General Information

Instructor: Uriah Kriegel
TAs: Michael Bruno, Ginger Clausen, Martin Stone Davis, Marc Johansen
Place: Social Sciences 100
Time: M, W 12-12:50, plus section
Office hours: W 3-6pm (Social Sciences 318d)
Email hours: M 9-12, W 3-6, F 9-12

Topics

Four topics will be covered in the course:  knowledge, mind, free will, and self.  First, do we know anything and what’s knowledge anyway? For example, do we know – and if so how – that there is a real world out there and we’re not just living in the matrix? Secondly, how is our mind related to our body, in particular the brain? For example, are we just slabs of meat that somehow move around and produce sounds as though they have a soul or is there really something more to us? Thirdly, we are often free to do what we want, but are we free to want what we want? For example, I am free to get ice cream when I feel like it, but is it really up to me when I feel like having an ice cream? Finally, what’s the deal with the self? For example, are you the same person you were in kindergarten or are you basically a separate person, and what counts as being the same person anyway?  

Requirements

There will be four relatively short examinations during the course, all four being combinations true/false questions and short essays. Each will be worth 25% of the grades, but  improvement trends will be taken into account in determining the final grade.

Reading Sources

1.    Mark Timmons and David Shoemaker, Knowledge, Nature, and Norms (KNN)
2.    Online sources
 
Schedule of Lectures

1.    Organizational – 8/25
A. Knowledge
2.      The problem of skepticism (KNN 28-29) – 8/27
3.      Realism and skepticism (KNN 30-31) – 9/3
4.      Realism without certainty (Russell) – 9/8
5.      The nature of knowledge (Plato) – 9/10
6.      Truth (Russell) – 9/15
7.      Justification (KNN 32) – 9/17
8.      First exam – 9/22
B. Mind
9.      The mind-body problem (KNN 7) – 9/24
10.    Dualism (KNN 8) – 9/29
11.    Idealism (Berkeley Sc. 1-24) – 10/1
12.    Emergentism (Huxley) – 10/6
13.    Materialism (Smart, from a campus computer) – 10/8
14.    Problems for materialism (KNN 12) – 10/13
15.    Animal Minds (Allen, sections 4-5) – 10/15
16.    The Mind-Body Problem Revisited – 10/20
17.    Second exam – 10/22
C. Free Will
18.    The Problem of Free Will (KNN 13) – 10/27
19.    Determinism (KNN 14) – 10/29
20.    Libertarianism (KNN 15) – 11/3
21.    Compatibilism (KNN 16) – 11/5
22.    The Problem Revisited (KNN 17) – 11/10
23.    Third exam – 11/12
D. The Self
24.    The problem of personal identity (KNN 1) – 11/17
25.    Self as memory (KNN 4) – 11/19
26.    Self as body (KNN 5) – 11/24
27.    Self as soul (KNN 2-3) – 11/26
28.    Self as consciousness (Dainton, from a campus computer) – 12/1
29.    The problem revisited (KNN 6) – 12/3
30.    Fourth exam – 12/8
31.    Conclusions – 12/10