| Course Number | Phil 89.001 (fall 2022) |
| Title | First Year Seminar Special Topics: Personal Identity |
| Credit Hours | 3 credits |
| Course Descriptions | See below |
| Prerequisites | None |
| Target Audience | First-year students with no prior experience with philosophical texts or reasoning |
| Instructor | Professor Jim Pryor (he/him), email jimpryor@unc.edu |
| Teaching Assistants | None |
| Course Website | http://phil89.jimpryor.net |
| Class Times and Location | Tue Thu 12:30–1:45 pm in Caldwell 103 |
| Instructor’s Office Hours | Tue Thu 2–3 pm in Caldwell 108A |
| Course Texts | 2 required textbooks and additional readings provided by web links |
| Course Format | Mix of structured presentation and group discussion, with presentation and collaboration components |
UNC students enrolled in the course can access the Sakai webpages for this course at https://sakai.unc.edu/portal/site/phil89-f22.
Those pages include the Zoom links for any course meetings you need to attend remotely, and for Professor Pryor’s office hours. These can also be retrieved from this restricted page.
Most of the information for the course will be published here, outside of the Sakai system, and can also be viewed by people not enrolled in the course.
This front web page won’t be updated frequently. Regular announcements, readings, and presentation notes will be posted at this page instead.
This is general information. A description of how this specific instance of the course will be run follows.
PHIL 89. First Year Seminar: Special Topics. 3 Credits. Special Topics Course. Content will vary each semester. Grading status: Letter grade.
You are different now from how you were ten years ago; but still you are one and the same person, who underwent those changes. (You weren’t replaced by an imposter.) What makes you the particular person you are, and the same person as the youth you used to be? What kind of thing is a person, that it can maintain its identity even through such changes? Are we identical to our life stories? Is the idea of a persisting self just an illusion? What would it take for a person to stop existing? Do you have an immortal soul that could survive the death of your human body? Or are you identical to your body? Might it be possible to survive the death of your body by having your brain, or the information in your brain, transplanted into a new body? or into a computer network? Might amnesia or dementia amount to one person’s ceasing and being replaced by another? Would teleportation like they use in Star Trek be a fast means for you to travel — or would that be another way for you to cease to exist and be replaced by a perfect copy? Why do we take special interest in our own continued existence as persons, moreso than the continued existence of people similar to us, or who will push forward our projects? Should we?
This course does not presuppose any prior background or coursework in philosophy.
It aims to introduce you to a range of philosophical writing about the nature of persons and the self, and give you experience analyzing and discussing arguments and writing philosophical papers.
Our class meetings will be a mix of structured presentation and intense group discussion, in which I’ll be both a guide and participant. We will also consult closely about your writing, which will be submitted in several stages.
In addition to the group discussions, you’ll also be learning how to give each other constructive feedback on your writing-in-progress.
You’ll be learning how to engage respectfully and charitably with the arguments of others: both your peers and the historical and contemporary philosophers we study. This includes identifying what the arguments and their underlying assumptions are; learning how to clearly explain an argument; formulating counter-examples and other reasonable objections; and recognizing how a view can best be defended (whether you endorse it or not).
You’ll also be learning how to develop your own independent arguments, objections, proposals, and responses.
All our philosophy courses aim at the acquisition and nurturing of basic philosophic skills. One of the main goals of our philosophy curriculum is to instill and enable the development of skills that are distinct to philosophy, but which are foundational to all forms of knowledge.
These basic philosophical skills involve being able to:
The issues we’ll be studying are primarily in the philosophical subfield of metaphysics (though we’ll also be engaging with philosophy of mind, ethics, and epistemology). Introductions to metaphysics and epistemology like this course aim at the following learning outcomes:
As part of the First Year Seminars Program, this course will address these Student Learning Outcomes:
This course satisfies the Ethical and Civic Values Focus Capacity (FC-Values). These courses help develop your capacity to think carefully and critically about how to make and justify private and public decisions, and address questions like these:
A recurring theme in our course will be to what extent we can expect harmony between public versus private or first-personal justifications for judgments about identity, and further judgments and decisions based on them. In many cases those two kinds of justification will seem to pull in different directions, and we’ll have to figure out how to reconcile them.
As an FC-Values course, we will aim at the following learning outcomes:
The course is offered by Professor Jim Pryor (he/him).
Professor Pryor’s office is Caldwell 108A. He can best be reached by email, at jimpryor@unc.edu.
Professor Pryor’s office hours are on Tue and Thu from 2-3. (If you have a quick question, you can also ask just after class.) If you’re unable to meet in person, we can also arrange to meet by Zoom. The Zoom link for office hours can be found on this restricted page.
Feel free to drop into office hours to discuss anything you like about our course. I’m happy to talk about paper ideas, continue discussion, and so on. If you do come to my office and I’m already speaking with someone, make sure that we know that you’re waiting for us to finish.
These will be available in the bookstore. You can also buy or rent them online.
Additional readings will be provided by web links. Some of these are in a restricted section of the course website. The username and password for these will be emailed to you, and also announced in class.
In addition to philosophy articles and textbooks/dialogues, we’ll also read some science fiction stories and watch two movies that deal with issues that we’re examining in the course. We’ll discuss all these in class.
It is essential that you attend the class meetings regularly. Material not in the readings will often be presented there, and useful background and framing for some of the readings will also be provided. The University’s Policy on Class Attendance can be found here. In brief, they authorize absences only for some University activities, religious observances, disabilities, significant health conditions including pregnancy, and personal or family emergencies. If these include your situation, then consult the link about how to get your absence approved. (The University Approved Absence Office (UAAO) also has useful information.) If you need to miss class meetings for other kinds of reasons (like a job interview or to attend your mother’s wedding), ask me about it well in advance. In any case, you will be responsible for catching up with missed course content; and permission to miss a class doesn’t excuse you from deadlines for work due before or after the class.
If you develop Covid symptoms, testing is available at Campus Health. At-home tests are also available from several free or insurance-based sources. If you get a positive result from a test not administered by Campus Health, you should also report it to them. In all cases, you should isolate according to recommendations. The UAAO process has been streamlined for students who test positive and must isolate, since that inhibits attendance and participation in your courses. Submit a request using this form (tests administered by Campus Health generate the form automatically).
If you need to stay home during any of our class meetings, try to attend the meeting by Zoom instead.
Since March, masks are optional in most campus buildings, but their use is still encouraged.
See the Policies section below about using laptops or other devices in class.
When you join our class meetings, you are expected to have read any material assigned for that day, and to be ready to discuss it and/or ask questions about it.
It is essential that you ask questions when things in the readings or class presentations are unclear, and be ready to participate when we have class discussions. I’ll expect you to actively engage with each other in class, and encourage you to do it outside of class too. Talking about philosophy is one of the best ways of learning how to do it. Your overall participation will contribute substantially to your grade for the course. See this page on participation for more details. If you don’t plan to participate earnestly, you should not take this course.
Your participation grade will reflect your regular contributions to our class discussion, and also other aspects of how you’re engaging with the course: including some brief writing exercises (more on these below), a collaboration component involving you giving each other feedback on a paper draft (more on this below too), and a presentation component involving several of you being designated to summarize the readings for a class meeting and start discussion. You should expect to have that role about four times during the semester. (For most meetings, three or four of you will share this role, so this offers more opportunities for collaboration.)
There will be reading assignments for most class meetings. These readings are often pretty short, but they all require close study. You should read them carefully before we discuss them in class (even when you’re not a designated discussion-starter), and you’ll need to read them more than once. For most of the readings, you won’t understand the material sufficiently with just a single reading. A good strategy would be to read the assignment once before we discuss it, and then go back and read it again after we’ve discussed it. If you don’t plan to do this, you should not take this course.
Here is a detailed explanation of how you’ll be expected to read philosophy papers.
You will have to submit three brief writing exercises (about a half-page each) for the course, due on Aug 23, Sept 20, and Sept 27 Sept 29. These will be graded one of: High quality/Satisfactory/Low quality. You will submit a more substantial, 3-5 page paper on Oct 13. This will receive a normal letter grade and feedback. You will then have to rewrite and resubmit that paper, improving it in light of that feedback. The rewrites will be due on Nov 3, and will also be graded. You will also write a new 3-5 page paper, again in several stages but with a different process. You will share drafts of these papers with other students in the class by Nov 17, and give each other feedback on your drafts by Nov 22. (The drafts won’t be graded.) Final versions of these papers will be due on the last day of class Nov 29 when our final exam period is scheduled, Fri Dec 2 at noon. (In total, this will all exceed the University requirement of ten pages of writing.)
I will arrange that grading of your work is done without me knowing whose work is whose.
Here is a detailed explanation of how you’ll be expected to write philosophy papers. That page includes a section “How you’ll be graded”; here is more information on how I understand different grades for written work.
There is no final exam for this seminar. The process of collaborating to give each other constructive feedback on your final papers, and revising the papers in light of that feedback, will take over its pedagogical function. Class will still meet during the scheduled exam period for the class (Fri Dec 2 at noon), for a review of the semester, and for further discussion of ideas that you had while writing your papers.
See below about rescheduling paper deadlines.
The University Honor Code applies to all course assignments and petitions for absences or rescheduling. In brief, this means students are expected to refrain from “lying, cheating, or stealing” in the academic context. For more information or to clarify which actions violate the honor code, consult with your instructors, honor.unc.edu, and/or The Instrument of Student Judicial Governance.
What constitutes “lying, cheating, or stealing” depends on the academic activity.
In this course, you’re allowed (indeed encouraged! and at one point required) to get feedback from your peers on your work before submitting it, and to use their ideas as starting points. But what you submit must represent your own developed thoughts and expression, and you must give appropriate credit for ways that others influenced the product.
Papers submitted for this and another course (whether taken the same semester or not) must be substantially different.
Your grades for the different components of the course will be weighted as follows:
20% for participation and brief writing exercises 20% first version of substantial paper 1 25% revised version of paper 1 35% substantial paper 2
Grade Appeals: If you feel you have been given an incorrect grade for any part of the course, we can review together how I applied the announced standards. If this doesn’t resolve the issue, you have the right to discuss with our department’s Director of Undergraduate Studies (currently Professor Markus Kohl), or to appeal through a formal University process. You’ll be expected to make a case that the grade reflects an arithmetic/clerical error, arbitrariness, discrimination, harassment, or personal malice. To learn more, consult the Academic Advising Program website, or this summary of University policies.
Most requests that I and other professors hear for changing grades are based on how good/bad it would be for a student to get a given grade; but it would be unfair and inappropriate for justifications like that to succeed.
This schedule lists due dates for assignments and the rough order of our topics. See this other page for course announcements, specific readings, presentation notes, and any minor tweaks to the schedule. Check that page frequently.
If you know in advance you’ll have good reason for being unable to submit a paper for a deadline:
Some requests will be University-Approved Absences. See that link (or the UAAO) for instructions about how to get these approved and communicated to me.
For Covid-related delays, see the links above discussing absences.
If your reasons for missing a deadline don’t qualify as University-Approved, but they are reasonable and you discuss them with me well in advance of the deadline (at least a week before), we may be able to make other arrangements for the deadline on our own.
What if it turns out that you can’t turn your work in, but now it’s only days or hours before (or even after 😮) the deadline?
The Office of the Dean of Students (ODOS) has staff who work with students who are dealing with medical and/or personal issues that are interfering with their courses. If you contact ODOS, they will be able to work with you to verify the cause of the disruption, connect you with campus services that may help, and notify me and other professors about the issue. They sometimes make recommendations about what would be reasonable accommodations for your situation, which I will take seriously. If you’re going to miss a deadline, or you’ve already missed it, then get in touch with them as soon as possible (in any case within five days) to tell them about your situation. I’ll expect any last-minute or after-the-fact requests for extensions or other academic accommodations to come through the ODOS.
What if you missed the deadline and don’t have an extension, or you were granted an extension but you missed that too? Then I’ll permit you to turn the paper in up to 72 hours late, for a 10% grade penalty. (For example, this takes what would have been a B- to a C-.) This permission can only be used once during the semester.
What if your paper is more than 72 hours late, or you already used up your permission to turn a paper in late earlier in the semester? In that case, it’s still best for you to complete the late paper and turn it in. I will still grade it and give you feedback on it, and if the work would have earned at least a C had it been turned in on time, then I’ll give you a grade of 50% for the assignment. That’s still an F, but as a “high F” it’s better than getting the 0% you would otherwise have gotten. Also you’ll still get the pedagogical benefits the assignment was supposed to serve in the first place.
I won’t prohibit the use of laptops or tablets for taking notes, though I strongly discourage this. I’ll post summaries of the main outlines of my in-class presentations, so you won’t need to write everything down during our meetings. You should be reviewing those presentation notes outside of class anyway. An effective use of your time in the classroom is to focus on following the discussion, and actively raising questions when you don’t. If you must have a device open in class, don’t browse the web, or read/send texts or other social media during our meetings. It’s pretty clear to everyone when you are doing this, and it’s rude and distracting to your instructors and your classmates.
You may not record our class meetings in any format without prior express authorization from me and the department. To request the use of assistive technology as an accommodation, contact the ARS (see below). For others, permission to record will only be granted in extraordinary circumstances. Students are never permitted to copy or distribute recordings of the class, and must delete any they possess when the course concludes.
UNC-Chapel Hill facilitates the implementation of reasonable accommodations, including resources and services, for students with disabilities, including mental health disorders, chronic medical conditions, temporary disabilities, or pregnancy complications resulting in barriers to fully accessing University courses, programs and activities. Accommodations are determined through the Office of Accessibility Resources and Service (ARS) for individuals with documented qualifying disabilities in accordance with applicable state and federal laws. See their website ars.unc.edu for information, or email ars@unc.edu.
I value the perspectives of individuals from all backgrounds reflecting the diversity of our students. I broadly define diversity to include race, gender identity, national origin, ethnicity, religion, social class, age, sexual orientation, political background, and physical and learning ability. I strive to make my classroom an inclusive space for all students. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to improve. I appreciate suggestions.
Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) is strongly committed to addressing the mental health needs of a diverse student body through timely access to consultation and connection to clinically appropriate services, whether for short- or long-term needs. Go to their website caps.unc.edu or visit their facilities on the third floor of the Campus Health Service building for a walk-in evaluation to learn more. Students may also call CAPS anytime at 919-966-3658 for immediate support.
In this course, as in other University programs and activities, you should expect an environment free of discrimination, harassment, and other misconduct. If this expectation isn’t respected, here are links for more information about University policies, how to obtain support, and file grievances:
The University’s Policy Statement on Non-discrimination says:
The University is committed to providing an inclusive and welcoming environment and to ensuring that educational and employment decisions are based on individuals’ abilities and qualifications. Consistent with these principles and applicable laws, it is therefore the University’s policy not to discriminate on the basis of age, color, disability, gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information, national origin, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation or veteran status as consistent with the University’s Policy on Prohibited Discrimination, Harassment and Related Misconduct. No person, on the basis of protected status, shall be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to unlawful discrimination, harassment, or retaliation under any University program or activity, including with respect to employment terms and conditions. Such a policy ensures that only relevant factors are considered and that equitable and consistent standards of conduct and performance are applied.
Prohibited Discrimination, Harassment and Related Misconduct
Students who are impacted by sexual discrimination, harassment, dating or relationship violence, sexual violence, sexual exploitation, or stalking are encouraged to seek resources on campus or in the community. Reports can be made online to the Equal Opportunity and Compliance Office (EOC) using this form. Please contact the University’s Title IX Coordinator (Elizabeth Hall, interim-titleixcoordinator@unc.edu), Report and Response Coordinators in the EOC (reportandresponse@unc.edu), Counseling and Psychological Services (confidential, link above), or the Gender Violence Services Coordinators (confidential, gvsc@unc.edu) to discuss your specific needs. Additional resources are available at safe.unc.edu.
If you’re experiencing other forms of harassment or discrimination contrary to University policies, you can also seek assistance through the Report and Response Coordinators in the EOC (reportandresponse@unc.edu), or file a report using the EOC form.
For free feedback on any course writing projects, check out UNC’s Writing Center. Their coaches can assist with any writing project, including multimedia projects and application essays, at any stage of the writing process. You don’t even need a draft to come visit. To schedule a 45-minute appointment, review quick tips, or request written feedback online, visit writingcenter.unc.edu.
Want to get the most out of this course or others this semester? Visit UNC’s Learning Center at learningcenter.unc.edu to make an appointment or register for an event. Their free, popular programs will help you optimize your academic performance. Try academic coaching, peer tutoring, STEM support, ADHD/LD services, workshops and study camps, or review tips and tools available on the website.
By attending UNC-Chapel Hill, you agree to abide by the University’s Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) for IT systems and services. The AUP sets the expectation that you will use the University’s technology resources responsibly, consistent with the University’s mission. In the context of a course, it’s quite likely you will participate in online activities that could include personal information about you or your peers, and the AUP addresses your obligations to protect the privacy of class participants. In addition, the AUP addresses matters of others’ intellectual property, including copyright. These are only a couple of typical examples, so you should consult the full Information Technology Acceptable Use Policy, which covers topics related to using digital resources, such as privacy, confidentiality, and intellectual property. Additionally, consult the Safe Computing at UNC website for information about the data security policies, updates, and tips on keeping your identity, information, and devices safe.
I reserve the right to make changes to the syllabus, including paper due dates. These changes will be announced as early as possible so that students can adjust their schedules.
I welcome your input about the course at any time. You are welcome to approach me directly. I’ll also provide opportunities for anonymous evaluation and feedback during the term.