Course Descriptions

Foundations of Machine Learning for linguists

Markus Egg (Humboldt University)

This class offers an introduction to Machine Learning (ML) for linguistics. ML is a widely used method of current empirical linguistic research. In ML, learning methods are applied to corpora, with the goal of acquiring a strategy of extracting specific information from such corpora. In a second step, the learned strategy is then used for the automatic large-scale analysis of new linguistic data.

1) Introduction: Basic principles and ideas of ML and their application in empirical linguistic research

2) A first algorithm: k-nearest neighbours

3) Naïve Bayes

4) Support Vector Machines

5) Neuronal processing

Morphologies in contact

Nikita Bezrukov (University of Pennsylvania)

The goal of this course is to familiarize students with a number of foundational readings in contact linguistics with a particular focus on morphological contacts, which is considered to be a much rarer phenomenon than, say, borrowing of lexical and functional elements. Overall, we’ll zoom out to see what linguists currently think about language change and what it means to be a grammar in contact, and we’ll zoom in onto individual cases of morphological borrowing in the languages of the world.

Justice: A Contemporary Introduction

Anthony Nguyen (University of Southern California)

What does a just society look like? In this introductory course, we will survey several of the most influential answers to this question in contemporary analytic philosophy. We will begin with John Rawls' justice as fairness, the conception of justice defended in his groundbreaking book A Theory of Justice. We will then discuss Robert Nozick's libertarianism and G.A. Cohen's luck egalitarianism. Next, we will look at Elizabeth Anderson's "sufficientarian" view of justice as democratic equality. Finally, we will discuss John Rawls' political liberalism and its distinction between political conceptions of justice and comprehensive conceptions of justice. For each of these theories of justice, students will learn what its main claims are as well as what some of the most prominent objections raised against it are. This course will heavily incorporate both lecturing and discussion. No prior experience with, or knowledge of, political philosophy will be assumed.

Ancient Philosophy

Marianna Koshkaryan (University of Georgia)

This course will primarily explore the philosophy of Plato; other important teachings (as those of Presocratics, Aristotle, Stoics and some other Hellenistic philosophers) will be analyzed as our study of Plato will require it. Our approach to Plato’s dialogues will be quite nontraditional: we will read them in the larger context of Ancient Greek culture, paying attention to the problems Plato inherited from poets and tragedians, as well as the structure of Platonic dialogues being the “tragedies in prose.” At the same time, a considerable part of our course will be devoted to the study of the innovations introduced by Plato into philosophy and religion, and we will see why the latter became incompatible with the traditional views of the world as expressed in the works of Greek poets and authors of tragedies.

Then we will turn to the subsequent development of philosophy of Plato - via Middle Platonism and some syncretic Hellenistic systems - to Neoplatonism (and first of all, the oeuvre of Plotinus), the latter being both the rival of Early Christianity and the most important source of Christian metaphysics.

We will conclude our course with a survey of the main problems of the contemporary studies of Plato, the leading European and American scholars working on them, as well as the international societies and philosophical journals uniting the efforts of these scholars.