PHL2172S
Seminar in Philosophy of Mind:
Materialism and Its Troubles

Instructor: William Seager.
Office: JHB-510.
E-mail: seager@utsc.utoronto.ca
Office Hrs: Wednesdays 2-3pm, or by appointment.

Course Outline:

This course aims to examine a number of basic 20th century materialist view of the mind. Our main focus will be on examining the development of a host of powerful counter-arguments against these materialist theories.

Evaluation: each student will be responsible for one seminar presentation (which should take up about an hour of class time), a mid-term paper (linked with the seminar presentation and which should be about 2500 words) and a term paper due at the end of class (on a topic of the student's choice and which should be about 3000 words long). The Seminar plus mid-term combo and the term paper will be equally weighted in the final grade.

Readings:

C. D. Broad: Ch. 14 of Mind and Its Place in Nature.
G. Ryle: The Concept of Mind, Chs. 1 ("Descartes's Myth") and 4 ("Emotion")
H. Putnam: "Brains and Behavior"
J. Smart: "Sensations and Brain Processes"
H. Putnam: "The Nature of Mental States"
J. Fodor : "Special Sciences"
N. Block: "Troubles with Functionalism"
J. Searle: "Minds, Brains and Programs"
D. Davidson: "Mental Events"
J. Kim: "The Myth of Nonreductive Materialism"
F. Jackson: "Epiphenomenal Qualia"
L. Nemirow: "Physicalism and the Cognitive Role of Acquaintance"
P. Churchland: "Knowing Qualia: A Reply to Jackson"
T. Nagel: "What is it Like to be a Bat"
S. Kripke: Lecture 3 of Naming and Necessity
J. Levine: "Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap"
D. Chalmers: Ch. 4 of The Conscious Mind, "Naturalistic Dualism"
B. Loar: "Phenomenal States"
S. White: "The Property Dualism Argument"
N. Block and R. Stalnaker: "Conceptual Analysis, Dualism, and the Explanatory Gap"
D. Chalmers and F. Jackson: "Conceptual Analysis and Reductive Explanation"

Schedule: