I have taken the class. I also have a BA in philosophy. It's a philosophy class, you're reading too much into subtle variations in course descriptions. SM's obviously not Korsgaard and his research isn't primarily in conventional history of philosophy but "conversant," the original description way back when, is largely accurate IME. I think some of the confusion may be that SM's research and teaching interests do not align perfectly; as many have noted, he hasn't published much recently. I wouldn't say the same for JP fwiw.
UChicago junior faculty
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I also genuinely cannot understand what the difference in that course description is supposed to be. Here's a random similar class from an analytic historian of philosophy in UChicago's phil dept this year, maybe you can recognize some alarm bell that it's history of phil not HPT, but I certainly can't.
An examination of the political philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and Benedict Spinoza. Each thinker, responding to contemporary political crises, developed theories of the absolute right of states, and connected this absolute right to the absolute power of a state. This course will examine these theories in relation to popular sovereignty, and explore whether either thinker has room for the possibility of radical democracy. Primary literature will focus on Hobbes’s Leviathan and Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise and Political Treatise. Secondary literature will look at the reception of these thinkers around the world, including work by Richard Tuck, Alexandre Matheron, Antonio Negri, and Sandra Leonie Field.
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I don’t know the course. It may be philosophical but it definitely isn’t (as originally claimed) a history of analytic philosophers. If you knew anything about how philosophers define their own history, you’d know they define analytic philosophy as beginning with Russell etc. Try googling “history of analytic philosophy”. It doesn’t include Rousseau.
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They do HPT but primarily of analytic philosophers, esp SM, who primarily teaches like Kant, Hume, Rousseau, etc.
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Savanna - You are so wrong you’re obviously an early graduate student. I’ll try to explain patiently. None of the people I mentioned rejected the possibility of ethics or political philosophy. Even more hostile analytics did not reject their possibility (they defended “emotivism”, which you should google). Ethics and political were less important to twentieth century analytic philosophy than were language or mind but they weren’t absent. They arguably begin with Moore include Rawls and so on.
Analytic philosophy is normally understood as arising with the work of people like Russell, Moore, and Frege
By this definition, there is no analytic political philosophy or ethics, as the early analytics generally rejected their possibility. "Analytic philosophy" now generally refers to "the sort of philosophy people do in mainstream English-speaking philosophy departments" and is not limited to M&E work descended from the early analytics.
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May I note that this is part of the infuriating nature of doing analytic stuff in a polisci department--phil is close enough that many people think they get it but simultaneously believe things that would strike philosophers as very strange. Analytic philosophy just doesn't mean what you think it means in its normal, everyday use. And this is a really basic point!
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The issue here just reflects different definitions of analytic. There’s a loose sense of analytic in which it’s just the set of methods commonly used in Anglophone philosophy, the sense in which Leiter is in the analytic tradition even though he works on Nietzsche and in which “analytic Hegelianism” and “analytic Marxism” are not oxymorons. There’s also a narrower sense in which it refers to a specific tradition descended from Frege, etc. For people who want to work on normative PT it’s the former that’s relevant, you wouldn’t say Kant isn’t relevant because he’s a bit too old.
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Emotivism is a noncognitivist metaethicalbtheory. It is an ethical theory uness you (unlike every other moral philosopher) exclude metaethics from ethics.
Wikipedia is your friend if yo can’t cope with the Handbook I linked earlier: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-cognitivism
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But like linking to a book on the history of analytic in the second sense is completely irrelevant to the first sense. Rawls is probably a borderline case for fitting into the second sense—he was influenced by Quine, but more obviously Kant, Hegel, and Marx—and that everyone calls him analytic reflects that the first sense has largely taken over except when talking about “history of analytic philosophy [proper]”
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Paise - And Williams, Korsgard, Taylor, Scanlon, O’Neill, MacIntyre, almost every moral philosopher of significance. Even lesser figures like Goodin work within a clear set of metaethical commitments. But we’re obviously going round in circles, so I’ll leave it there.
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I can't believe there are still people under 60 who hold the view that metaethics "isn't ethics". Good lord, this is some badly outdated nonsense. Sue your advisor for malpractice.
The claim is that meta-ethics isn't the same as normative ethics, which is true by definition. And sociologically it's also true that the circles of people who write on them, major debates, etc. don't overlap that much. For a bunch of people interested in philosophy this thread has a lot of people who are bad at grasping distinctions.