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.

After Mon Feb 23:

Some of you asked for help finding additional reading, especially regarding the Pairing Problem. Here is a selection from Jaegwon Kim’s textbook that discusses epiphenomenalism and most of our arguments against interactionism. (Not much on Conservation of Energy, though, but Gennaro discusses that.) It’s entirely optional to do any extra reading for the papers, but if you want to, that would be a good place to start.

Note that, as I’ve warned you several times in our discussions, different philosophers don’t always define terms exactly the same way. Some of these differences show up between terms as I’ve introduced them to you and as Kim uses them:

  1. I said that “dualism” leaves open what view you take about the relation between you (the person) and your soul. Kim sometimes characterizes “dualism” as committed to the specific view that you are identical to your soul; other times he characterizes it as committed to the specific view that you are identical to a combination (or “union”) of your soul and your body.

  2. I said that “epiphenomenalism” leaves open whether mental things (events, processes, states) can cause other mental things. Kim characterizes “epiphenomenalism” as committed to the specific view that they cannot.

  3. I said that “causal closure” says only that physical events that have any causal explanation will have a sufficient physical cause (a physical cause that would be enough by itself). This seems to be Kim’s official understanding too. But he sometimes writes in a way that makes it sound like “causal closure” already directly says that there are no soul causes of physical things:

    > the physical domain is _causally closed_. What does this mean? Pick any physical event … and trace its causal ancestry or posterity as far as you would like; the principle of physical causal closure says this [will never]{.underline} take you outside the physical domain.

> the closure principle is consistent with mind-body dualism … All it requires is that [there be no]{.underline} injection of causal influence into the physical world from the outside, including Cartesian minds.

Instead of <q>will never</q> and <q>there be no,</q> I think Kim should have written that <q>there doesn't need to be</q> any non-physical causes (or effects).

For Wed Feb 25:

On Wednesday, there will be a quiz about the mental causation material.

We’ll also start discussing Free Will. Here are some initial readings on this:

After Wed Feb 18:

We started to discuss worries about how the mental and the physical causally interact. Here is the handout I distributed in class, for those of you who weren’t there in person.

Here are lecture notes on Causal Arguments against Interactionist forms of Dualism.

Added: Niko said something at the end of class about “contrapositives” which makes me realize some clarifying remarks could be helpful.

1. What we're thinking about now are when some things can *cause* other things. This is *not the same as* an if-then relationship, though it *will often be what explains* why certain if-then relationships hold. But if-then relationships can hold for other reasons too.

2. If there's a fire, there will be smoke. Why? Because the fire will cause the smoke. (Fires don't *always* cause smoke, but suppose we're talking about a specific situation where they would.) If there's smoke, there will be a fire behind it. Why? Again, because the fire causes the smoke. If fire fighters show up, an insurance claim will be submitted tomorrow. Why? Because a fire caused both things to happen. In all these examples, we have a relationship of if-P-then-Q, but sometimes P causes Q, sometimes Q causes P, sometimes they're both caused by something else. Some if-then relationships don't involve *any* causes: for example, if you light a fire inside this room, you will have broken the law. But lighting the fire doesn't *cause you* to break the law, as a further effect. It *already counts as* breaking the law (given what the law prohibits).

3. As I said, if one thing causes something else, often there will be a corresponding if-then relationship. (But sometimes not. We'll discuss such tricky cases next week.) But if-then relationships aren't the same thing as causal relationships. Contrapositives have to do with if-then relationships. "If P then Q" is equivalent to its contrapositive, "If not-Q then not-P."
But when P causes Q, we normally *won't* want to say that the absence of Q also causes the absence of P. (My feeding the cat on Monday causes it to be alive on Tuesday; but its not being alive on Tuesday didn't cause me not to feed it on Monday.)

4. One way to ask about causes is to ask a Why? question, and one way to describe causes is to say Because... But be careful, because Why? and Because can mean other things too. If I say "Why is the cake baked?" one answer may be to tell me about the actions of the cook that caused the baking. But another answer may be to give you my evidence for thinking that the cake is baked --- which might be that, for example, my neighbor promised to bake it before we get home tonight. "Because she promised" can justify my claim that the cake will be baked, but doesn't have to be what motivated or caused the baking to happen. Another way to answer the question "Why is the cake baked?" may be to explain what we mean by "being baked." (Perhaps there's some non-standard methods of baking that you didn't know about.) So don't take it for granted that every time someone answers a Why? question, or correctly says "Because...," they are describing a causal relation.

5. What then *does* causing involve? This is a hard question, that much philosophical work has wrestled with. But some initial ideas are that some notions that are more familiar to us have a causal element to them. If you killed a cat, you caused it to die. If you baked a cake, you caused it to heat up for a period of time. The *more general notion* of causing is some kind of abstraction or generalization from notions like killing, and baking, and so on; and also from what physics tells us about how systems can/will evolve over time.

6. In some examples, we talk about *things or people* being causes (as when I said *you* baked a cake), but many philosophers think that (perhaps sometimes? perhaps always?) this can be understood in terms of *something you did*, that is, *some event you were part of*, being the cause. (For example, it was *you putting the dough in the oven and turning the knob* that caused the cake to bake.) We'll talk more in later weeks about whether causes should always fundamentally be understood as being events, in this way.

For Mon Feb 23:

Read some correspondence between Princess Elisabeth and Descartes

After Mon Feb 16:

Here are some lecture notes on Huxley’s article.

Huxley is sort-of an example of what van Inwagen and other contemporary authors call “epiphenomenalist,” though Huxley doesn’t use that label himself. (I explain why I only say “sort-of” in the notes.)

If you want to read more about Descartes, or Huxley, or epiphenomenalism, there are some Wikipedia links.

For Wed Feb 18:

For Wednesday, please read:

#. In van Inwagen, review p. 226–middle p. 229 (which you read before), and read pp. 260–262 (which is new)

#. In Gennaro, read p. 26–p. 44. (This is the end of section 1.4 and sections 2.1–2.3 for those of you whose copies lack our pagination.)

After Wed Feb 11:

Optional: If you want to read more arguments for dualism, you can continue reading in van Inwagen his discussion of the “second argument” (top p. 233–top p. 240) and “third argument” (top p. 240–top p. 241). We’ll come back and look at his discussion of a “fourth argument” later in the semester. As I said before, he also mentions a “fifth argument,” but he presents and responds to that in a section of his book that our PDF skips.

The “second argument” van Inwagen discusses is based on the idea that it’s mysterious and hard to understand how physical things could have thoughts and sensations. You’ll notice that his discussion of this argument is longer and more complex than his discussion of any other arguments, either for or against dualism. It will take some work to follow the backs and forths and understand what’s happening. It might help to have some signposts and ways of breaking that long discussion of the “second argument” into smaller pieces. Here are my suggestions for how to do that:

So in the end, even though the physicalist is giving us less than we’d like, and still leaving things unsatisfyingly mysterious, arguably so too is the dualist. If van Inwagen is right, the considerations of this “second argument” don’t really end up giving us more reason to accept dualism.

The “third argument” van Inwagen discusses is based on the idea that we don’t seem to occupy the same space as our bodies do.

The arguments van Inwagen discusses for dualism (including the fifth argument our PDF skips) don’t exhaust all of the arguments that a dualist might give. If you’re interested to read about more, here are two pages of notes for another course. Also relevant are pp. 262–65 in our van Inwagen reading (which I won’t be assigning for this course).

For Mon Feb 16:

Read for Monday: Huxley.

After Wed Feb 4:

Reminder: on Monday Feb 9, there’s no class (it’s a University Well-Being Day).

For Wed Feb 11:

For next Wednesday, read these three texts:

  1. Continue reading Gennaro, p. 21–middle p. 26. (This is section 1.4 for those of you whose copies lack our pagination.)

  2. Continue reading van Inwagen, to the top of p. 233.

  3. Read my webnotes Limits to Leibniz’s Law

After Mon Feb 2:

Note that next Monday Feb 9, there’s no class (it’s a University Well-Being Day).

Our thin textbooks like Gennaro’s may be clear and straightforward enough that you don’t need to work hard to understand the structure of their text. The ideas may be hard, but I hope it won’t be a challenge to follow these texts’ discussion of them.

Other readings we look at in the course, like the van Inwagen reading, will demand more work from you as a reader.

As philosophical writing goes, that reading should be accessible to beginners in philosophy like yourselves. At least, the individual sentences and paragraphs should be clear. But it is a longer and more complex text than anaything we’ve looked at so far. You should expect to spend some time working on understanding it. You should also expect to read it more than once.

reading philosophy

It won’t be enough to just get the big picture and overall feel of the text. You need to go through the reading carefully and understand the details. This webpage tries to give you some guidance about how to do that:

Try to map out for yourself which paragraphs are explaining core commitments of dualism (things you have to say, to count as a dualist), which paragraphs are explaining options that some dualists might take but others reject, and so on. The same with physicalism. And which paragraphs are presenting the first argument for dualism, which the second, and so on.

The van Inwagen PDF I linked to before is the “clean copy” of our reading. Here is an alternate “annotated copy”, where I mark in pencil the topics of various paragraphs, underline important claims, and say where the discussion of some topics begins and ends (sometimes these extend over several pages). As I say in the Guidelines on Reading, marking up texts in this way is an extremely useful tool to help you understand and think about the readings better. I like to do it in pencil on hard copies, but you can also mark up documents in many PDF readers, or you can take notes for yourself in a separate notebook or file, sketching a brief outline of what you’ve read. (And maybe some reactions or questions that occur to you while you’re reading.) You won’t do this for everything you read, but it is a great habit to develop as your default approach to texts that will be important to what you’re studying or thinking about.

You need to do this yourself on texts to get the real benefit, and develop your skills for how to read closely. I’m just showing you this copy of the van Inwagen text with my own annotations to help you see how to get started.

For Wed Feb 4:

For Wednesday, read these four texts:

  1. Re-read more closely the Terms and Methods page on Conditionals that we read earlier in class but postponed discussing

  2. Read my webnotes Introducing Leibniz’s Law

  3. Continue reading Gennaro, pp. 14–21. (This is section 1.3 for those of you whose copies lack our pagination.)

  4. Continue reading van Inwagen, to the bottom of p. 231.

After Wed Jan 28:

Here is the page I promised about messiness in philosophy, as for example in the distinction between “abstract” and “concrete,” and in explaining what we mean when we argue about whether something “is a substance.”

For Mon Feb 2:

There are three texts to read for this coming Monday:

  1. Read p. 5 to bottom p. 13 of the Gennaro textbook (Mind and Brain: a Dialogue on the Mind-Body Problem). (In case you have a version without pagination, or whose pagination differs from the physical book, that’s sections 1.1 and 1.2.)

  2. My Notes on Dualism and Materialism

  1. Start reading this selection from Peter van Inwagen’s book Metaphysics. That whole PDF is long and complex, and we’ll be working through it over the next few weeks. The PDF has three parts. First there’s an “Introduction to Part 3,” where van Inwagen contrasts “rationality” to some ways of understanding “intelligence,” and explores what’s included in our concept of “rational.” Next is Chapter 10 of his book, which distinguishes two large proposals about “what kind of thing” rational beings like us are. These are views that philosophers call “dualism” on the one side, and “physicalism” or “materialism” on the other. The initial parts of Chapter 10 explain what these competing proposals say, and then from p. 230 to p. 245 discuss four arguments that are supposed to support the dualist side. In fact van Inwagen mentions “five arguments,” but the fifth is in part of his Chapter 11 that our reading selection skips. The PDF resumes again later in Chapter 11, on p. 260, where van Inwagen discusses four arguments that are supposed to support the physicalist side.

    For Monday, read up to the middle of p. 230. So that’s the “Introduction to Part 3” and the first couple of pages of Chapter 10. (Don’t worry much yet about his discussion of “interactionism” and its alternatives like “epiphenomenalism.” We’ll come back and re-read those sections, and discuss the surrounding issues, later in February.)

    Peter van Inwagen was an important metaphysician based at Syracuse and Notre Dame, but is now retired from teaching. He currently has an affiliation as a “Research Professor” at Duke, and sometimes leads grad seminars there.

    Note that his family name is “van Inwagen.” Some people’s surnames/family names are made up of more than one word. For example, when you refer to the Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, you don’t say “Márquez said so-and-so.” You refer to him as “García Márquez.” There are various and sometimes complicated histories of how people get compound surnames like this. Sometimes it’s the result of taking a compound name upon marriage (Kim Kardashian West). Sometimes it’s the result of the person’s parents keeping different surnames from each other. Sometimes the explanation lies several generations back (Helena Bonham Carter). In European-derived names, a common pattern is for surnames to begin with “von” (German) or “van” (Dutch) or variations on “de” (several Romance languages). These initial words are part of the surname. You don’t talk about the painters Gogh or Vinci, or the actors Niro or Sydow or Damme, or the director Palma. You talk about van Gogh, da Vinci, De Niro, von Sydow, Van Damme, and de Palma. Sometimes the person (or their parents or more distant ancestors) chose to capitalize the initial “De” or “Van,” other times not. In van Inwagen’s case, the “van” is not capitalized. (You can capitalize it at the start of a sentence.) If you’re going to refer to him, you should use his full name “Peter van Inwagen” or his surname, which is “van Inwagen.” Not “Inwagen” or “Vaninwagen.”

AFTER Mon Jan 26:

For Wed Jan 28:

Normally I won’t post webnotes until after we’ve introduced ideas in class, but in this case, because the ideas are so abstract, it will be especially useful for you to have lots of time to digest and think about them (and ideally to come to class ready to ask questions).

To Check:

Some observations about different kinds of questions we ask, and different ways of answering them, have come up in different ways over the past weeks, that’d be helpful for me to summarize. So I will make webnotes on those:

: At one point the Dualist team connected the notion of a soul to the notion of consciousness, which they said came in degrees. It would have been natural to ask whether having souls also came in degrees? How would that work? (A different view might say that all creatures have souls, just some have more complex souls.)

At one point, the Materialist team linked the Materialist picture of what minds are like to the claim that everything we do is predetermined and unfree. This is an interesting connection, and may be part of what motivates some people to accept (or to reject) Materialism. But as a matter of fact, many philosophers count themselves as Materialists and deny that everything we do is predetermined. (Many philosophers also reject the equation between predetermined and unfree; but we don’t need to pursue that right now.) There have even been some philosophers who are Dualists and yet also think that everything we do is predetermined. Only a few examples of that combination, but it is a coherent option. So the step from claims about the Dualism/Materialism debate (also known as “the metaphysics of mind” or “the mind/body problem”) to claims about things being predetermined or not, or the reverse, isn’t an automatic straightforward one.

Another point worth mentioning is the meaning of “essence.” When you’re talking about a particular object, its essence is the properties it’s impossible for it to exist without. Or in other words, the properties it has to have, in order to exist. Some of you said instead, the properties it has to have, in order to be that thing. This is a slightly different idea. Some philosophers use “essence” to express the second notion rather than the first, so I didn’t penalize anyone for it. But with the vocabulary I was teaching you, I’d call that second notion your “identity conditions,” not your “essence.” What is the difference between the first notion of essence (the properties you have to have, in order to exist) and this second notion, that I’m calling your identity conditions? Well, with the first notion, it might be for example, that what I need to exist is to have a living human body, and that’s also what you need to exist. So you and I could have the same essence. But with the second notion, if I am a different person than you, what I need in order to be me would presumably be different from what you need in order to be you.

Whichever way you understand “essence,” saying you are essentially alive would still be compatible with your dying. It would just be that after dying, you would no longer exist (as yourself, and presumably you wouldn’t exist as something else, either). By contrast, saying you are immortal would be incompatible with your dying.

A third way some of you interpreted “essence” was as being any property you had (perhsps something in your history, or part of your social identity) that played an important role (perhaps even a necessary role) in making you the way you are now. That is, as having some of the properties that you now happened to have, such as personality traits. It’s important that you recognize this is not the way philosophers use the notion of “essence.” The kinds of properties you’re referring to may be important to your life history, and could in some ways be more important to you than the ones philosophers call “essential” to you. But when philosophers talk about “essences” and “essential properties,” those are not the properties they mean. (See the page on Identities and Essences for more.)

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Mon Feb 2

Another class canceled because of weather. I’ve updated the due dates for the readings in the entry below. We’ll probably have another out-of-class quiz due the end of this week.

Tue Jan 27

Here is the plan, assuming that we’ll still be having class tomorrow.

We’ll do this week’s quiz outside of class. It’s due by the end of the day Wednesday. I sent you an announcement about that through Canvas.

The readings that were assigned for Monday will be discussed tomorrow (and are addressed in the quiz). I’ve shifted some of the upcoming scheduled readings and topics forward. Here is what you should read for next Monday, Feb 2 Wed Feb 4:

Here is what you should read for next Wednesday, Feb 4 Wed Feb 11:

That’s a lot of reading for next week, so give yourself enough time for it.

The following Monday, Feb 9, we again have no class (Well-Being Day). For Wednesday of that week Mon Feb 16, our reading is:

Fri Jan 23

I posted your quiz grades and some model answers to the quiz. (See link under yesterday’s entry.)

I just saw on alertcarolina.unc.edu that Monday classes are cancelled. Do what you can to do the reading I assigned for Monday before our next meeting, whenever that is. (I suppose there’s some chance that Wednesday classes will end up getting cancelled too.) Also check in here and I’ll most likely add some additional reading. I may make next Wednesday’s quiz one you can complete online outside of class, even if we meet on Wednesday.

If you get stuck in some situation like a power outage where it’s not feasible for you to keep up with the coursework, just deal with your situation as best you can, and let me know about it when you have the opportunity to do so. I know we’ll need to accommodate each other.

Thu Jan 22

  1. I will post some notes summarizing yesterday’s discussion of animal mentality:

    Those pages also have some optional links if you want to dig further into details.

  1. Here are some model answers to the the quiz. I’ll post your grades Friday afternoon. new

  1. For Monday, please read these selections:

    • Leiber textbook (Can Animals and Machines Be Persons?: A Dialogue, available at bookstore) Chapter 1, also bottom p. 34–top p. 39
    • Colin Allen, “Star Witness”

    Here are some notes on these readings:

    For the “Star Witness” reading, the “Reader Assignment” at the end is just part of the original text. It’s not a written assignment for our course. Also, for our purposes, we don’t need to sort out the legal issues discussed in the text, such as whether witnesses need to be cross-examinable. We’re reading and discussing this text just to get leverage on questions about what cognitive abilities it’s reasonable to think a parrot might have, and why.

    The Leiber textbook is one of the three you need to purchase for the course: it’s available in the bookstore, or you can find links on the front webpage. If you had trouble acquiring it, email me. There’s part of this reading selection that I think is more complicated than it needs to be. Here’s some context and explanation to help you track what’s going on:

    One of the people taking part in that dialogue is named Mary Godwin. Some back-history: William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft were philosophers in late 1700s. They had a daughter Mary Godwin (the mother Mary Wollstonecraft then died shortly after childbirth) who grew up, got involved with the poet Shelley and wrote Franksentein. The mother was born with the name Wollstonecraft but took her husband’s name Godwin on marriage; the daughter was born with the name Godwin but took Shelley’s name when she eventually married him. The dialogue refers to the mother as “Mary Godwin” and it’s a story about her that’s discussed in the first chapter.

    Thomas Paine wrote The Rights of Man in 1791, arguing (in defense of the French Revolution) that all citizens (not just aristocrats) had “natural rights,” and that they can/should revolt when their government doesn’t protect these rights. Paine also argued for education and welfare reforms. Around the same time, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (that is, the mother) wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, arguing that women deserved “rational education” (versus just “domestic education”), and that they had the same natural rights as men.

    Thomas Taylor then wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes in 1792; this was meant to be a satire of Paine’s and Godwin’s arguments. Taylor thought that the absurdity of counting animals as persons (as he pretended to argue for) implied it was also absurd to count poor servants and women as equals to their superiors.

    Our dialogue invokes this historical exchange for several purposes: (1) to remind us that Paine and (the historical) Godwin had to argue that all men, and women, deserved the same rights as others — it took work to overcome people’s doubts about this; (2) to remind us that the arguments Paine and Godwin offered had to do with reason and intelligence, which as Taylor observed, are present to some degree in animals too; (3) the (future, in-the-book) Godwin agrees with Taylor that there’s a “slippery slope” from the arguments of Paine and (the historical) Godwin to accepting that animals also have rights. Taylor thought therefore those arguments must be wrong (hence his satire). The future Godwin instead endorses the arguments and this further conclusion.

  1. On Monday — if we’re able to meet, either in person or by Zoom — we’ll discuss further how to interpret “outer” phenomena like animals’ behavior as evidence for “inner” mental states, processes, and abilities.
Tue Jan 20

Sorry it took me a while to prepare these notes, but have a look at these pages before class tomorrow. It’s just a few pages. We’ll talk through the concepts at the start of class. Some of the fundamental ideas from these notes will be on the quiz, along with an invitation to describe interesting and surprising facts about what you learned from reading about animal mentality.

I also updated the review sheet.

Fri Jan 16

I posted your quiz grades. These were graded to a relaxed standard, and by that measure, everyone did reasonably well. The grades ranged from B+ to A. Almost everyone made a few mistakes, but I gave partial credit if, for example, you marked the correct answer for a question but also marked an incorrect answer. An A- grade roughly corresponds to getting between one and two full questions wrong. Here is a set of model answers to the quiz, which I encourage you all to review. I hope that even if you were still somewhat confused about a concept while taking the quiz, the process of comparing the model answers to your own will help improve your understanding.

Apologies again for my own confusion on Wednesday about what time class ends. I was starting to explain one way of categorizing mental states that philosophers find helpful, that distinguishes between the state’s being an occurrent episode or happening and its being more dispositional. I’ll post notes about that contrast, plus a second set of categories philosophers find helpful, later today or tomorrow. Have a look at those notes for our next meeting on Wednesday, along with continuing to browse videos or article about animal mentality.

Mon Jan 12

Here is the review sheet of material that’s candidates for being on our quizzes or finals. It was part of the one handout distributed in class today. As the course progresses, I will add more material to the review sheet.

As discussed in the syllabus, for normal class purposes (including when we break into small groups for discussion), our classroom policy will be no devices: laptops, tablets, or phones. If there’s something urgent you need to use a phone to handle, please excuse yourself and go handle it in the hallway.

For quizzes and the final, you’ll have the option to complete them handwritten, or using a lockdown browser on your laptop or tablet. That’s an exceptional situation, when devices are allowed. Either way you proceed, you’ll be allowed to consult any printed or written notes during the exam, but not any device (and if you’re using the lockdown browser, it won’t allow you to switch to a different app or window). Note that the time to complete the quiz will be limited.

On Wednesday, we’re going to take up our first main topic, that of animal mentality or cognition. We’ll get to some philosophical readings on this. (I have them on the Calendar for Mon Jan 26, but we may end up adjusting that.) Before we do that, it will be helpful for you to learn about surprising things that some animals can do, and things they can’t do. The exact details here aren’t going to matter so much for our discussion. But it still will be helpful to have a rough feel for the details.

There are different ways to do this.

Here is a page of links to popular science and news articles and videos about animal mentality. (You can also search on your own on YouTube or Google for keywords like “animal cognition” or “intelligent animals.”)

I don’t expect anyone to try to read/watch all of those. But I do ask you to make a good faith effort to spend time browsing some of them, or doing your own research, over the next week or so. I will be inviting you to summarize and react to some of what you learn on our second quiz (on Wed Jan 21).

Another option is to read some of this selection from a book about animal cognition in general, and their linguistic abilities and limitations in particular:

That PDF looks long, but if you go through it there’s a lot of partial pages. It looks to me to sum up to about 85 pages altogether. I think it’s a useful overview of the kind of information we want to be drawing on. But as I said, we don’t need to master the exact details. You’re welcome to read all of that selection, but I’m not requiring or expecting that you will do so.

And I don’t mind if some of you choose to skim the whole Dr Dolittle selection quickly; while others get interested in some of the details in one section and read there more closely, never making it through the whole text; and others instead just watch a handful of YouTube videos. Browse through these links and see what catches your attention. For this initial reading about animal mentality, I’m just going to trust that you’ll each put in good faith efforts to read/watch/learn some more about the surprising things some animals can and cannot do. We can share highlights with each other in class.

Our later reading assignments won’t be so free-form as this. We’ll generally all want to be looking and talking about the same texts. But this seems to me a useful and interesting way to start off.

Wed Jan 7

For those of you who missed today’s class, here are summaries of what we discussed. See below for links to the reading to do for Monday.

What is Philosophy?

Our Big Questions

Tue Jan 6

Our first class meeting is on Wed Jan 7. I’ll introduce you to our course topics and talk about what philosophical activity looks like — what kinds of tools and strategies philosophers use for answering questions.

There is no reading assigned before our first meeting. But there is a chunk of reading you should do afterwards, and be ready to discuss/ask questions about in our subsequent meetings. That starts with the group of web pages at this link:

That link leads to a list of five pages; the most important for now are the first three. Skim the fourth too, but it may be harder and we’ll come back to it and discuss it more carefully in a few weeks. The last page is a Glossary that I hope will be useful but isn’t important for you to memorize.

Those pages already have developed explanations of many of the concepts we’ll be relying on this semester, and I’m not planning to repeat/summarize them in class. But I will take questions about the material on Monday, and we’ll talk through the Review lists at the end of the pages. Come to class next week with ideas and questions about what you find confusing or would be helpful to explore further.

The first of our Wednesday quizzes, on Wed Jan 13, will cover those materials.

For Monday, also read this brief selection:

(“Pojman” is the author’s family name.) 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.

Have a look also at this short page:

It will help you with the kind of task described in the Pojman reading.