Read This First!

Philosophy is hard to read. You cannot read a piece of philosophy and expect to passively absorb its content. You need to learn how to fight with the text: generate objections, questions, puzzles and push those objections onto the text and see if it pushes back.

You can’t do this by just reading piece once all the way through. So break the process down into steps:

Step 1: First Read Through. Read the piece all the way through, and try to get a general sense of what the author is doing. If you get lost, don’t stop: just try to push through.

Step 2: Question. Attempt to answer the following questions:

1. What is the author’s thesis? What is she trying to argue for?
   Do you agree with it? If not, why not? If so, why?

2. What are her arguments? Where are they in the text?
   Do you find her arguments convincing? If not, why not? If so, why?

3. How does this relate to what you’ve come across in the other readings?
   Is she agreeing with something someone else said? Disagreeing? What are the points of agreement and disagreement?

Most likely, you won’t be able to answer all these questions, or your answers will be a bit vague and uncertain.

Step 3: Reread. Read the piece again. This time, read it with all those questions, and your answers, in mind. If you weren’t sure what her thesis was, keep an eye out for clues. And keep an eye out for the passages that contain the arguments. If you found yourself disagreeing with the author, or found her arguments unconvincing, look for passages that address your objections or concerns: push your worries on the text and see if it pushes back.

Repeat. Keeping trying to answer the questions. Keep rereading. A good philosophy article will reveal more to you every time you read it. As you get familiar with its structure and content, you will be able to focus in on the more important parts. Try to reconstruct the key arguments in premise-conclusion form. Try to come up with counterexamples to key premises or assumptions that the author is making. Look for arguments in this paper that interact with arguments from other papers you’ve read, and try to make sense of how the arguments are related.

Schedule

This schedule may change, depending what your interests are and how classroom discussions go.

Readings are assigned by the week. You should come to class each Monday having read the readings for that week. You should plan to reread the readings after class discussion.

OHS abbreviates Oxford Handbook of the Self.

Week 1 (8/17-19): Descartes and Hume

• Barresi and Martin, “Western Theories of Self”, in OHS.
• Descartes, Meditations I, II, and VI

• Hume, Selection from A Treatise of Human Nature

• Handouts: Day 1, Day 2

Week 2 (8/24-26): The Mind-Body Problem

• Smullyan, “An Unfortunate Dualist”
• Ryle, “Descartes’s Myth”
• Smart, “Sensations and Brain Processes”

• Anderson, “Introduction to Functionalism”

• Handouts: Day 3, Day 4

Week 3 (8/31-9/2): The Hard Problem of Consciousness

• Blackmore Consciouness: A Very Short Introduction, chapter 1
• Nagel, “What is it Like to Be a Bat?”
• Chalmers, “The Puzzle of Conscious Experience”
• Levels Paper, First Attempt Due, Monday 8/31

Week 4 (9/9): Other Minds

• Russell, “Analogy”
• Ayer, “One’s Knowledge of Other Minds”

• Optional: Malcolm, “Knowledge of Other Minds”

• Monday, 9/7: Labor Day, no class

Week 5 (9/14-16): Machines

• Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence
• Bradley, “Turing Test and Machine Intelligence
• Searle, “Can Computers Think?”
• Anderson, “Searle and the Chinese Room
• Star Trek episode, “Measure of a Man”
• Anderson, Mind Project Module, “What is a person?”

Week 6 (9/21-23): Identity Over Time

• Sider, “Personal Identity”
• Locke, Selection from “Essay Concerning Human Understanding”
• Buridan, “Questions on Aristotle’s Physics, Book I, Question 10
• Butler, “Of Personal Identity”

• Parfit, “Personal Identity”

• Levels Paper, Second Attempt Due, Monday 9/21

Week 7 (9/28-30): Identity Over Time

• Williams, TBA
• Lewis, “Survival and Identity” and “Postscripts”

• Olson, “Was I ever a fetus?”

• Midterm, Wednesday 9/30

Week 8 (10/5-7): The Narrative Conception of Self

• Schechtman, “The Narrative Self” in OHS.
• Guignon, “Story-Shaped Selves”

Week 9 (10/12-14): No Self?

• Blackmore Consciouness: A Very Short Introduction, ch 5
• Nagel, “Brain Bisection and the Unity of Consciousness”
• Metzinger, “The No-Self Alternative” in OHS.
• Siderits, “Buddhist Non-Self”, in OHS.

• Dan Zahavi, “Unity of Consciousness and the Problem of the Self”, in OHS

• Levels Paper, Third Attempt Due, Monday 10/12

Week 10 (10/19-21): Self-Synthesis?

• Perry, “On Knowing One’s Self”, in OHS.
• Nozick, Selections from Philosophical Explanations. PE 71-73; 78-79; 87-90

Week 11 (10/26-28): Self as Free Agent

• Kane, A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will, Chapters 1-5

Week 12 (11/2-4): Free Agency and the Deep Self View

• Kane, Chapters 8 and 9
• Frankfurt, “Freedom of Will and the Concept of a Person”
• Watson, “Free Agency”

• Wolf, “Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility”

• Levels Paper, Fourth Attempt Due, Monday 11/2

Week 13 (11/9-11): Self as Social Construction?

• Gergen, “The Social Construction of the Self”, in OHS.
• Haslanger, “Gender and Race: (What) are they? (What) do we want them to be?”
• Mills, “But What Are You, Really?”
• Witt, “What is Gender Essentialism?”

Week 14 (11/16-18): Self-Fulfillment

• Guignon, “The Culture of Authenticity”
• Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism”
• Parfit, “The Unimportance of Identity”, in OHS

Week 15

• Fall Break

Week 16 (11/30-12/2): Wrapping Up and Review

• No New Reading
• Levels Paper, Fifth Attempt Due, Friday 12/2

Finals Week

• The Final Exam will be during Finals Week, date and time TBA