Philosophy of Mind

The seminar will be a consideration of some problems about what it is to encounter, recognize, and understand another subject — a mind that is not one’s own. Questions to be considered include:

1. ​What role, if any, does our understanding of our own minds plays in grounding our understanding of other minds?

2. ​In what ways does our knowledge of other persons depend on perception? What role does perception of bodies play in our awareness of other minds? Can we perceive the mental states of another person, or must we always make an inference from something exterior and visible to something interior and invisible?

3.​ Does understanding other minds require possession of a “theory of mind”? To what extent is our understanding of other minds appropriately conceived as a kind of theoretical understanding?

4. ​How is our capacity to understand other subjects related to our capacity to stand in relations of “mutual recognition” with other subjects? Is the idea of another mind fundamentally the idea of a “second person”, a “you” to my “I”?

5. ​What is the relation between understanding other minds and feeling concern for other persons? Is our capacity for shame, empathy, a sense of justice, etc. grounded on our understanding of other minds, or do such forms of concern for others themselves ground our understanding of what another mind could be?

This will be a close reading of Sartre’s great early work, Being and Nothingness (1943), focusing on his account of consciousness, freedom, anguish, and bad faith, as well as his conception of basic relations to other persons such as desire, shame, and love. We may also spend some time considering the development and critique of Sartre’s ideas in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity and in her classic work of philosophical feminism, The Second Sex.

What is the relationship between physical processes in the brain and body and the processes of thought and consciousness that constitute our mental life? Philosophers and others have puzzled over this question for millennia. Many have concluded it to be intractable. In recent decades, the field of cognitive science--encompassing philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, linguistics, and other disciplines--has proposed a new form of answer. The driving idea is that the interaction of the mental and the physical may be understood via a third level of analysis: that of the computational. This course offers a critical introduction to the elements of this approach, and surveys some of the alternative models and theories that fall within it. Readings are drawn from a range of historical and contemporary sources in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and computer science. (B) (II)

What is the relationship between physical processes in the brain and body and the processes of thought and consciousness that constitute our mental life? Philosophers and others have puzzled over this question for millennia. Many have concluded it to be intractable. In recent decades, the field of cognitive science--encompassing philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, linguistics, and other disciplines--has proposed a new form of answer. The driving idea is that the interaction of the mental and the physical may be understood via a third level of analysis: that of the computational. This course offers a critical introduction to the elements of this approach, and surveys some of the alternative models and theories that fall within it. Readings are drawn from a range of historical and contemporary sources in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and computer science. (B) (II)

What can reflection upon artificial intelligence teach us about human thought? This question may be asked and understood in many ways. Our concern will be philosophical: the insight we seek is into the nature and structure of thought as it is for the one thinking, as it informs, shapes, or constitutes the life of a thinking being. This course will lay the groundwork for pursuit of our question by (1) introducing and examining the idea of a model of a human intellectual capacity (2) outlining the basic concepts needed for understanding the architecture of the currently most noteworthy form of artificial intelligence—the class of language models known as GPTs, (3) introducing some of the philosophical ideas needed for analyzing the forms of thought that go into human linguistic communication, and finally (4) endeavoring to bring all of these elements together. (B)

What is the relationship between physical processes in the brain and body and the processes of thought and consciousness that constitute our mental life? Philosophers and others have puzzled over this question for millennia. Many have concluded it to be intractable. In recent decades, the field of cognitive science--encompassing philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, linguistics, and other disciplines--has proposed a new form of answer. The driving idea is that the interaction of the mental and the physical may be understood via a third level of analysis: that of the computational. This course offers a critical introduction to the elements of this approach, and surveys some of the alternative models and theories that fall within it. Readings are drawn from a range of historical and contemporary sources in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and computer science. (B) (II)

This course introduces students to issues and questions that have defined scholarship in the philosophy of mind as well as to prominent theories in the field. Starting from Descartes and the articulation of a general “mind-body problem,” we will go on to investigate particular mental phenomena (such as beliefs, emotions, sensations, and intentions) by considering what philosophers have said about them, drawing primarily from the 20th century and the analytic tradition. We will read works in Dualism, Identity-Theory, Functionalism, and Eliminativism. Besides offering a brief survey of the field, this course equips students with the resources for evaluating whether some particular view provides an adequate account of human mindedness. (B)

What is the relationship between physical processes in the brain and body and the processes of thought and consciousness that constitute our mental life? Philosophers and others have puzzled over this question for millennia. Many have concluded it to be intractable. In recent decades, the field of cognitive science--encompassing philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, linguistics, and other disciplines--has proposed a new form of answer. The driving idea is that the interaction of the mental and the physical may be understood via a third level of analysis: that of the computational. This course offers a critical introduction to the elements of this approach, and surveys some of the alternative models and theories that fall within it. Readings are drawn from a range of historical and contemporary sources in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and computer science. (B) (II)

What is the relationship between physical processes in the brain and body and the processes of thought and consciousness that constitute our mental life? Philosophers and others have puzzled over this question for millennia. Many have concluded it to be intractable. In recent decades, the field of cognitive science--encompassing philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, linguistics, and other disciplines--has proposed a new form of answer. The driving idea is that the interaction of the mental and the physical may be understood via a third level of analysis: that of the computational. This course offers a critical introduction to the elements of this approach, and surveys some of the alternative models and theories that fall within it. Readings are drawn from a range of historical and contemporary sources in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and computer science. (B) (II)

What is the relationship between physical processes in the brain and body and the processes of thought and consciousness that constitute our mental life? Philosophers and others have puzzled over this question for millennia. Many have concluded it to be intractable. In recent decades, the field of cognitive science--encompassing philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, linguistics, and other disciplines--has proposed a new form of answer. The driving idea is that the interaction of the mental and the physical may be understood via a third level of analysis: that of the computational. This course offers a critical introduction to the elements of this approach, and surveys some of the alternative models and theories that fall within it. Readings are drawn from a range of historical and contemporary sources in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and computer science. (B) (II)