Philosophy of Mind
Course DescriptionIn this course we'll be thinking about immaterial spirits, futuristic computers and robots, fake computers with little people inside, Martians who behave like us but have an internal structure very different from ours, brains in vats, 'swampmen' who are formed by random aggregation of molecules.... We will ask whether these strange characters have thoughts and feelings, and whether, if so, they are like us in what they think and feel. We will consider how we might know the answers to these questions, and whether they even have right answers. The point is not to consider bizarre cases just for the sake of it, but to see what light we can shed on our own nature as beings with mental lives. DetailsCourse Code: V83.-0080; Registration Code 75126. Instructor: Cian Dorr, 503H Main Building, office hours: Mondays at 3:00 PM or by appointment, email: cd50@nyu.edu. TA: Joshua Schechter, 503M Main Building, office hours: Thursdays at 1:00 PM or by appointment, email: js665@is9.nyu.edu. Lecture Times: 11 - 12.15, Mondays and Wednesdays, 630 Shimkin Hall. Optional Discussion Group: Tuesdays at 5:00 PM, 503M Main Building. ReadingsYou will need two books, both of which are available at Posman's bookstore on University Place:
David Rosenthal (ed.), The Nature of Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. David Braddon-Mitchell and Frank Jackson, Philosophy of Mind and Cognition, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996 There are some additional readings which are not in either of these volumes. These will be handed out in class, unless they are optional, in which case they will be available from the Philosophy Department office or on the web. RequirementsYour final grade will be determined as follows:
What makes for a good philosophy paper? There is much to be said about this question, and Jim Pryor has said it: please read his Guidelines on writing a philosophy paper before you start writing. SyllabusReadings marked 'NM' are to be found in David Rosenthal's The Nature of Mind. 'BMJ' abbreviates references to chapters in Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson, Philosophy of Mind and Cognition. If there are changes to the syllabus as the course progresses, they will be recorded on this website.
ResourcesBMJ have a useful glossary of terms in the philosophy of mind. For more general philosophical vocabulary, I recommend Jim Pryor's Philosophical Terms and Methods. The best reference work on the philosophy of mind is A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, by Samuel Guttenplan (Blackwell, 1994). General encyclopedias and dictionaries of philosophy can also be useful: the most complete is the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ed. Edward Craig); two up-to-date one-volume references are the Oxford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ed. Ted Honderich) and the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (ed. Robert Audi). On the web, there is a Dictionary of the Philosophy of Mind, the MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which currently doesn't have very much in the philosophy of mind. David Chalmers maintains the best philosophy of mind links page on the web. Two other textbook-style overviews of the philosophy of mind are Jaegwon Kim, Philosophy of Mind (Westview Press, 1998) and David Armstrong, The Mind-Body Problem: An Opinionated Introduction (Westview Press, 1999). William Lycan's Mind and Cognition (2nd edition, Blackwell, 1999) is a book of readings that contains several of the articles we will be reading that aren't in Rosenthal. Warning: philosophers of mind disagree about how some of the key terms should be defined: for example, some people use 'physicalism' for what I will be calling the "Identity Theory". So if you come across a definition of some term in one of the readings, don't just assume that it will carry over into other readings. |
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