Course Blog

These posts are in reverse-order, so the newest posts will always be at the top. The dates are when the post was first made.

Readings are in a restricted part of this site. The username and password for these will be announced in class and on Canvas.

Here is a sparser evolving index of all the handouts, webnotes and readings we’ve used during the course. Or you could look under the Canvas “Modules” tab.

Fri Aug 29

Here are notes summarizing materials discussed in the past few classes:

The last page summarizes and expands on material that we won’t get to until today’s class.

Here is a review sheet of material that’s candidates for being on our quiz next Wednesday. As we’ve discussed in class, you’ll be allowed to consult any printed or written notes during the quiz, but not use laptops, tablets, or phones. However, the time to complete the quiz will be limited.

Wed Aug 27

In class today, we discussed one kind of question What makes something be a church? What does it take?, and a different kind of question What makes something stay the same church, rather than becoming a new object (which could also be a church)? The sense of “same” invoked in this second kind of question means “one and the same,” that is numerical identity, rather than meaning “having all the same qualities,” or qualitative identity. We discussed a version of the second question involving the Ship of Theseus, where there are more than one candidate for being numerically identical to the original object, and some lines of reasoning would say the one candidate is the original ship, and other lines of reasoning would say the second candidate is the original.

One of the assignments for Friday is to watch this short video and continue to think about that puzzle:

I encourage you also to think of things you might say to avoid having to choose one of the candidates over the other. Is it plausible to say neither one is the original ship anymore, they’re both new ships? Is it plausible to say one is “numerically the same ship” in one sense and the other is “numerically the same ship” in another sense, and neither of these senses has priority? Is it plausible to say it depends on what we want from the ship, or how we feel about the ship? That we can decide which one to count as the same ship? Similar to how, if a church changed its name and leadership and I asked you whether it’s still the same church — whether there’s been one church that underwent those changes, or whether one church stopped existing and was replaced by a second one, you might feel that it’s up to us which of those is the better way to talk. We can decide what counts as “the same church.”

I don’t know which of these is the best thing to say about ships and churches. But it looks appealing to not have to choose one of the candidate ships as being definitely the original, and the other as definitely not. And it looks appealing to not have to give a definite yes-or-no answer to questions like Is this still one and the same church?

When it comes to parallel questions about persons, though, it’s going to be a lot harder to think there’s no definite answer. We’ll talk about this on Friday.

The second assignment for Friday is to watch this short video about what it takes to be a person (compare to What does it take to be a church?):

I will post some more materials here by Friday, summarizing the past few class discussions and giving you more review materials for the quiz next Wednesday.

Mon Aug 25

For Wednesday please read:

As mentioned last week:

Fri Aug 22

If you’re interested, here is more about the film Moon I mentioned today in class. Here is some optional reading on cloning, cloning humans in particular, and here is a video about surprising ways that identical twins (and so also clones) really turn out to be different. (None of this is assigned/required. These are just links to follow up on if/when you have interest. Whenever I provide such links, I’ll say explicitly that they’re optional.)

On the topic of films, there is a series of philosophy-related films showing on campus. Here is the current schedule:

The assigned reading for Monday is to continue reading the Terms & Methods pages and the two further texts:

For Monday, also watch this series of short videos:

As I said in class, the details of these aren’t important. We’re looking at them to get a sense of another way of thinking/talking about “identity” (or maybe it’s a family of several related ways of thinking/talking about identity), that we’re going to try to distinguish from the concept of identity our course explores.

Wed Aug 20

Here is the sci-fi reading for Friday.

Our topics for Friday will be the debriefing about your discussion of the questions about the Egan article, plus your thoughts/reactions to the new sci-fi reading, plus we’ll start to review/field questions about the Terms & Methods pages. As I said in class today, I realize there’s a lot of reading on the table right now and I’m not expecting everybody to get through all of those Terms & Methods pages immediately. But do get started on them, and try to make enough progress that you can ask questions and benefit from class discussion of them on Friday and Monday. The most important of the Terms & Methods pages are the first three entries/links.

I will post a link and/or bring to class a handout pointing out the main ideas you should be developing an understanding of from reading those pages. You could use that as the start of notes for yourself, that you’re welcome to consult when we have a quiz on that material in two weeks.

In addition to the Terms & Methods pages, I asked you to read the first of these short texts:

When you do, also have a look also at the second page — which is also short. It will help you with the kind of task described in the Pojman reading. (That’s the author’s name.)

Tue Aug 19

As I emailed you, our classroom will be changing to Wilson 217. We meet there starting tomorrow.

Mon Aug 18

updated Our first class meeting was today. I introduced our course topics and started to talk about what philosophical activity looks like.

For Wednesday, watch this podcast (or read the transcript, either way is fine):

Also read this short sci-fi story:

(Pages with a “restricted” URL like that one need a username/password, which will be announced in class and on Canvas. You should only need to enter it once per device.)

Over the next few meetings, we’re going to continue developing our understanding of the questions our course will be addressing. And we’ll continue talking about the kinds of tools and strategies philosophers use for answering questions. Here’s a group of web pages, starting at this link:

that talk about those tools and strategies. Start reading these pages, aiming to get through them all by early next week. The last of the pages is a Glossary that I hope will be useful but that you don’t need to memorize. Just save it to come back to later. Also the page on Conditionals may be harder than the others. We’re going to go through that page together carefully in a few weeks. For now, maybe just skim it.

Together with the Terms & Methods pages, read this brief selection:

Our plan for the classroom this week is:

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