Emeritus Professor of Philosophy
Copyright © 2024 Bruce W. Hauptli
Department of Philosophy | Home: |
Florida International University | 15 Dummer Street |
Modesto Maidique Campus | Bath, ME 04530 |
Miami, FL 33199 | Cell: 305-301-1355 |
Department: 305-348-2185 |
Brief
Biography
My Vita |
Professional Email: hauptli@fiu.edu Personal Email: hauptli@me.com
Personal Position Statements: the following provide my educational philosophy, my view of universities and their constituencies, and other items of possible interest: (click on links for statements)
Lectures Given To Others' Courses at FIU Elaborating My Considered Views: (click on links for lecture)
Fall 2023: Course Description:
: Introduction
to Plato.
Plato’s Euthyphro,
Apology, and
Crito provide an excellent introduction to Plato and philosophy.
These dialogues (55 pages of reading) are so accessible that they require
no prior study, yet they are so rich that even the most experienced scholars
have critically discussed them for more than two millennia.
Our discussions will devote time to both the dialogues and some of the
historical criticisms of them. In
addition to providing the opportunity for interested individuals to learn about
Plato and philosophy, they are intended to engage students in topics such
as “Does Socrates have substantive knowledge,” “Must one always obey the laws,”
and “Is Socrates engaged in a religious quest?”
This course was first offered at MSC
in the Fall of 2016, and Spring of 2021.
Spring 2023 Course:
Could Amy Gutmann's
Philosophy of Education Help Repair Our Democracy?
Text:
Spring 2022 Course:
What Do Colleges and Universities Owe
Democracy?
Course Description: Ronald Daniels’s account
of liberal education points to a “vital tension” in liberal democracies, arising
as they work to bind “the notion of a government responsive to popular will to
the imperative to protect individual rights and preserve rule of law.”
As President of Johns Hopkins University,
Daniels contends universities must provide students with a civic education that
prepares them for the responsibilities of democratic citizenship, and maintains
universities fail to recognize, let alone meet this responsibility.
Daniels discusses historical attempts to
address this and offers his own proposals.
I n this course we will critically study his analysis and proposals.
Text: Ronald J.
Daniels, What Universities Owe Democracy, ISBN 978-1421442693 (Kindle or
hardcover).
Winter 2022 Course:
Progressive Capitalism: A
Possible Model for A Renewed America
It should be noted that I am not a
trained economist—I’ve never even had a course in economics. I
have extensively studied political and social philosophy, however, and have a
good deal of experience with economics and markets as an investor for over 50
years, and with public policy as a political activist throughout that time. I
read Stiglitz’ book earlier this year and found his proposals very interesting. I
decided to teach the course because I want to better understand his proposal
(teaching something is a wonderful way of coming to better understand it), and
because I hope to discuss his proposal with others of diverse political and
economic perspectives.
Text: Joseph Stiglitz, People,
Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism For An Age of Discontent (NY:
W.W. Norton, 2019). Kindle, $9.17 Paperback: 978-0393358339
$9.65
Fall 2021 Course:
Plato's "Aristocratic and Authoritarian"
Republic vs.
Dewey's "Pragmatic" Democracy
Course Description:
In his Republic Plato provided a
characterization of, and an argument for, his ideal individual and state. His
view is that those who know what is good should rule, paternalistically if
necessary; and that those who lack such knowledge have the best chance of living
the good life if they surrender their freedom and accept the rule of the wise. On
his account democracy (which was the sort of government in at
his time) is one of the worst forms of government imaginable! He
emphasizes the transformative role which education can play in producing good
individuals and states and the importance of acquiring both knowledge of
unchanging and objective essences, and the objective and unchanging nature of
human virtue. His influence on our culture is immense.
Writing roughly twenty thee centuries later, John Dewey provides both a critique
of Plato’s views, and a defense of democracy rooted in an American pragmatism
which provides some significant challenges to a number of deep contributions
which Plato has made to the Western culture. Rejecting Plato’s
fixations with the fixed, permanent, unchanging, and singular essences (of man, justice,
virtue, and knowledge), Dewey offers a contrasting view of the good life for
individuals, good civic states, and the value of democracy. In this course we will study Plato’s
views and arguments and contrast them with Dewey’s.
Fall 2019 Course:
Benedict Spinoza's Ethics: What
The World Is Like According to Philosophy's Most Consummate Deductive
Rationalist
Course Description: Spinoza is a rather unique philosopher who has been accused of being both
“god-intoxicated” and atheism.
While he grew up in Amsterdam, which had at the time one of the most tolerant
European climates, in 1656 he was excommunicated from the Jewish community of
Amsterdam. In 1660 they petitioned
Municipal authorities to denounce him as a “menace to all piety and morals,” and
in 1661 he leaves Amsterdam and begins writing his
Ethics.
While his book criticizing Descartes
could safely be published in 1664, Spinoza had to publish his
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus [1670]
anonymously (and to protect the publisher from political retribution the title
page identified the city of publication as Hamburg and the publisher as Henricus
Kunraht). This book was written in
Latin in hopes of avoiding censorship by the secular Dutch authorities though
the Calvinist Council of Amsterdam denounced it as a “work forged in Hell by a
renegade Jew and the Devil.” Spinoza’s
collected works were published (in both Latin and Dutch editions) by his friends
with the title pages containing neither the name of the publisher nor the
location of the publisher. In this course
I plan to introduce the students to Spinoza’s philosophical worldview, clarify
his unflagging commitment to a deductive conception of rationality and
a priori truth, and examine the
consequences of his commitments to these.
In this course I plan to introduce the students to Spinoza’s
philosophical worldview, clarify his unflagging commitment to a deductive
conception of rationality and a priori
truth, and examine the consequences of his commitments to these.
Spring 2018 Course:
Descartes:
Sensible Doubts and Legitimate Knowledge?
Descartes’
Meditations is so accessible that it
requires no prior study of philosophy, yet it provides the reader with an
outstanding picture of this activity and its importance.
It also provides an excellent picture of one view of liberal education at
that time in our culture. The
material is so rich that even the most serious scholars have critically
discussed them for more than three-and-three-quarter centuries, and our
discussions will devote time to many of these criticisms.
In addition to providing the opportunity for interested individuals to
learn about Descartes and his philosophy, students will learn much about the
philosophical activity in general, and the class discussions will show students
what it is like to
engage in this activity.
He wishes to place human
knowledge on the most firm of foundations so that the "new modern age" could be certain
of its understanding of the world.
To do so he tries to give skeptical doubts their maximal sway.
In doing so, he believes, he can uncover both the most secure form of
knowledge, and the method for building the new "scientific understanding" upon this
foundation. His project has a
lasting influence upon our culture, and in this course we will study his
Meditations on First Philosophy
[1641]. We will address the
following questions:
“Why does he start out in skepticism?”
“Do his doubts ultimately make sense?”
“What is his first claim to knowledge, is it as secure as
he claims, and what problems does it initiate?”
“What method does he employ to gain further knowledge,
does it really produce the desired understanding, and how is it related to
science (then and now)?”
“How successful are his proofs for the existence of a
deity?”
“Can he move from knowledge of the self to knowledge of
others, and then to knowledge of the physical world?”
Text: René
Descartes, Discourse on Method and
Meditations on First Philosophy
(Fourth Edition), Trans: Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998)—ISBN
(paper): 978-0-87220-420-1.
My Publications:
Book:
The Reasonableness of Reason: Explaining Rationality Naturalistically
(Chicago: Open Court, 1995).
Refereed Articles:
“A Dilemma for W.W. Bartley’s Pancritical Rationalism,”
Philosophy of the Social Sciences, v.
21 (1991), pp. 86-89.
“
“Quine’s Theorizing About Theories,”
Synthese, v. 57 (1983), pp. 21-33.
“Quinean Relativism: Beyond Metaphysical Realism and Idealism,”
The Southern Journal of Philosophy, v.
18 (1980), pp. 393-410.
“Inscrutability and Correspondence,”
The Southern Journal of Philosophy, v. 17 (1979), pp. 199-212.
Unpublished Work: I believe they are worth a look, but they are no longer submitted for consideration for publication. While many were written in the 1980's and 1990's, the copyright date indicates when they were first placed on the web or the date of the latest revision: (click on links for papers)
William Alston's Epistemic Level Confusion and Disguised Fideism |
Philosophy
and The Quest For A Justified World-View--A Review of Kekes
(a criticism of John Kekes'
The Nature of Philosophy) |
Good Philosophy Is Unavoidably Technical--A Criticism of Adler (a criticism of his Six Great Ideas PBS video program) | Living One's Pyrrhonistic Skepticism (Contra Burnyeat) |
Course Websites for FIU Courses I Taught In the Decade Before my Retirement in 2015: (click on links for course websites--some of the lectures have been revised during retirement, and the date at the end of each indicates the date each was last given or revised)
PHH 2063 Classics In Philosophy: Introduction to Philosophy--taught for the last time in Spring 2015. This course introduces the history of philosophy by examining the works of Plato, Anselm, Hobbes, and Descartes.
PHH 3401 16th and 17th Century Philosophy--taught for the last time in Fall 2014. A course which in the Department's History of Philosophy sequence which dealt with orientations of four philosophers: Rene Descartes, Blaisé Pascal, Benedict Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz.
PHH 3402 British Empiricism--taught for the last time in Spring 2015. A course in the Department's History of Philosophy sequence which deals with orientation of three philosophers: John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume.
PHH 3700 American Philosophy--taught for the last time in Fall 2015. A course introducing American Pragmatism through studying the works of Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey.
PHH 4930 A Major Philosopher: Wittgenstein--taught for the last time in Spring 2014. The course concentrated on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
PHI 3300 Epistemology--taught for the last time in Fall 2013. A basic upper division course in the theory of knowledge. It addressed skepticism, the nature of knowledge, epistemic justification (what is requisite if we are to support our claims to knowledge), and alternative orientations within contemporary epistemology.
PHI 3601 Ethical Theory--taught for the last time in Fall 2013. A basic course in ethical theories, this course concentrated upon a critical analysis of the theories of Hobbes, Mill, Kant, and Aristotle.
IDS 6937 Great Ideas Seminar: Special Topics--Liberal Education and Democracy--I taught this course in Summer 2004. The seminar focused on a historical survey of the evolving idea (and ideal) of liberal education and its relationship to democracy. Attention was directed to its cultural origins and contexts, and to its importance for democratic citizenry.
Information for FIU Students: (click on links for information)
Regarding Requests for Letters of Recommendation
|
Regarding Independent Study Requests--though retired I am still open to them. |
Regarding Requests to Do PHI 4911 Projects With Me--though retired I am still open to them. |
Student Malapropisms Collected Over My Years of Teaching
FIU Department of Philosophy (includes information of faculty, Student Advising Guide, etc.)
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Professional Email: hauptli@fiu.edu Personal Email: hauptli@me.com
Last revised: 07/21/24