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PHIL 785.001 – Advanced Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics

Instructor: Luc Bovens. This course meets T 4:00 – 6:30 p.m. in CW 213.

This course is aimed toward PhD students in Philosophy who want to make PPE into an area of competence. Undergraduates with an interest in PPE are very welcome in the course as well. There are three parts to the course.

  1. The first six weeks will be a crash course covering materials that are traditionally covered in introductory economics and political science courses in college. We will approach the materials in a philosophical manner. Prospective readings: Parts from Heyne et al. The Economic Way of Thinking and Sheple Analyzing Politics and Clarke et al. Principles of Comparative Politics.
  2. The next six weeks we will be studying chapters from some much-discussed recent literature that is relevant to PPE. Candidate readings are:
    1. Daniel Kahneman 2011 Thinking—Fast and Slow
    2. Elizabeth Anderson 2017 Private Government How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It)
    3. Thomas Piketty 2014 Capital in the 21st Century
    4. Daniel Hausman, Michael McPherson and Debra Satz 2017 Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy and Public Policy
    5. Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir 2013 Scarcity
    6. Matthew Adler Forthcoming. Measuring Social Welfare: An Introduction
    7. Cass Sunstein 2016 The Ethics of Influence: Government in the Age of Behavioral Science
  3. The last four weeks will be taken up by student led projects on topics that can be approached from all three disciplines. We will cover readings that develop philosophical, political science and economic perspectives on the topic in question. Candidate topics are migration, the welfare system, unemployment, philanthropy, climate change etc.