180136 KU Conceptual Engineering (2025S)

Reflection on concepts seems to be one of the favourite activities of philosophers. Often philosophers try to find out about the characteristics of a given concept, such as the concept of justice, the concept of truth or the concept of a person. Sometimes, the result of such an investigation is that the concept in question is in some way deficient: imprecise, trivial, incoherent, contradictory, or in some other way imperfect. That raises the question: should the deficient concept be improved or perhaps replaced by a better one?

In recent years, more and more philosophers explicitly pursue not only the project of describing some concept we have, but engage in the normative project of proposing possible improvements of concepts. For example, Sally Haslanger proposes deliberately to modify the concept of a woman in order to achieve certain desirable effects, and Kevin Scharp proposes to replace the concept of truth, which he regards as contradictory, by two new concepts.

"Conceptual Engineering" is the buzzword that has gained currency for these types of normative endeavour that aim for conceptual improvement. The aim of this course will be to study some key texts in this area, starting with some classics and moving on to some more recent important research articles, and thereby to understand some main views and discussions in this area. Furthermore the aim is for the participants to begin to develop their own views in this area by discussing their own written work in class, and developing this into a short course essay.

After an introductory session, there will be three types of session. In the "text discussion sessions" two texts will be at the centre of attention. Students will prepare these sessions by providing short summaries of the texts in question. There will be a short presentation by one of the course leaders followed by general discussion of the texts. In the "written production sessions", there will be discussion of short essays that students have produced and submitted in advance. The discussion is “pre-read”.

At the end of the course, there will be three “presentation sessions" which serve exclusively for the presentation and discussion of the participants' final course essays. A final written and revised version of the essays will then be submitted for a deadline some weeks later. (There will be a voluntary opportunity to submit draft essays by an earlier deadline and receive feedback from one of the course leaders.)

The provisional structure of the course is: Introductory session, two text discussion sessions, one written production session, two text discussion sessions, one written production session, two text discussion sessions, one written production session, three presentation sessions.