Truth in Ethics 


Farbod Akhlaghi


In this course, we will explore several questions about the nature of truth in ethics together. Most importantly: what does the truth of an ethical claim consist in? Is there something special about truth in ethics? And what, if anything, makes ethical claims true?  We will be interested in these and related questions both for their own sakes, and for what they might teach us about the nature of morality itself. 


Political Epistemology

Maria Baghramian, Arshak Balayan, Xintong Wei and others

Political epistemology is a relatively new branch of applied philosophy that explores the relationship between politics and complex processes of (scientific) knowledge production, communication, and application. This crash course will be co-taught by several instructors and will explore topics such as the following:

Phonology of poetry


Lev Blumenfeld


In this course we examine rhythmic structure in poetry from the point of view of modern phonology, using material from a variety of languages. We will focus both on descriptive questions ("How does it work?") and broader typological and theoretical issues ("What is possible and impossible? Why?"). Our discussion will examine the parallels and differences between sound patterning in poetry and in ordinary phonology.


The Limits of Thought. A Short Introduction to Paradoxes

Ludovica Conti  


This course explores the theme of paradoxes in contemporary philosophy, paying particular attention to their role in the foundational debate between the 19th and 20th centuries, and more broadly in the analytical tradition. After a brief introduction to the notions of argument, validity and soundness, the distinction between fallacies and paradoxes as different types of reasoning failure will be examined. The challenge raised by paradoxes, in particular, will then be examined in terms of its logical and philosophical scope. Various types of paradoxes (logical and semantic) will be presented and some exemplary derivations analysed. The possible explanations and solutions that have been proposed so far will also be discussed. The investigation will focus primarily on paradoxes related to the definition and formalisation of mathematical concepts, such as infinity, sets, cardinal and ordinal numbers, definability, and provability. Analysing the emergence and derivation of such paradoxes as Cantor’s paradox, Russell’s paradox, and the Liar’s paradox will provide insight into the formal and conceptual limitations of proposals that are still under discussion in the philosophy of mathematics.


Philosophy of logic

Filippo Ferrari


This course introduces some core topics in the philosophy of logic. We begin by asking what logic is primarily about, then examine the relationship between truth and logic, and finally probe the notion of logical consequence. Against this background, the course turns to contemporary metaphysical and epistemological debates. We will ask whether there is a single true logic or several correct logics, and confront puzzles about the revision, adoption, and justification of logical principles. We conclude by asking whether, and to what extent, logic is normative for reasoning.


 

Temporality in Ancient Greek Philosophy

Chelsea Harry


This course takes a thematic approach to teaching ancient Greek philosophy, focusing on the concept of time. Students will investigate temporality in six ancient Greek thinkers, noticing what is similar and dissimilar in the accounts. Further, they will be invited to explore the ideas of time, eternity, and temporality found in these texts as they relate to modern ideas and, in particular, to their own ideas, about time. The addition of readings by Hesiod and Sappho expands the canonized readings on time and temporality in ancient Greek philosophy, allowing students the opportunity to likewise discuss the metaphilosophical question: who counts as a philosopher of time?


Modality in Language

Paloma Jeretič


A core property about human language is its ability to not only refer to the real world, but also alternative ways the world could be. One way language does this is by using modals. In English, modals are words like might, must, can, have to, possibly. The meaning of modals is complex and multi-dimensional, making them a rich area of semantic investigation. Studying these types of meanings is essential in understanding how language encodes non-actual truths, and it provides a powerful framework for representing meaning more generally, beyond modals alone.

This course is a natural continuation of the introduction to semantics course from the first week. We will first familiarize ourselves with the theoretical concept of modality and identify the components of modal meaning.  We will then introduce basic tools for modeling modality within a theory of linguistic meaning. Finally, we will zoom out on the cross-linguistic typology of modality, exploring how modal expressions vary from language to language, and inviting course participants to identify and investigate modals in their own language.


Computational semantics

Aleksandre  Maskharashvili


Semantics attributes a tenable interpretation or representation of the "meaning" of a sentence, whereas computational semantics studies how to arrive at that interpretation. Assuming, for instance, that we know how to represent meanings of ‘dog’, ‘every,’ and ‘bark,’ and we know how to put those words together to spell out a sentence (syntax) ‘every dog barks,’ under these premises, computational semantics aims at computing the representation of the meaning of ‘every dog barks.’ In this course, we will focus on compositional approaches to deriving sentence meaning in the tradition of Montague Grammar. We will study the core tools needed for this work, including type systems for classifying expressions, the lambda calculus for representing functions and their compositions, and syntactic rules for encoding sentence structure.



Causal Models and Meanings

Dean McHugh


Causation is central to how we think and act. All children seem to go through a “why?” phase—and some never grow out of it.

In recent years, philosophers, linguists, and computer scientists have made great progress in understanding how to represent causal information. 


This course surveys recent developments in how to model causation, including structural causal models and counterfactual theories of causation. 


We then discuss the meaning of causal claims, such as “Eating the zhingyalov hats caused me to feel full”, “We are happy because we just saw Khachaturian’s Gayane”, and “The reason my legs are tired is that I ran up the Cascade”. We analyse what the words “cause”, “because”, and “reason” mean using causal models.



Introduction to syntax

Maria Polinsky


This week-long course introduces the core principles of formal syntax with a central emphasis on syntactic argumentation—how linguists develop, justify, and evaluate claims about sentence structure. We will focus on phrase structure, constituency, and syntactic categories and discuss the ways of using empirical evidence, diagnostics, and counterexamples to support or challenge analyses. This course is designed for students from diverse academic and linguistic backgrounds, guiding them to engage critically with syntactic arguments and to articulate their own analyses in a clear way. 


Why is there something rather than nothing?

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra


‘Why do we exist?’ is a basic existential question that addresses the mystery of our existence. The question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ is even more basic, since it addresses the mystery of existence in general. This general question (‘the question’ from now on) will be the topic of my course at YALP. The question became a focus of philosophical discussion through Leibniz, who discussed it in On the Ultimate Origination of Things, of 1697, and then in the Principles of Nature and Grace, of 1714. Ever since, the question has been the object of attention of many philosophers from different schools and traditions, for instance, Adolf Grünbaum, Martin Heidegger, Robert Nozick, Derek Parfit, and Bede Rundle, to mention only a few. Heidegger called it the fundamental question of Metaphysics, and Parfit said it was the most sublime question of all. However, some philosophers, Wittgenstein for example, have maintained that the question makes no sense. There are also different ideas about the fact that an answer to this question is supposed to explain, and the type of explanation that must or can be given of such a fact. For instance, is the question about the existence of anything, whether contingent or necessary, abstract or concrete, or only about contingent concrete things? Do we need to identify a cause of existence or only general principles or laws that can explain existence? Does the question presuppose the Principle of Sufficient Reason? There is, indeed, a multiplicity of explanations of why there is something rather than nothing. Some philosophers maintain that it is necessary that there is something, and that is why there is something rather than nothing; others maintain that there being something is more probable than there being nothing, and that is why there is something rather than nothing; there are those who affirm that there is something because God freely chose to create some things; and yet there are others who think that the existence of something rather than nothing is a brute fact that has no explanation. These are the questions and ideas I shall discuss in my course.


Debates and Developments in Feminist Epistemology

Miriam Ronzoni


Feminist epistemology is a branch of social epistemology that studies how power dynamics influence the conception, production, and justification of knowledge. Although it originated in a concern about how gender power dynamics in particular influence practices of knowledge production, feminist epistemology has had important repercussions on how other marginalised groups think their own relationship to such practices. In this short course, we shall look at the most important insights of feminist epistemology, and at some crucial recent debates. Beginning from the insight that knowing subjects are socially situated, the course explores how power and social location shape what is known, who is recognised as a knower, and which forms of knowledge are taken seriously. We will examine key themes such as the idea of epistemic privilege, epistemic injustice, and the relationship between lived experience and epistemic authority, while also addressing internal debates and tensions within feminist epistemology itself. The aim is not only to present feminist epistemology as a critical project, but to show how it offers positive, analytically rigorous tools for understanding knowledge practices in science, politics, and everyday life.



The syntax and semantics of exceptive and exclusive constructions

Luisa Seguin


Exceptive constructions express an exception to a generalization (von Fintel 1993; Potsdam & Polinsky 2019; Vostrikova 2021), as in Everyone came except John. The syntax of these constructions can vary. In some cases, exceptives are phrasal; that is, they have a structure similar to that of prepositional phrases, like with John. In other cases, they have a silent clausal structure and involve ellipsis (deletion of part of the structure): Everyone came except John didn't come. In this course, we will investigate the syntactic properties of exceptive constructions in a variety of languages, exploring how different syntactic structures can affect the semantics. 


Then, we will turn our attention to the severely underexplored exclusive constructions, like Setting aside John, everyone is here/we shall go home. While on the surface they resemble exceptive constructions, we will see that exclusives differ both syntactically, semantically, and pragmatically from exceptives. Playing around with data from languages spoken in the class, we will probe at various questions concerning the structure and meaning of these constructions. 



Introduction to Phonology

Tatevik Yolyan


Phonology is the subfield of linguistic theory that studies the sound structure of language. This week-long course introduces the basic principles of phonological theory, with emphasis on articulation (how sounds are produced), phonological maps (how sounds undergo change), and syllable structure. We will focus on languages that are relevant to YALP participants (e.g. English, Armenian, Turkish, and Russian) to get hands-on practice with analyzing linguistic data and developing hypotheses to explain observed patterns. This course is self-contained, and designed for students with minimal or no linguistic training. This means that emphasis will be placed on hands-on engagement with linguistic data rather than formalisms.  


MORE COURSE DESCRIPTIONS TO COME SOON!