Phil 101: Announcements, Readings, and Lecture Notes

The front webpage for the course is at phil101.jimpryor.net.

Here are Zoom links for the course meetings and for Professor Pryor’s office hours.

The Canvas webpages for this course will be linked here when it’s published.

Prof Pryor’s office hours are on Mondays starting at 11 am, and Wednesdays starting at 11 am. His email is jimpryor@unc.edu.

Deadlines

Here are some guidelines about philosophical writing. See the front webpage for information about extensions and how you’ll be graded.

Posts

These 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 were emailed to you, and will also be announced at the start of class.

Here is an index of all the course handouts, webnotes and readings we’ve covered so far (together with some of the upcoming ones).

Sat Dec 2

I added some additional (short) reading for next week to the entry for Thursday Nov 30 (see below).

For a short but good overview of the problem of moral luck, that we discussed last Monday, see this video by Victor Kumar (6 min).

Here are two longer videos that go over ground we’ve talked about in the past weeks:

Finally, here is another episode of that program that addresses some of the issues about the relation between free will and physics that get discussed in the readings assigned for this week:

(I’ll add some notes later summarizing the main topics to watch for in each of these videos.)

Instead of trying to continue with Zoom lectures this week, I propose that you instead “watch” those four videos (the longer ones are audio-only), to reinforce and expand on our readings and discussions so far.

I will aim to be available by Zoom at my office hours link during our class times on Monday and Wednesday. I’ll be happy to discuss with any (or all) of you questions you have about these issues, or ideas that you’re developing for your papers.

Remember that drafts of your papers should be submitted to Canvas by the end of the day on Wednesday; the system will then assign you papers from three of your peers, and you should email them back feedback (cc:ing me) by Friday. Some of you have already discussed with me challenges to having a fully developed draft available by Wednesday. I’m not grading or even reviewing the drafts that you share with each other. If a complete draft isn’t possible, you should still develop your paper plans as much as you can by then, so that your peers can still be in a position to give you maximally useful feedback.

Here are some optional videos if you want to dig into any of these issues further:

Thu Nov 30

Here are notes on Libertarianism.

The reading already assigned for next Monday is Lemos Chapter 4. updated Here are some additional short readings:

I’m also reviewing a number of videos presenting and discussing the theories and argumnets we’ve been discussing these past weeks about free will. I will post the best and most useful of these here later.

Mon Nov 20

Here are the second part of our lecture notes for Compatibilism. (The first part of the notes are linked in the entry below.)

Here are the prompts for your final papers.

Sat Nov 18

I’ll post a summary of our discussion so far of Compatibilism in the next couple of days. updated Here are the notes on Compatibilism.

Here are our readings for Monday, and for the sessions after that:

Fortune willing, I’m planning for us to meet in person this coming Monday, but for the four meetings after that, and our meeting during finals period (on Thu Dec 14 at 4 pm), I think we’ll probably have to meet by Zoom. Assume that’s what we’re doing unless you hear otherwise. I’ll aim for each of the Zoom sessions to be “live” (synchronous), but there’s a fair chance that some of them will end up needing to be recorded, and then you can view them as best suits your schedule.

Mon Nov 13

Here are notes about the Consequence Argument for Incompatibilism.

Read for Wednesday: all of Lemos Chapter 2.

For submission instructions for the rewrites (due tomorrow night), see the entry below for Wed Nov 8.

Wed Nov 8

I’ve gotten a number of requests for extensions for the rewrite, which I’ve been granting on a one-by-one basis. But I’m deciding now to give everyone until the end of the day (11:59 pm) on Tuesday Nov 14 to turn the revisions in. As we discussed in class, you should turn in both the “submission” version of your revision, that you want me to evaluate — these don’t need to be anonymized, but should be PDFs. And also turn in a work log describing how you went about doing the revision. In most cases, you don’t need to submit any “wip” documents. If you used AI tools for additional help in the rewriting process, in that case you should also submit “wip” documents showing your prompts and the AI replies.

For Monday, read this chapter from van Inwagen. The parts in the pale blue box on pp. 279 – top of p. 281 you can skip for now. We’ll read these parts later when we talk in class about the “agent-causation theories” that van Inwagen is discussing here.

Also read pp. 21 – middle of p. 25 in the Lemos textbook. The “Consequence Argument” that they discuss there is the same argument that van Inwagen presents from bottom p. 273 – p. 276 in his chapter, using the concept of an “untouchable fact” and “The Principle” about one untouchable fact implying another one.

The part of the van Inwagen reading from p. 277 – top of p. 279, where he argues that the lack of determinism seems to take away free will too, corresponds to what the Prof Goldfarb character in Lemos’ First Act called “the problem of luck” (p. 10–12).

updated Here are initial lecture notes about free will and determinism.

new For Monday, bring the Lemos text to class, also whatever version (electronic or paper) you’re using of the other free will readings we’ve looked at.

Mon Nov 6

Here is today’s recorded lecture. The passcode is “r##W0UUe”.

Let me know if you have any problems viewing, and I’ll address as soon as I’m able to. (But it may take until tonight.) I think you’ll need to be logged into Zoom using your UNC credentials.

Wed Nov 1

Here is today’s handout with discussion questions about Schwitzgebel and Garza.

Mon Oct 30

Here is the handout with today’s discussion questions.

Here is our reading for the next few classes:

Wed Oct 25

updated Here are notes on our discussion of Searle.

If you want to read more about it, here is some optional advanced discussion.

Sometime in the next few days I’ll also post links to some videos about Searle’s argument, though as I warned in class, many misrepresent the details of what Searle and his opponents are each committed to. Often, videos describe Searle as though he were just arguing that passing the Turing Test doesn’t guarantee that something is intelligent. (Most contemporary philosophers already agree with that; Searle was trying to demonstrate something more specific and controversial.)

Our reading for next Monday is:

We’re at an awkward point in the class. I was prepared to go through the discussion of Searle more slowly, but today’s discussion led us directly to the punchline, so I followed the discussion’s lead. I think the core of you who were tuned in to today’s discussion do now understand the main shape of Searle’s argument and (what seems to me to be) the most promising way to resist it. On the other hand, a number of people were missing today, and more were present but not really tuned in. I don’t think it will be effective or appropriate for me to just repeat the walkthrough. Those of you who haven’t tracked where we’ve gotten to, should try to catch up via the webnotes that I’ll post summarizing what we talked through today. I think the best way forward is for us to read the dialogue/short story texts I assigned for Monday, and we’ll have class discussions of them, starting with small groups as we’ve done before. I will expect everyone to be caught up with the reading and ready to discuss it on Monday. It’s OK if you continue to find some parts of the argument confusing, and need to talk them through to understand them better. It won’t be OK if you’re not ready to discuss just because you haven’t put the work in yet.

Mon Oct 23

Here are the pages with sample papers with feedback. The paper we discussed today in class is Paper 1. You can see written-up versions of the feedback that we instructors, and some past classes, would give to the (imaginary) author of that paper. You can also see a revised version of the paper that responds to that feedback (especially recommended). The revised version is still not perfect, but much better in the respects we criticized. Note that in my browser, I usually have to “reload” the page to get it display properly. Something changed in browsers to make it clumsier than it used to be.

There are also two more sample papers responding to the same prompt.

Our readings for Wednesday were already listed below, but here they are again: read about Searle’s Chinese Room. Also get started on this dialogue-form discussion about Einstein’s Brain — though we may not discuss it until the next Monday.

Fri Oct 20

Thanks for submitting your papers. Some of you had extensions, but I received 18 papers from the rest of you. 11 of these followed all the instructions for submitting their work (at least with respect to the “submission” documents, I haven’t yet gone through the logs or wip documents). 7 unfortunately did not manage to do so. I regret not being able to give you all full credit for this component of the assignment, but it wouldn’t be fair to the other students, and to me, who’s had to spend more than an hour this morning sorting everything out, to give full credit also to the papers that didn’t manage to follow all the instructions. Hopefully with the next assignment you’ll all do better.

Examples of instructions these papers didn’t follow (many of them messed up in several ways):

Now that I’ve sorted these issues out, I look forward to diving into your papers and seeing what you have to say.

Wed Oct 18

Here are notes on the Turing Test and related issues we’ve been discussing.

Here is a summary of the dialogue-form discussion of the Turing Test.

Remember your papers are due by tomorrow night. There is no new reading for Monday. For next Wednesday, read about Searle’s Chinese Room. Also get started on this dialogue-form discussion about Einstein’s Brain — though we may not discuss it until the following Monday.

My understanding is that we can move back to our original classroom starting on Monday. So let’s do that unless you hear otherwise from me.

Mon Oct 16

For Wednesday, re-read the Turing article, with a special eye to the question “Is he saying that we should think passing the Turing Test logically suffices for/guarantees that the creature has thoughts/intelligence/and so on? Or just that it makes it likely/makes it reasonable to count them as having thoughts/being intelligent?” Also to his discussion of the objections, and the final discussion of learning (which is connected to his discussion of Lady Lovelace’s objection about originality).

Also read this dialogue-form discussion of the Turing Test.

Those are the required readings. If you want to dig further into the Turing Test:

Thu Oct 12

I sometimes bookmark YouTube videos that look like they might be relevant to this course. You may find some of them useful or interesting. I’ll link to a few playlists now, and perhaps some more later. Note that I’ve only previewed some of these videos, and I can’t vouch for any of them. Mostly I’m just adding them to the playlists based on their titles. If you come across any that you think are dumber or less helpful than average, please let me know. Also if some of them are especially good, or you come across some other good videos on these topics that I haven’t included, please also let me know.

Wed Oct 11

Here is today’s handout on computing history, for reference/interest. You’re not expected to remember details. The goals of going through the timeline were:

  1. to see many times when “computers” were built to run programs, without yet relying on the kinds of electronic hardware (or any electronics at all) we use now

    Some pictures, videos, and links of mechanical computers: updated

  2. to get some context for talk about “Turing Machines” and the “Turing Test”

  3. to get some context for talk about simple early chatbots like ELIZA, which we’ll talk more about later. Here are some links to online versions of ELIZA, if you want to experiment

Our readings for next week were linked already below. Those of you who were on-call today, but didn’t get opportunities to contribute, I encourage to next week bring us back to points raised in today’s readings (Gennaro and Leiber) that come up over the next week. The next group of you are on-call for next Wednesday. As I said below, focus on being prepared to discuss Turing’s proposals. (Which are presented both in his article that we’re reading for Monday, and discusssing the whole week; and also the reading for next Wednesday.)

Tue Oct 10

Just got a message from the University which says we must move our class after all. So our next few meetings will be in Murphey Hall 202.

Mon Oct 9

For clarity: The University told me there’d be construction in the basement of Graham Memorial Hall this week and next week, and that we might want to relocate the class, but that it was up to us. We are trying to remain in our original room and see if that can work. Today was no problem. There are misleading signs posted though, saying that all classes including ours have been relocated. It may be that someone comes and tells us we have to relocate after all. But unless and until that happens, let’s continue trying to stay in our original room. We meet late enough in the day that we may experience no real disruption. If we do end up having to move, the alternate room they’ve assigned us is Murphey Hall 202. It’s alright, but much smaller than our current room.

updated Here are notes on today’s discussion of Huxley.

What we’ll be talking about next in the course is whether computers could in principle think and/or feel, and what would give us good reason to think it’s happened? For Wednesday, read pp. 60–86 of Gennaro, and Chapter 2 of Leiber. (Some of you are on-call for then.) For next Monday, read:

We’ll spend most of next week talking about the Turing Test. Some of you are on-call for next Wednesday; the material for you to be responsible for is the Turing paper we’ll begin discussing on Monday, and also a more informal dialogue-form discussion of the arguments of that paper, that everybody should read for next Wednesday.

Here are a collection of optional sci-fi readings relevant to our next set of issues. If we hadn’t lost so many meetings to campus shutdowns, we’d spend time discussing them together in class. But instead I’ll just offer them to you as optional supplemental reading, that you may find interesting or may help fuel your thinking.

At the end of class today, I thought five or six of you said you wanted to come to my office hours this Wednesday, but when I left a sign-up sheet on the table, only two signed up for slots. The rest of you, if you do want to come this Wednesday, email me to let me know which times you are available. The slots still open are 11-11:20, 11:20-11:40, and 11:40-12. If you could make more than one, please say so in your initial email so we don’t have to waste time going back and forth.

On Wednesday of this week, and Wednesday of next week, I will also be available right after class. I also have office hours on Monday of next week from 11-1, and Wednesday of next week from 11-12:40ish (but that’s the day before the paper is due). Probably we will need to do sign-ups for those times too. If you want to discuss your paper ideas but none of these times are feasible, I’ll have some limited capacity to zoom at a few other times. (Usually between 9:30 am-12:30 on Tuesday, Thursday, or Friday.) Email me to see if we can find a time that works.

One of you asked for sample papers to look at for this assignment. Here is a page with some sample papers on a topic similar to one assigned for this class. The papers posted there are initially presented with problems, and then there’s discussion of how to improve the papers. You may find it helpful to look at some of those now. We will discuss these or other sample papers together in the classroom — after you have submitted your first versions of this next assignment, but before you’ll have started rewriting them. (Note that these sample papers are substantially shorter than what you’re expected to do for the midterm assignment.)

I may also post here later some sample common feedback that student papers at this stage in intro classes have prompted in past semesters. The assigned topics vary, but many common problems show up in different papers.

I think the most useful preparatory resource for you though will be my page on How to Write a Philosophy Paper, and also workshopping your ideas for your paper with other people — perhaps with me, perhaps with each other, ideally with both. If you’re not yet at the point of knowing what specific argument you want to push, you can also still benefit from exploring the strengths of some arguments, or some responses to arguments, through such discussions.

new Some other announcements:

Wed Oct 4

Here are the instructions for your next, graded assignment. See also the notes on How to Write a Philosophy Paper.

I’ve updated the notes on causal arguments against dualism, to include the new arguments we discussed today.

Reading for Monday: Huxley

Mon Oct 2

Here are lecture notes summarizing today’s discussion of causal arguments against dualism. After Wednesday’s discussion, I’ll update those notes with discussion of the final two arguments.

As linked below, our reading for Wednesday’s meeting is: Princess Elisabeth and Descartes. Our reading for Monday’s meeting is this article by Huxley.

When I posted the page about Using Devices in Class earlier this semester, there was an immediate change in how much engagement and participation we had during our meetings. I appreciated that you responded that way. But now many of you are again multitasking (a lot) during our meetings. I’d rather not confront this while we’re having a class, but if it continues like it has been, I will.

updated Here is general feedback on the first, expository writing exercise. I will also arrange for your grades and individual feedback (which in some cases will be brief) to be released soon, perhaps tonight but at any rate before our next meeting. As I stressed in class, the feedback is meant to be constructive and I am available, and many other resources are also available, to help you improve the kind of analytical and writing skills our course is aiming to teach you. If you approach the challenge in the right spirit, and give it enough time and effort, it’s possible to start off with a “1/3” on this first assignment, meaning your submission had substantial problems, and still end up doing great in the course.

Here are notes on How to Write a Philosophy Paper. You can get started reading that advice to prepare for your graded midterm papers, which will be due on Thursday Oct 19. (A bit over two weeks from now.)

I will post the topics and instructions for the midterm papers in the next few days. To give you a general idea, one topic will be about what’s good evidence of mentality in non-humans, and an alternative topic will be about the causal arguments against dualism that we’re exploring now.

Wed Sept 27

Today we finished discussing Leibniz’s Law. Here’s a summary of my presentation

Reminder that your first writing exercises are due tomorrow night. Also, tomorrow morning I will start signing people up randomly for on-call days if they haven’t already chosen three days on their own. (Go to the Canvas site and click on “Pages” if you still need to do this.)

Read for Monday’s meeting: Gennaro pp. 29-44, and review van Inwagen pp. 226-29 and 260-62.

If you want to read ahead for next Wednesday’s meeting: Princess Elisabeth and Descartes.

Wed Sept 20

Remember we don’t meet again until a week from today. There’s no new reading assignment for then, but you should be sure to finish reading the van Inwagen and to read especially closely the passages that you’re choosing to exposit for our first exercise. What I plan for us to discuss next Wednesday will be: (a) what’s fishy about the “Box 3” style applications of Leibniz’s Law that we drew in today’s class (this is also discussed in the Gennaro and van Inwagen texts), and (b) any questions you want to discuss about what’s happening in the passages you’re trying to exposit. Those exercises will be due at the end of the day, next Thursday.

Mon Sept 18 (evening)

What we did today: we reviewed a map of the different ontological categories, focusing on a 2x2 table of concrete/specific in one column, versus abstract/general in the second column, and individuals on one row, versus other things on the second row. We spent most of our time trying to get a handle on the notion of a substance or Thing-with-a-capital-T, which is a smaller subgroup of the concrete individuals. Small-t things like wrinkles, echos, and so on are thought to be logically derivative in some way from the capital-T Things. We discussed that some philosophers would argue that only the fundamental building blocks of reality, such as electrons, can be substances, but other philosophers think that at least some larger objects made up out of smaller, more fundamental parts, could also be substances. For example, human bodies might also be substances.

After talking through what ideas lied behind those debates, and what the philosophers are disagreeing about, we turned to our main topic for the next series of classes: the debate between materialists/physicalists on the one side, who think that the only substances there are are physical, and dualists, who think humans also have non-physical “soul substances,” that are necessary for some or all of the mental aspects of our lives. The soul is what does our thinking, perhaps also our feeling, imagining, nad so on.

We started to discuss one argument from our reading in support of dualism, namely the view that complex physical objects like bodies or brains have smaller parts, but minds (so the argument claims) do not. We discussed some challenges to that second claim, and started to discuss how dualists might refine or clarify their argument to get around those challenges.

I’ve linked the webnotes introducing Leibniz’s Law (part of the reading for Wednesday) in this morning’s post.

Mon Sept 18 (morning)

I updated the syllabus and reading schedule to accommodate our missed class from last week. Mostly, we’re going to go through the next few classes of material a bit faster than I had planned, and I’ll rely more than I otherwise might have on expositing things (at least initially) by webnotes rather than in class.

The most visible changes will be:

  1. This afternoon, we’ll discuss ontology, substances, dualism vs materialism as we were planning to last Wednesday; if feasible, we’ll also begin discussing some arguments for dualism like the discussion of divisibility in the Gennaro reading. The group (Brandon, Ty, Mak) who were to be on-call last week will be on-call today instead.

  2. The expository exercises were initially due tomorrow, but then after our first round of cancelled classes I moved them to next Tuesday. Now I’ve moved them again until Thursday of next week. Here are the instructions. That link also gives you some examples of the kind of thing I’m asking you to do, and some advance warning of shortcomings I’ve talked to people about when they did this kind of exercise in past semesters. As I say in the instructions, the exercise will be graded only High quality/Satisfactory/Low Quality, and though everyone must do it as part of your class participation, my evaluation of this exercise won’t be included in your overall course grade. It’s meant to give your practice and feedback. Also, though I say on the main syllabus that written work will be graded anonymously and that you must submit a log of your work and drafts along with the final submission, these only apply to the more substantial papers you’ll be writing later in the semester.

  3. Some of you have signed up for on-call days already, but many haven’t gotten around to it yet. Please everyone sign yourself up for three slots by the end of this week. (Those who don’t do so, I will assign randomly.)

  4. One group of students (Kathryn, Mitchell, Salil) was originally scheduled to be on-call today, and a second group (Kishan, Kuhu, Fran, Ty) had signed up to be on-call on Wednesday of next week. (Note we have no class on Monday of next week, it’s a scheduled Well-Being Day). I’m going to combine these two groups and say that all seven of you will be on-call on Wednesday of this week and also on Wednesday of next Week. There will only be a moderate-sized chunk of reading for you to be responsible for, but it’s not yet clear to me how the pacing of these two classes will work out. So these students should prepare for this Wednesday, though they may not be called on until the following one.

  5. The readings those students will be responsible for will be:

    • the Gennaro textbook pp. 21-28
    • my webnotes Introducing Leibniz’s Law new
    • initial parts of van Inwagen (up to top of p. 233) Everyone in the class should read those materials and also read further in the van Inwagen — at least up to p. 245, because the rest of that text is the source material that your expository exercises due next week will be covering. After our class discussion of Leibniz’s Law has progressed a certain amount, I will also post more webnotes on that topic here, that you should all read for review.

  6. The next on-call slot is Mon Oct 2. Only one student (Cole) is signed up for that yet. I’m expecting that we’ll catch up in our schedule enough by then that that date and ones after it won’t need to be adjusted. But we’ll see.

Wed Sept 13

It’s now Wednesday around 2:30, the University has given the all-clear but not officially cancelled classes. But I expect few people are ready to go immediately back to the regular routine, and that few if any more classes will take place today. So our class will not meet this afternoon.

However, I will remain in my office (Caldwell 108A) until at least 5, and am available if any of you have questions or want to talk about anything — either the material we have been discussing in past classes, or what we read for today and are going to talk through next, or what’s going on in the university, or whatever. Glad to be here and talk with any of you.

Mon Sept 11 updated

Here is today’s handout, if anyone lost their copy. We managed to cover all the important Review ideas except for the notion of a reductio argument. If you found that notion confusing, or if you’re not sure about any of the Exercises, email me to discuss.

You can now go to the “Pages” link in the Canvas site for this course. There you’ll find a “On-Call Signups” page that you should be able to edit. As we discussed, everyone should sign up for three sessions (at most 4 people signed up for any one session). Our understanding will be that it’s OK if you have to miss one of your sessions, but everyone has to do two. Any time you do miss, if you want to (or need to, to meet the minimum of two sessions), you can sign up for another session later in the term, if there are still empty slots. If you do more than the required two sessions, you’ll get extra participation credit for the course.

Signed up for this Wednesday: Brandon, Ty, and Mak. Signed up for next Monday: Kathryn, Mitchell, Salil.

As I said in class, we’re going to set aside for now questions about how to know that other creatures have minds (we’ll return to them later). Our next readings and discussions will instead wrestle with questions about what having a mind consists in, what is the fundamental nature of minds?

There are four readings for Wednesday. The first is a brief part of the Gennaro textbook (namely p. 5 – middle of p. 21).

The second and third readings are two webpages of mine:

These webnotes give a broad overview of some basic philosophical distinctions in “ontology.” (They also explain what that word means.) The material in those pages will be especially dry and “abstract” and super-conceptual. Much more so than will be normal for our course. I hope some of the distinctions described in those pages will seem intuitive, even if the philosophical vocabulary for talking about it is unfamiliar. Other distinctions proposed there may be challenging to wrap your head around. That’s why I want us to talk through them in an informal Q & A way, rather than delivering them to you as a lecture. In addition to their being especially “abstract,” another challenge with this material is that many of the issues are controversial among philosophers, so there’s widespread disagreement about how to draw the conceptual maps, what divisions we need and which we don’t, and what count as examples of different places on the map. But I hope these webpages will give you a good enough introductory tour.

But let me emphasize again that I don’t regard this material as established doctrine that you have to master. It’s meant as an initial survey, so that you can get a feel for some distinctions that philosophers may want to draw (even if other philosophers argue against them), and get a feel for how philosophers talk about these different categories, and what might naturally be offered or argued to be examples of each category.

Everyone should read these texts, and come to class ready to ask about what you find confusing. Those who are “on-call” for Wednesday will be expected to be especially ready to engage with the readings.

The fourth reading for Wednesday (which the on-call people don’t have to do anything special for) is another webpage on philosophical methods. These are my Guidelines on Reading Philosophy. 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 will demand more work from you as a reader. This includes the reading I’ve assigned for next Monday, Sept 18, which is part of Peter van Inwagen’s book Metaphysics. As philosophical writing goes, this should be clear and accessible to beginners in philosophy like yourselves. But it is a longer and more complex text than others we’ve looked at so far. So you should expect to spend some time working on understanding it. You should also expect to read it more than once.

reading philosophy

The author’s last name is “van Inwagen”; he was an important metaphysician based at Syracuse and Notre Dame, but is now retired from teaching. Note that our selection has three parts (all in the linked PDF). First 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. We resume again on p. 260, where van Inwagen discusses four arguments that are supposed to support the physicalist side.

One thing that you’ll definitely want to do when trying to get on top of this reading is to map out 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. You will notice that van Inwagen’s discussion of a second argument for dualism is longer and more complex than his discussion of any of the other arguments, either for or against dualism. To understand these pages, you’ll need to work at following the backs and forths of that discussion.

Here are some signposts and suggested ways of breaking that long discussion of the “second argument” into smaller pieces. First, pp. 233–4 deliver the dualist’s initial complaint: it’s mysterious how physical things could be capable of thought or sensation. Second, pp. 234–7 explore how physicalists will reply. van Inwagen thinks their reply is reasonable so far as it goes, but still leaves some things mysterious and unexplained — but, he observes, we also have to consider whether the dualist is really in a superior position. They’re claiming an advantage over the physicalists, but it’s not obvious we have the kind of understanding they’re demanding of how what happens in a soul could amount to thoughts or sensations, either. Third, pp. 237–8 summarize where the discussion stands; say that whether dualists can meet this challenge depends on what “positive account” they can give of the nature of souls; and give a story about “Sir Aaron Oldham” and magnets that van Inwagen will use for analogy. Finally, pp. 238–40 argue that although dualists do say some positive things about the nature of souls, what they tell us is unexplanatory, like Oldham’s claims about magnets also seem to be. 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.

I encourage you to already read the whole van Inwagen selection, but our initial discussions will focus on the difference between dualism and physicalism, and the first argument in support of dualism. The second, third, and fourth arguments will be for you to summarize and explain in your first writing exercises (due Tue Sept 26 Thu Sept 28). So you should definitely read all these parts (taking you up to p. 245) for next week. Our discussion of those parts will continue the week after, and then on Oct 2 and 4, we’ll discuss some of van Inwagen’s arguments in support of physicalism. There’s a part of Chapter 10, from middle p. 226 – middle p. 229, where he discusses different options a dualist has for how to think souls and bodies are causally related (this is where van Inwagen talks about “interactionist” forms of dualism). We’ll postpone talking about that thoroughly until Oct 2 and 4 too.

Those who are “on-call” for next Monday are only responsible for the initial part of the van Inwagen reading, up to the top of p. 233.

Sun Sept 10

Tomorrow (Monday Sept 11) there will be a Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) Interest Meeting for Undergraduates at 6:30 pm in Caldwell Hall, with pizza. You are welcome to come learn more about the program, and please pass on the word if you know others who might be interested in PPE.

new This Friday (Sept 15), from 3–4:30 pm the Philosophy Department is hosting a Philosophy in 15 Minutes event in Gerrard Hall. Everyone is welcome, not just philosophy majors. Feel free to bring friends who may be curious about philosophy. This event will also have free food.

Thu Sept 7

First some admin stuff:

  1. I added an “index” or “table of contents” listing all the handouts, webnotes, and readings so far. It’s in bold before all of these dated entries. I recommend regularly following along with these dated entries, but if you’re looking for something specific, you can go there instead of scrolling or searching through the past entries.

  2. Here is a page about Using Devices in Class. Please read and respect. When I notice some of you multi-tasking in the classroom, I’ll give you cards inviting you again to go read this. I hope you can appreciate where this is coming from. I don’t want to embarrass any of you or make you feel unwelcome; but this is important for maximizing the overall value of our limited classroom time for the whole group.

  3. The readings for Monday are listed in the post from Monday night (below). As I say there, my proposal for our class meeting is to talk through the Reviews at the end of the pages — I mean, inviting you guys to volunteer answers and ask questions. I’ve already written up explanations in the pages you read, and am not planning to repeat/summarize them. But whatever is confusing or you think it’d be helpful to explore further, let’s discuss. I propose we also as a group work through some Exercises from those pages and other texts. These are things that I should have been able to give you as a quiz or homework, and if you understand the material you’d be able to give reasonably good answers. But we’re just going to talk the material through as a group, instead of you having to write up individual answers.

  4. Answering some questions that came up after class yesterday, or in the info sheets you filled out.

    First, some of you were asking about is there any issue about being enrolled in the class if you’re not already part of the honors program. I checked on this, and my understanding is that so long as you have a GPA of at least 3.0, and there’s space available, this is fine.

    Second, how do I suggest prepping for the class meetings when we have group discussion? Just do the kinds of things I wrote on the Monday post (below): have a good familiarity with the texts we’ll be discussing, and think ahead of time about what seemed to you to be important or problematic moves that were happening in those texts. Ideally, you’ll have some questions already in mind, or some objections or responses to objections already in mind, when you come to class.

    Third, what should you expect for writing assignments, especilly the first one that’s due in about two weeks? The first exercise (which doesn’t get a letter grade) will be you having to summarize part of one of our readings. The challenge will be for you to step back, drop lots of the details, and explain how the passage is organized, what the main points it’s making are, and so on. I will show you an example of how to do this. The other exercises will be you writing a paper that addresses some philosophical question from a list of choices I give you. You’ll have to set up the issue, then make some reasonable argumentative steps pushing for or against some proposed answers to the issue. I know most of you — perhaps all of you — don’t have experience doing this before. That’s why this is an Intro class. We’ll be working on developing these skills. If you want to read ahead about some of things it’ll be important for you to pay attention to, go to the index/table-of-contents link above, and see the several links about writing philosophy and sample papers in the “Admin handouts” section at the top.

    Fourth, someone asked whether it was possible to revise papers after they’re graded. The first paper that gets a letter grade, that I in some places call the “midterm paper,” will be one that you submit, I give you a letter grade and feedback, and then everyone will revise in light of the feedback and resubmit. The improved version also gets a letter grade, that counts for more. For the next paper in the course, that substitutes for a final exam, there won’t be any draft you submit to me. But we will arrange for you to share drafts with each other, and give each other feedback that you can make use of before turning the final version in to me.

    Throughout the course, I will be happy to talk paper ideas through with you. I won’t read and give detailed comments on drafts except for the versions you officially submit. There are two reasons for this: First is my limited time and energy to do this, but if I agree to do it for any of you I should be ready to do it for anyone who wants me to. The second is that students tend to think that if my eyes have read a passage and I haven’t raised any complaints about it, then the passage must be fine and not have any deficiencies. But this isn’t true at all: if you come to me with a draft, there will likely be all sorts of ways it could still be improved, but we’ll only have a limited time to discuss, and you’ll only have a limited capacity to take in critical feedback, so I’ll have to focus on what seemed to be the most important outstanding issues, that need the most work from you in continuing to develop the paper. I don’t want you to walk away from our meetings with the impression that any text we didn’t discuss is at the best level you could make it, or be expected to make it.

    So as a matter of policy, I won’t read your drafts until you officially turn them in. But what I am happy to do is to sit with you and have you talk through your argumentative ideas: not at the sentence-by-sentence level, but in big picture terms. Students and I are usually able to have very productive discussions in this way that helps them a lot in refining their papers before they submit them.

Ok I think that’s all the admin issues. The rest of this post is following up on yesterday’s meeting.

That was a nice discussion! Of course we’re only getting started sorting out the issues, and making initial steps, but we’ve already been doing philosophy together in these discussions. I thought we made good use of our limited time and you guys raised good questions. Before we move on, I wanted to float some additional ideas that also came up in the readings, or in discussions of these issues that I’ve had with other groups. They may be helpful landmarks for you too as you continue thinking this stuff through.

We talked in class about how the notion of a “person” is often linked to the idea of some special rights or “mattering” in different ways for ethical questions. Some interesting further questions here are: Is the notion of “personhood” we’re working with all-or-nothing, or can it comes in degrees? Are there going to be universal, non-arbitrary criteria for being a “person,” or is every species just going to count its own members as persons? (This last question came up in our discussion on the first day of class.)

One kind of question to ask is what does having a mind consist in? We will be talking about that in upcoming classes. The questions we’re focusing more on now (and will return to again later thinking more about AIs) are, how can we know what things have minds. These two kinds of questions obviously bear on each other, but they’re not the same questions. (This is a theme that is emphasized in the readings for Monday.) I’ve already said in class, when we ask about how we can know something, there’s a choice of how high we want to understand the threshhold to be. If we’re asking, how can we prove with certainty that some non-human animals have minds, well clearly that’s not going to be possible. But neither is it possible to prove with certainty that other people really have minds, either. Still we do think it is pretty reasonable to think other people have minds, and we can ask, what would make it also reasonable to think such-and-such animals have minds? It doesn’t necessarily have to be as reasonable to think so, as to think that other people do. But it’s interesting to sort out what kinds of evidence would make it more reasonable, and how much more reasonable they’d make it.

We can approach those questions by asking what would make it reasonable to think a creature had any kind of mentality at all? Or we could ask about specific capacities: what would make it reasonable to think it had beliefs? what about plans? what about emotions? what about feelings like pain? and so on. These are more specific questions, and presumably they’d call for evidence of different kinds. What we learned about a creature might make it plausible that it had some of these mental capacities but not others.

The last two paragraphs cover ground that we’ve also stepped on several times in our discussions. But here is a new idea. One kind of question you can ask about is whether, for some general capacity we have, whether the creature also has that. Does it have thoughts, for example? or memories? or conscious sensations? A different kind of question is whether the creature has the same specific experiences, say, or specific concepts, that we have. Maybe a parrot has thoughts, but the concepts it thinks in terms of don’t map exactly onto our own concepts. The question whether the parrot’s concepts are the same as ours comes up many times in that reading. Those are interesting questions, but even if we don’t count the specific experiences or concepts as the same, the more general questions, about whether they have thoughts, or so on, at all, are also interesting.

One important part of the parrot reading was when they were discussing what the difference might be between ant’s mechanical, “dumb” responses to their dead nestmates, and people with our concept of “death.” The reading framed this in terms of what it takes to have the same concept we have, but the issues here are more general. You might argue there’s a difference between the ants and creatures that are thinking about a phenomenon like death using any concepts at all, even if we allow it’s probably not exactly the same as our own concept.

The readings distinguish between brain and biological evidence that creatures have some mental capacities, and evidence from a creature’s more readily observable behavior. Some kinds of behavioral evidence that people have wanted to spend time talking about are: communication (even if it doesn’t count as “language”), and other kinds of social intelligence (like deception or empathy); also behaviors like avoiding or expecting threats, planning, reasoning, solving problems, learning to do new things, and being able to reflect on one’s own limits or resource constraints, and compensate for them.

Well, lots more here to talk about…!

Mon Sept 4

How to prepare for Wednesday’s class: re-read or skim again the text about the parrot and the first chapter in the Leiber book. Everyone should come to class armed with two or three points in these readings that they either strongly agree with, or disagreed with and had some thoughts about how to challenge, or just thought of ways that it’d be promising for the argument on one side to continue. I know some of you will be ready to volunteer these points, but we want to try to get everyone participating. So expect you may be asked if you don’t volunteer.

How to prepare for the following class, Monday Sept 11: Over this past weekend, I reorganized and expanded the Philosophical Terms and Methods webpages, which you should treat as the most important readings. (The last of those pages is a Glossary that I hope will be useful but is less important than the earlier pages.) The Pojman and Norton readings cover many of the same ideas, helpfully supplementing the way they’re presented in the Terms and Methods pages. In class, we will talk through the Reviews at the end of the Terms and Methods pages, and will together work through some Exercises from those pages and the other texts.

Wed Aug 30

The University has emailed us all about resources to help process and deal with the traumatizing events on Monday. I hope it goes without saying — but I’ll reaffirm anyway — that you should feel welcome to be in touch with me if you need special accommodation getting back on track with your courses.

We’ll return to the classroom next Wednesday (this coming Monday is Labor Day), to have a group discussion of the texts I asked you to read and prepare to discuss on Monday.

The grim coincidence is striking, that the background of one reading we were to discuss then concerns a professor being murdered in her lab, allegedly by one of her students. If this is too uncomfortable to engage with, I expect you tell me. But for now I’m proceeding on the assumption we can still discuss this reading productively. The specific nature of the crime the parrot may be a witness to is not crucial to the story. For our purposes, neither do we 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.

Let me offer some help with part of our other text, the first chapter in the Leiber book. There’s a portion of this chapter that I think is over-complicated. Here’s some context and explanation to help you track what’s going on.

One of the people taking part in the dialogue is named Mary Godwin. Some backhistory: William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft were philosophers in late 1700s. They had a daughter Mary Godwin (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 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. The absurdity of counting animals as persons was meant to imply it was also absurd to count poor servants and women as equals to their superiors.

The dialogue invokes this historical exchange for several purposes: (1) to remind us that Paine and (the orginal) 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 modern Godwin agrees with Taylor that there’s a “slippery slope” from the arguments of Paine and (the original) Godwin to accepting that animals also have rights. Taylor thought therefore those arguments must be wrong (hence his satire). The modern Godwin instead endorses the arguments and this further conclusion.

Tue Aug 29

I hope you all are well. On Wed we’ll discuss the material (the readings on the parrot and the chimp) we were going to discuss yesterday, and the big chunk of readings on philosophical arguments, tools, and vocabulary is postponed until the following week (after Labor Day). I adjusted the reading schedule on the syllabus by dropping one discussion we would have had in the middle of term. As always, we’ll adjust the schedule as the semester progresses to match our pace.

updated Tomorrow’s classes were just cancelled too, so looks like we’ll next meet on Wed Sept 6. I’ve adjusted the syllabus to reflect this.

Wed Aug 23

Here are notes summarizing today’s lecture: The Varieties of Mental States.

Here is some discussion of related issues: Marks of the Mental. I touched briefly on some of the points in those notes, but didn’t have time to talk through them in any detail. Still you may find them helpful to get oriented about the issues we’re exploring.

On Monday, we’ll return to group discussion about the “Star Witness” reading already assigned, and also Chapter 1 of the Leiber book, which you should read before our next meeting.

Next Wednesday, we’ll be talking more abstractly about what philosophical inquiry aims to do, and some of the vocabulary and tools philosophers use for talking about arguments. The readings for that class are these: Pojman, Norton, Philosophical Terms & Methods. All together, this is a longer chunk of reading (around 52 pages) so you might start early. The three pieces cover some of the same ideas, though, so that should be helpful.

Mon Aug 21

As evidence of animal mentality, you may enjoy watching this clip.

Read for Wednesday: Colin Allen, “Star Witness”. We may begin discussing this on Wednesday, and next Monday will definitely discuss it and the subsequent reading assignment, Chapter 1 of the Leiber book (available in the bookstore, or you can find links on the front webpage).

Note that the “Reader Assignment” at the end of “Star Witness” is just part of the original text. It’s not a written assignment for our course.

What we did in class today is already part of the activity of philosophizing. On Wednesday I’ll introduce you to some technical concepts philosophers have come up with to better organize how we think and talk about these issues. That’s also part of the activity of philosophizing. As the class proceeds, we’ll sometimes be doing the one thing — drawing on our intuitions to make proposals, and refine them, and challenge/raise doubts about them, and so on. We’ll sometimes be doing the other — picking up conceptual tools philosophers offer for exploring these issues more rigorously.