Topic

We'll spend the first half of the course working through some of the main texts from M&E in the 20th century. Topics covered will include Frege's theories of reference and sense; Russell's theory of descriptions and uses thereof; debates over the relationship between linguistic conventions, a prioricity, necessity, and the a priori; and Kripke's Naming and Necessity. In the second half of the class, we'll spend the first few weeks discussing more recent work on analyticity and the a priori, and for the last few weeks, students will give brief presentations of some parts of, or ideas for, their term papers.

Format

This course is a seminar rather than a lecture; but the first half will contain a bit of lecturing.

Texts

Everyone should get a copy of Kripke's Naming and Necessity. Other readings will be made available in PDF form via links from the syllabus.

Assignments

Everyone will write two short papers + a term paper. You'll be welcome, and encouraged, to submit drafts of the term paper. The term paper needn't be especially long; the goal is that it should approximate a publishable journal article.

Grading

The midterm exam and (non-cumulative) final exam will each be worth 35% of the final grade; short take home assignments will, collectively, be worth 10%. The remaining 20% of the final grade will be given on the basis of class attendance and participation.

Each assignment is required, in the sense that failure to complete one or more assignments is sufficient to fail the course.

Notre Dame has no official way of indexing numerical grades to letter grades. This is the system that will be used in this course:

A	94+
A-	90-93
B+	87-89
B	83-86
B-	80-82
C+	77-79
C	73-76
C-	70-72
D	60-69
F	59-

Honor code

In all of their assignments, students are responsible for compliance with the University’s honor code, information about which is available here. You should acquaint yourself with the policies and penalties described there.

Sometimes, it can be hard to know what, exactly, the honor code implies with respect to different disciplines. For this reason, the philosophy department has prepared a document explaining, using examples, what the honor code requires of students when writing a philosophy paper. I strongly recommend that you read this document, which is available here. It is possible to violate the honor code without intending to do so; the best way to avoid this is to carefully read through the philosophy department's guidelines.

If you are in doubt about what the honor code requires of you in a particular case, please ask me.