This course provides an advanced introduction to the causal theory of action explanation (and the closely related causal theory of action), some recent challenges to, and elaborations of, this theory, and some related topics concerning self-control and agency. For over forty years, the causal theory of action explanation has been the standard account of what distinguishes our intentional actions from our other bodily movements and mental activity. After introducing the causal theory, we will explore different ways of making sense of self-control, and its opposite, weakness of will. Then, we will investigate some challenges that have been posed for the causal theory. First, we’ll look at whether the account captures what is distinctive about human agency and compare it to accounts of non-human agency. Then, we will turn to challenges that are motivated by recent work in the sciences of the mind concerning whether, and under what circumstances, conscious reflection and deliberation involving representational states cause our actions.
This course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of neuroethics, which explores both what the sciences of the mind can tell us about the nature of morality (i.e., the neuroscience of ethics) and how we should ethically respond to neuroscientific advances (i.e., the ethics of neuroscience). We will focus on recent research in neuroscience and psychology on the nature of moral judgment, decision-making, and action and the possible implications that this work has for theories of responsibility, free will, altruism, and the self. We will also investigate the ethical, legal, and social issues raised by neuroscientific developments, such as neuroimaging and “mind reading,” cognitive enhancement, pharmacological treatment of mental disorders, and “neuroprediction.”
This course provides an overview of some core topics in the philosophy of mind. We will survey major views about the relation between the mental and the physical: substance dualism, behaviorism, identity theory, functionalism, and non-reductive physicalism. We will also examine some important questions about mental states, focusing on consciousness and where mental states are located. Is the mind inside the head, or, does some cognition occur outside the body? What is the nature of consciousness? Can consciousness be explained in physical terms? Finally, we will explore a number of issues at the intersection of neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy of mind. Is there a single, unified self? Can mental disorders and unusual cases reveal important facts about the nature of the self, our capacity to understand others, and responsibility? Do any non-human organisms or machines have minds? How can we know whether, and if so what, non-human organisms or machines think?
What is the nature of the mind? What makes for a good life? What is it to be moral? Is it in your self-interest to be moral? What is a soul? Do humans have one? In this seminar, we will explore various answers to these, and related, questions. We will pay special attention to the way in which different views on the nature of the mind have influenced accounts of morality and its connection to what makes a human life worthwhile. We will not only examine what ancient Greek, modern European, and Buddhist philosophers have had to say about these issues but also investigate how contemporary science supports, or conflicts with, these philosophical views. We will also touch on how these ideas relate to the contemporary American political scene and how we do (and should) regulate our beliefs.
This course is an introduction to some of the ethical and societal problems that are posed by recent developments in data science, artificial intelligence, and the pervasiveness of the Internet in everyday life. The first three full weeks of the course provide an introduction to the nature of information and data, to three major normative ethical theories (consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics), and to some common biases and fallacies concerning probability and statistics. We will then spend about four weeks exploring moral issues concerning privacy and freedom in connection with big data and the Internet. What, if anything, justifies the right to privacy? How does privacy relate to autonomy and to property rights? Are traditional justifications of the right to privacy still adequate in the age of big data and social media? How does the right to freedom of speech interact with negative effects of polarization and the spread of misinformation online? The course concludes by surveying a number of ethical problems posed by machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). We will explore such questions as: How does “deep” learning differ from “shallow” learning? Should machine learning algorithms be transparent or interpretable by humans? What would such constraints amount to? How do biases arise in algorithms? What is wrong with such biases, and how can they be prevented or corrected? How do we make sense of questions of moral accountability in cases in which machines are (at least partially) autonomous? How will automation affect the nature of human labor, and how will it affect inequality?
What is the nature of the mind? What makes for a good life? What is it to be moral? Is it in your self-interest to be moral? What is a soul? Do humans have one? In this seminar, we will explore various answers to these, and related, questions. We will pay special attention to the way in which different views on the nature of the mind have influenced accounts of morality and its connection to what makes a human life worthwhile. We will not only examine what ancient Greek, modern European, and Buddhist philosophers have had to say about these issues but also investigate how contemporary science supports, or conflicts with, these philosophical views. We will also touch on how these ideas relate to the contemporary American political scene and how we do (and should) regulate our beliefs.
This course provides an overview of some core topics in the philosophy of mind. We will survey major views about the relation between the mental and the physical: substance dualism, behaviorism, identity theory, functionalism, and eliminative materialism. We will also examine some important questions about mental states, focusing on consciousness, and where mental states are located. Is the mind inside the head, or, does some cognition occur outside the body? What is the nature of consciousness? Can consciousness be explained in physical terms? Finally, we will explore a number of issues at the intersection of neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy of mind. Is there a single, unified self? Can mental disorders and unusual cases reveal important facts about the nature of the self, our capacity to understand others, and responsibility? Do non-human organisms have minds? How can we know whether, and what, non-human organisms think?
This course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of neuroethics, which explores both what the sciences of the mind can tell us about the nature of morality (i.e., the neuroscience of ethics) and how we should ethically respond to neuroscientific advances (i.e., the ethics of neuroscience). We will focus on recent research in neuroscience and psychology on the nature of moral judgment, decision-making, and action and the possible implications that this work has for theories of responsibility, free will, altruism, and the self. We will also investigate the ethical, legal, and social issues raised by neuroscientific developments, such as neuroimaging and “mind reading,” cognitive enhancement, pharmacological treatment of mental disorders, and “neuroprediction.”
What is the nature of the mind? What makes for a good life? What is it to be moral? What is a soul? Do humans have one? In this seminar, we will explore various answers to these, and related, questions. We will pay special attention to the way in which different views on the nature of the mind have influenced accounts of morality and its connection to what makes a human life worthwhile. We will not only examine what ancient Greek, modern European, and Buddhist philosophers have had to say about these issues but also investigate how contemporary science supports, or conflicts with, these philosophical views.
This course provides an advanced introduction to the causal theory of action and some recent challenges to, and elaborations of, this theory. For over forty years, the causal theory of action has been the standard account of what distinguishes our intentional actions from our other bodily movements and mental activity. After introducing the causal theory, we will explore some challenges it faces. First, we’ll look at whether the account captures what is distinctive about human agency and compare it to accounts of non-human agency. Then, we will turn to challenges that are motivated by recent work in the sciences of the mind concerning whether, and under what circumstances, conscious reflection and deliberation involving representational states cause our actions.
This course explores the nature of the self and its relation to the natural world. We will explore such questions as: Are we purely material beings, or do we have an immaterial soul? How is the mind related to the body? How, if at all, do we remain numerically the same people over time, despite changing both physically and mentally? Is it possible for two people to switch bodies, or for two people to occupy the same body? What are the ethical implications of the nature of the self (or its nonexistence)? Course readings will includes works from ancient Greek, modern European, and Buddhist philosophers, as well as from contemporary thinkers.
This course provides an overview of some core topics in the philosophy of mind. We will survey the major views about the relation between the mental and the physical: substance dualism, behaviorism, identity theory, functionalism, supervenience and realization theories. We will then examine some important questions about mental states, focusing on causation, consciousness, and content. Can mental states ever be causally efficacious? What is the nature of consciousness? Can consciousness be explained in physical terms? Many, or perhaps all, mental states are intentional states: they are about things. Can mental content or intentionality be naturalized? Is mental content determined solely by what is “inside the head” or is it individuated partly in terms of features of the physical or social environment? Are there good reasons to think that the boundaries of the mind extend beyond the body? We will explore how to make these questions more precise and develop a variety of answers to them.
This course provides an introduction to some enduring philosophical questions. These include topics in metaphysics (which is concerned with questions about the nature of reality, such as: Is there a God? How are our minds related to our bodies? What is a person?), epistemology (which concerns if, and how, we can have knowledge about the world), and ethics (which is concerned with questions about norms and values, e.g.: What makes an action good? What is justice? Why should we be moral?). We will examine what thinkers of the past, as well as contemporary philosophers, have had to say about these issues. Along the way, we will also consider questions about the practice of philosophy itself: What makes a question a philosophical one? What are the methods philosophers use to answer such questions?
Many philosophers endorse naturalism, which is often summed up by the claim that the methods of philosophy should be consonant with the methods of the sciences. In the last decade or so, a particular form of naturalistic methodology called "experimental philosophy" has become popular (and controversial). Experimental philosophers conduct empirical research into what actual subjects say about particular thought experiments. Many experimental philosophers claim that the results of this research call into question philosophers' reliance on intuition and on reflection "from the armchair." In this seminar, we will examine such issues as: the varieties of naturalism, the relation between naturalism and experimental philosophy, whether a plausible version of naturalism requires radically revising "traditional" philosophical methodology, the bearing of experimental philosophy on conceptual analysis, and whether or not experimental philosophy is methodologically sound and has the implications some of its proponents claim it does. We will consider these issues as they arise in metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.
This course provides an overview of some important issues in metaphysics and epistemology, although more emphasis will be placed on metaphysics. One goal of the course is to examine critiques of metaphysics in general and of specific metaphysical claims (e.g. the existence of a mind-independent world, the existence of objective causal relations). We will look at the motivations behind such critiques, some of their consequences, and a variety of responses to them. This will help to bring out the relation between metaphysical and epistemological issues, since many philosophers are suspicious of certain metaphysical claims for broadly epistemological reasons.
We will begin by touching on some very general questions about the nature of metaphysics itself: Is it a meaningful enterprise? What methodology should metaphysicians follow? What is it to be committed to the existence of certain entities? We will then turn to two distinct but related debates. The first concerns the nature of properties; are there abstract, general entities—universals—in addition to concrete particulars? The second centers on the question of whether there is a mind-independent world, and if so, how could we have knowledge of it.
The middle portion of the course will be a survey of a number of core topics in metaphysics and epistemology: modality (claims about what is necessary and what is possible), counterfactuals, causation, and explanation.
Finally, we will use the resources from our earlier discussions to consider debates about explanation and reduction in the special sciences. Can biological and psychological explanations be reduced to explanations given in terms of chemistry or physics? Or are explanations in biology and psychology “autonomous” in some sense, perhaps providing a different kind of information than physical explanations do?
This course provides an introduction to the principles of valid reasoning. Topics include: standard propositional logic and predicate logic; translating between English and a formal language; constructing proofs to show that an argument is deductively valid; constructing models to show that an argument is not deductively valid.
In this course, we will investigate the prospects for physicalism (also called “materialism”) about the mind. Specifically, we will consider two powerful lines of argument against the dominant view of the relation between mental and physical states, properties, and events: so-called “non-reductive physicalism,” which holds that mental states and properties are determined by (supervenient on, realized by), but not identical to, certain physical states and properties.
The first line of argument is that non-reductive physicalist theories cannot make room for mental-physical (or even mental-mental) causation. (This has come to be called the “causal exclusion problem” in the literature.) Given some plausible assumptions about the nature of causation in the physical domain, any apparent causal relations between mental events and other events seem to be “screened off” or “excluded” by causal relations that involve only physical events. The physical properties that underlie mental properties seem to be doing “all the causal work.” As we will see, the fact that mental causation is seen to be a problem for non-reductive physicalist views is surprising, since mental causation (or mind/body interaction) was thought to be a special problem for dualist theories and is one of the difficulties that that physicalist theories were designed to solve.
The second line of argument is not so surprising, given that it involves a set of closely related problems that are allegedly faced by any kind of physicalist view (not just non-reductive ones). These problems all concern how to fit consciousness into a physicalist theory of the world. After distinguishing several different kinds of consciousness (or conscious experience), we will focus on phenomenal or qualitative consciousness (e.g., what it’s like to taste orange juice or to see a vivid sunset) and the problems and prospects for fitting it into a physicalist view of mind. We will consider three arguments that qualitative consciousness “floats free” of the physical: Frank Jackson’s “knowledge argument,” the possibility of zombies (organisms physically identical to humans that lack conscious experience), and the alleged “explanatory gap” between physical facts and facts about consciousness.
After some general background on different theories of mind, we will consider various versions of these two lines of argument and some of the responses that physicalists have offered.