Jason Bridges

Jason Bridges received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 2001 and his B.A. from Harvard University in 1994. His primary research and teaching areas are the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. He also has serious interests in metaphysics and epistemology, the philosophy of action, the later work of Wittgenstein, and political philosophy. Current projects concern: logical and structural difficulties in the 'naturalization' of content, the relationship between content externalism and the rationality-involving character of psychological explanation, the dependence of thought on language, and issues concerning the attribution of mental states to animals. Professor Bridges has recently offered courses on the mind-body problem, the theory of meaning, and semantic naturalism.

CV (Website)

Contact

office: Stuart Hall, Room 231-C
office phone: 773/834-8191
email: bridges@uchicago.edu


Professor Bridges is on sabbatical during the 2007-2008 academic year.

Selected Publications

Please see http://home.uchicago.edu/~bridges/ for a complete list of publications and CV.

Courses

21410/31410. Philosophy of Action

Open to college and grad students.   In this course we address a group of related philosophical questions about human agency. What is the ontological relationship between actions and bodily movements---between, e.g., my moving my arm and my arm's moving? What distinguishes between cases of bodily movement in which there is an action on the part of the person and cases in which there is not? Is our everyday practice of explaining people's actions in terms of their beliefs and aims threatened by the possibility of physical explanations of the motions of their bodies? How, if at all, do the concepts of reason and rationality structure our explanations of human activity? How is weakness of the will possible? What is the relationship between the concepts of agency and freedom? Readings are drawn from a wide variety of contemporary sources.   Autumn 2003. 

23401/33401. Philosophy of Mind: Thought, Community, Environment

Open to college and grad students.   It seems natural to think of the mind as an autonomous object: subject to causal influence from the world outside, but possessed, like a clock or other physical mechanism, of its own self-standing internal constitution. Over the last half-century, however, a number of philosophers have articulated and defended views in radical conflict with that conception. According to such views, our minds are not merely in causal contact with the world; rather, the very existence and identity of our thoughts and beliefs are partially constituted by our relationships to the physical and social environment. In this course, we critically examine the most influential arguments of this kind in the analytic tradition, and consider the philosophical fall-out from the 'externalist' revolution for issues of self-knowledge, skepticism, language, and naturalism. Readings will be drawn from Davidson, Dretske, Evans, Fodor, McDowell, Putnam, Wittgenstein and others.  

23001/33110. Reasons and Reasoning

Open to college and grad students.   Arguably, the fundamental distinguishing feature of creatures with minds is their possession of rationality: the capacity to recognize, assess, and be moved by reasons. But what is a reason, and what is it to recognize, assess, or be moved by one? In addressing these questions we will grapple with several core issues in epistemology and philosophy of mind. Topics include: theoretical vs. practical reason, the relationship between the explanatory and justificatory dimensions of reasons, first- and third-personal perspectives on psychological explanation, the role of perceptual experience in providing reasons for belief, the nature of inference, and contextualism about justification. Authors read include, among many others: Brandom, Davidson, Fogelin, McDowell, Peacocke, Jay Wallace and Michael Williams.  Winter 2006. 

29600. Junior Seminar

Open to college students. Prerequisites: Open only to third-year students who have been admitted to the intensive concentration program. .  Topics for this small, discussion-oriented seminar vary.   Autumn  2004.

 
53200. Intentional Content

Open to grad students.   This seminar will explore two issues concerning intentional content. The first is normativity. In what sense, if any, is content normative? What implications does our answer to this question have for understanding the nature of propositional attitudes and other mental states? The second issue concerns the relationships between three types of intentional content: cognitive, perceptual and semantic. What justificatory and/or constitutive connections obtain among these varieties of content? Readings are drawn from an array of contemporary sources.  Winter 2007.

54003. Moral Psychology

Open to grad students.   This seminar addresses topics at the intersection of ethics and the philosophy of mind. It draws on readings from both the early modern and contemporary period. The key early modern figures are Hobbes and Hume: we will look closely at their conceptions of reason and of its relationship to ethics. Contemporary ethicists and philosophers of action often claim a kinship between their views and those of these earlier figures, especially Hume; we will evaluate these claims and also consider the contemporary views on their own terms. Central issues include the idea of a reason for action, the question of whether moral principles play a distinctive role in the motivation of action, and the nature of akrasia (weakness of the will).    Spring 2005.

20100/30000. Elementary Logic

Open to college and grad students. Course not for field credit. An introduction to the concepts and principles of symbolic logic: valid and invalid argument, logical relations among sentences and their basis in structural features of those sentences, formal languages and their use in analyzing statements and arguments of ordinary discourse (especially the analysis of reasoning involving truth-functions and quantifiers), and systems for logical deduction. Throughout, we are attentive to both general normative principles of valid reasoning and the application of these principles to particular problems. Time permitting, the course ends with a brief consideration of set theory.   Autumn 2002, Autumn 2005, Autumn 2006.