, The Hermeneutics of the Subject; Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, What is Philosophy?, A Thousand Plateaus; Stanley Cavell’s This New Yet Unapproachable America, The Claim of Reason, Pursuits of Happiness, Contesting Tears. Films will include:  Gaslight, Adam's Rib.

Required Texts:

Plato, Plato on Love: Lysis, Symposium, Phaedrus, Alcibiades, with Selections from Republic and Laws; Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? and Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature

What is truth? What is politics? How have these come to be understood, now?

What does our thinking on each reveal of our thinking on the other?

The task of this course (as described in the Berkeley Course Catalogue) is to "concentrate ... on aspects of twentieth century political, social, and legal theory that are too complex to be treated comprehensively as one section of the courses in modern theory."   So charged, we shall this term inquire philosophically into the relation of truth and politics, attending in particular to changes in the understanding of truth, and the understanding of politics, as these underlie and elicit the course taken by political, legal, and social theory during the twentieth century.

Readings will be drawn from significant twentieth century works in political philosophy and political theory, and from contemporaneous philosophical accounts of truth and investigations into questions of truth.

This is not a survey course in these fields, nor a class in or concerning twentieth-century political activity.   Rather, it is a philosophical investigation into the thinking that occurs prior to such field-specific theoretical and practical activity and sets them on their way.   Concerned with the course of thinking traveled by these fields of inquiry in the last century, we shall track not only the conceptions of truth and politics explicitly invoked in the theories, but also these conceptions' origins, affinities, and precursors in implicit understandings of the world (in the widest sense), of human being, and of their relation.   We shall thereby be drawn into sustained reflection upon how it is that contemporary thought about politics, law, and society -- and, with it, our own thinking on such matters -- has come to take the course that it has, and with what implications.

Prior coursework in philosophy is not required; an openness to its challenges is.

Please note: The course is intensive;  prepared, participatory attendance is obligatory. Students are advised to plan their schedules accordingly.  

The instructor will limit enrollment as necessary, and will consider for enrollment only those students in attendance from the outset.   Accordingly, all students interested in taking this class -- whether pre-enrolled, wait-listed, or neither -- are to attend the first class meeting, 2-3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, August 29.  

Required Texts:

Georgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics; Alain Badieu, Metapolitics; Chantal Mouffe, On The Political; Stephen Eric Bronner, ed., Twentieth Century Political Theory: A Reader; José Medina and David Wood, eds., Truth:   Engagements Across Philosophical Traditions; Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. III and IV , trans. J. Stambaugh, D.F. Krell and F.A. Capuzzi; Course reader

"good legal writing should not differ, without good reason, from ordinary well-written English."
-Wydick, Plain English for Lawyers, p. 5

"'Reason' in language: oh what a deceitful old woman! I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar..."
-Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, "Reason" in Philosophy, section 5

The course this semester will introduce the student to the ABC's (or the three R's - reason, writing, and rhetoric) of legal discourse by exploring legal writing, legal reasoning, and legal process, first as general issues, then in the context of laws of crime, property, contract and tort. The course is not pre-law (it will not help you get into law school nor give you a head start in law school). It is something of an experiment in reading and interpretation. Students will be encouraged to consider the parallels (or not) between legal issues and rhetorical ones. The course is divided roughly into seven two-week units and students will be required to turn in short assignments for each unit.

Introduction: Can You Skip this Part?
1. Plain English - Why Not?
2. Legal Reasoning: To Be or Not to Be a System of Rules?
3. Speaking Authoritatively of Rights or How Does a Legal Speech Act? 
4. Crime: No Crime without a Subject who Predicates (or a Noun that Verbs)
5. Property: The Agent's Own Good
6. Contract: "We Will Now Avoid a Tense Future through Agreement in the Future Tense"
7.  Palsgraf Returns
Conclusion: Aphorism and Excess

Note regarding enrollment:  attendance the first day is required. Students who are enrolled but absent will be dropped in favor of students who are present and wish to enroll.

Required Texts:

Required Texts will include (but may not be limited to)

Richard Wydick, Plain English for Lawyers; Arthur Quinn, Figures of Speech; J.L. Austin, How to do Things with Words; Martin P. Golding, Legal Reasoning; United States Constitution; Course Reader; Handouts

Recommended Text:

Peter Tiersma, Legal Language

Mythical entities believed to be real are indeed real in their effects. The idea that humanity is carved at the joints into deeply different races is just such a myth--an absurd belief system yet terribly real in its consequences and an arbitrary classification system yet seemingly objective to many of its adherents. With race as its case study,then, this course will explore human myth making, the specifically human ability to create fictional, yet seemingly transcendent, entities which then come to set parameters on human practice. Through historical investigation we will study classificatory racial ideology as partially constitutive of American cultural conceptions of human diversity, contract, freedom and nation. What are taken as among the definitive features of American culture--its individualism, its meritocratic nature, its basis in free contract, and the openness of its borders--will all be explored in light of their relation to a specifically American ideology and material practice of hard-and-fast classificatory racialism. To get at the specificity of these conceptions we will do some cross national comparative study. This course satisfies the American Cultures requirement.

Required Texts:

Required Texts:

This course addresses basic philosophical issues related to the political and moral foundations of the law (UCB General Catalog). Such issues traditionally concern the relations between law and justice, the nature of obligation and human action, and the meaning of community and rights. By placing texts that discuss these topics in the context of Friedrich Nietzsche's History of an Error (or history of metaphysics in Twilight of the Idols), we will not only consider these issues, but ask what it means to presume that there are political and moral foundations of law at all.

In other words, we will read and consider Nietzsche's history of metaphysics as a history of jurisprudence. In so doing, we will also explore the relation of texts about law to three great philosophical questions: who we are, what to do, and how we know. Insofar as law purports to tell us what to do, some notion of who we are or who we must be is implied in texts about law. Through close readings and discussion of particular works in the philosophy of law, the class will examine continuities and changes in our conceptions of ourselves and of law. Students will become sensitized to how words matter: how do references to citizen, person, actor, or individual, for instance, invoke different constellations of ideas about authority, tradition, education, responsibility, punishment, causation, at law?

The readings, lectures, and discussions are arranged around Nietzsche's "How the Real World at Last Became a Myth," in Twilight of the Idols (Hollingdale translation pp. 50-51). You must have your own copies of each of the required texts in the translation noted.

Required Texts:

Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Hollingdale; Plato, The Defence of Socrates, trans. Gallop; Plato, Phaedo, trans. Gallop; Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, trans. Williams; Bigongiani, ed., The Political Ideas of St. Thomas Aquinas; Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans Paton; Mill, Utilitarianism and Other Writings; Unges, The Critical Legal Studies Movement; Unsworth, Morality Play

This course examines the historical rise of the social sciences as well as their diverse epistemologies, modes of explanation, methods of inquiry and operations. We trace the forms of knowledge that distinguish the social sciences from the humanities and other natural or technological sciences. We also investigate how some social science disciplines contribute to the secular constitution of the "social" as a domain concerned mainly with "human" action and institutions defined in opposition to „non-humans," "nature," "technology" and the "divine." In examining these issues, we hope to gain a critical understanding of the power that the social sciences exert over our understanding of the world.

Required Texts:

Texts for our course include a reader as well as the following books:
Giambattista Vico, New Science; Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its
Discontents; Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures: Science as a Vocation; Politics as a Vocation; Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries; Andrew Abbott, Chaos of Disciplines.

This class will explore the links between machines, humans, and thinking. Ever since the Scientific Revolution introduced the concept of a "mechanical"' universe in the 17th century, we have had to face the question of whether or not human thought can be explained as the product of some physical mechanism. So well before the invention of electronic computers, people reflected on the possibility that the human body is just a machine, and speculated that we could make machines that think -- artificial intelligence that is.  Over the course of our semester, we will therefore follow a number of different trajectories in order to elucidate the way ideas about human thought have been bound up with advances in technology and science, and vice versa. We will explore ideas in physics, biology, communications technology, psychology, robotics, computing, and artificial life. We will see how certain historically specific metaphors and conceptual structures shaped both scientific discourses and cultural practices. Background ectures will trace main currents in the history of science and technology, as well as major shifts in the nature of social relations in the age of the machine. Class discussions will center on a mixture of primary sources (authors such as Descartes, Diderot, Turing, Von Neumann, and the like) and academic essays on, for example, artificial intelligence, automata, and the history of computing. And near the end of the semester we will discuss two important films that address many of our key themes--Stanley Kubrick's 2001 and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.

Requirements: short response essays throughout the term; final paper.

Required Texts:

Course Reader

Not long ago, a famous philosopher defined literature as the institution that allows one to "say everything." This definition yokes together two different elements of literature that we expect to be at odds: its apparent non-seriousness and, we assume, political impotence as compared with other kinds of discourse and its subtle yet unmistakable associations with freedom and risk--with "free speech," democracy, and a productive or inventive open-endedness that makes new things sayable, thinkable, even possible. In this course we will explore the power of this yoking in hopes of gaining a clearer understanding of the complex place of literature and literary elements in theories of how we change the world. We will attend equally to texts that put a negative spin on things, emphasizing literature's power to distort, to lie, to destroy or do violence, and those that take a more positive view, emphasizing its power to make demands, make things happen, or otherwise act in the world. Plato, Aristotle, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Proust, Marx, Benjamin, Althusser, Trotsky, Breton, Césaire, Glissant, Butler, Derrida.

Required Texts:

Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster; Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative; Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse