UNIT I
Required Reading: N/A
Supplementary Material—
Video: School of Life, What is Philosophy for?
Audio: Philosophy Bites, What is Philosophy?
Reading: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Entry on Fallacies
Note: Most relevant to the class are Sections 1 & 2, but sections 3 & 4 are very interesting.
Text Supplement: Useful List of Fallacies
Required Reading: Harald Thorsrud, Ancient Greek Skepticism, Section 3
TL;DR: Jennifer Nagel, The Problem of Skepticism
Supplementary Material—
Video: Steve Patterson, The Logic Behind the Infinite Regress
Advanced Material—
Reading: A. J. Ayer, What is Knowledge?
3. The Advancement of Learning
Required Reading: Lorraine Daston, The Empire of Observation, 1600-1800
Note: The required reading is only the first 11 pages of the document. Here is a redacted copy of the reading.
TL;DR: 60Second Philosophy, Who is Francis Bacon?
Supplementary Material—
Reading: David Simpson, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry on Francis Bacon
Advanced Material—
Reading: Francis Bacon, Novum Organum
See in particular Book II.
Reading: Jürgen Klein, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry on Francis Bacon
4. Cogito
Required Reading: René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy
Notes:
Read only Meditations I & II.
Here is an annotated reading of Descartes’ Meditations, courtesy of Dan Gaskill at California State University, Sacramento.
TL;DR: Crash Course, Cartesian Skepticism
Related Material—
Video: Nick Bostrom, The Simulation Argument
Netflix: The interested student should also watch "Hang the DJ" (Episode 4, Season 4) of the Netflix series Black Mirror.
Advanced Material—
Reading: The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia & René Descartes
Reading: Michael Williams (2004), Scepticism and the Context of Philosophy
Required Reading: John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Note: Read only chapters 1 and 2.
TL;DR: Crash Course, Locke, Berkeley, and Empiricism
Advanced Material—
Reading: Matt McCormick, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Immanuel Kant: Metaphysics.
Note: Most relevant are sections 1 and 2.
Reading: Peter Markie, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry on Rationalism vs. Empiricism
Required Reading: Gordon Leff, The Fourteenth Century and the Decline of Scholasticism
TL;DR: Carneades.org, Occams’s Razor (and why you should be skeptical of it)
Supplementary Material—
Reading: Theodore Gracyk, Aquinas and the Five Ways
Advanced Material—
Reading: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Entry on Ockham
Note: Read Sections 1, 2, and 6
Reading: William Cecil Dampier, Chapter 2 of A History of Science and its Relations with Philosophy of Religion
Reading: Frank Thilly, Chapter 30-33 of A History of Philosophy
Required Reading: John Mackie, Evil and Omnipotence
TL;DR: Crash Course, The Problem of Evil
Supplementary Material—
Video: Bart Ehrman, God and the Problem of Suffering
Note. Bart Ehrman is a biblical scholar. His personal website is here.
Related Material—
Reading: Burt Solomon, The Tragic Futility of World War I
Reading: Brian Frydenborg, The Urgent Lessons of World War I
Advanced Material—
Reading: Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God
Reading: Jeff Speaks, Speaks on Mackie
Reading: Peter Van Inwagen, The Problem of Evil
Note: This is a series of lectures for the interested student. Most relevant to the course is Lecture I.
Required Reading: Alan Hájek, Pascal’s Wager (Note: Focus primarily on sections 1, 4, & 5.)
TL;DR: Crash Course, Indiana Jones and Pascal’s Wager
Related Material—
Video: TED, Dan Gilbert: Why We Make Bad Decisions
Advanced Material—
Note: In this lecture, we utilize decision theory to assess Pascal's argument. Here is an introduction to decision theory.
Reading: Katie Steele and H. Orri Stefánsson, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry on Decision Theory
9. The Problem of Evil (Part II)
UNIT II
Required Reading: A.J. Ayer, Freedom and Necessity
TL;DR: Crash Course, Determinism vs Free Will
Link: Student Health Center Info and Link
Supplementary Material—
Video: Big Think, Michio Kaku: Why Physics Ends the Free Will Debate
Video: Closer to Truth, Do Humans Have Free Will?
Video: Crash Course, Quantum Mechanics - Part 1
Related Material—
Video: Epic History TV, Napoleon’s Masterpiece: Austerlitz 1805
Video: Insights into Mathematics, Non-Euclidean geometry | Math History | NJ Wildberger
Video: Scene from Waking Life
Advanced Material—
Reading: Pamela Huby, The First Discovery of the Freewill Problem
Reading: Ian Hacking, Nineteenth Century Cracks in the Concept of Determinism
Reading: Susan Wolf, Asymmetrical Freedom
Reading: Shaun Nichols, The Rise of Compatibilism
2. The Person and The Situation
Required Viewing: Think 101, Know Thyself?
Supplementary Material—
Video: Imagine Science Films, How Free Is Your Will? An interview with Michael Gazzaniga
Video: Think 101, Know Thyself? (Full Episode)
Video: WIRED, How Humans Get Hacked: Yuval Noah Harari & Tristan Harris Talk with WIRED
Related Material—
Video: BBC, Choice Blindness
Video: TEDx Talks, Choice Blindness | Petter Johansson
Video: BBC, The Libet Experiment: Is Free Will Just an Illusion?
Reading: David Bourget and David Chalmers, What Philosophers Believe
Advanced Material—
Reading: Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson, Telling More Than We Can Know
Reading: Mark Balaguer, A Coherent, Naturalistic, and Plausible Formulation of Libertarian Free Will
Note: The interested student may be interested in Mark Balaguer's texts, Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem and Free Will
Reading: Michael Shermer, Exorcising Laplace's Demon: Chaos and Antichaos, History and Metahistory
Note: This essay defends a chaotic model of historical sequences via giving a specific example of nonlinear history. The author concludes that we need not worry about Laplace's demon since “it was always a chimera.”
3. The Mind’s I
Required Reading: Plato, The Republic, Book II
Note: Read from 357a to 367e.
TL;DR: The School of Life, POLITICAL THEORY: Thomas Hobbes
Advanced Material—
Reading: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Entry on Egoism, Sections 1 & 2
Reading: Thomas Hobbes, On the Social Contract
Reading: Plato, The Republic, Book IX
Required Reading: Steven Cahn, God and Morality
TL;DR: CrashCourse, Divine Command Theory
Supplementary Material—
Reading: Michael Austin, IEP Entry for Divine Command Theory
Video: Transliminal, Interview of Ara Norenzayan
Advanced Material—
Reading: Plato, Euthyphro
Required Reading: Julia Annas, Virtue Ethics
Note: Read at least pages 1-14.
TL;DR: The School of Life, Aristotle
Advanced Material—
Reading: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Reading: Aristotle, Virtues and Vices
Reading: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Entry on Virtue Ethics, Introduction and Sections 3 & 4
Reading: Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care
Required Reading: Gilbert Harman, Moral Relativism Explained
TL;DR: Crash Course, Metaethics
Supplementary Material—
Reading: Theodore Gracyk, Relativism Overview
Reading: James Rachels, The Challenge of Cultural Relativism
Related Material—
Video: Steven Pinker: Linguistics as a Window to Understanding the Brain
Note: A common analogy used by relativists is the language analogy: Moral systems vary as widely as language systems. This video introduces the viewer to some core concepts in linguistics.
Advanced Material—
Video: Noam Chomsky on Moral Relativism and Michel Foucault
Related Video: The School of Life, Michel Foucault
Reading: Kenneth Taylor, How to be a Relativist
Note: This is a novel, psycho-functional approach to relativism. It is also a very challenging read.
Video: Common Sense Society, Roger Scruton on Moral Relativism
Required Readings:
Onora O’Neill, A Simplified Account of Kant’s Ethics
Barbara Herman, Integrity and Impartiality
TL;DR: Crash Course, Kant & Categorical Imperatives
Supplementary Material—
Video: Marianne Talbot, Deontology: Kant, duty and the moral law
Advaned Material—
Reading: Michael Rohlf, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry on Immanuel Kant
Reading: Christine Korsgaard, Kant's Formula of Universal Law
Reading: Tim Jankowiak, IEP Entry to Immanuel Kant, Section on Moral Theory
Reading: Robert Johnson and Adam Cureton, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry on Kant’s Moral Philosophy, Section 10
Note: This section stresses Kant’s argument that freedom must be a necessary idea of reason. This notion is the strongest link to Kant’s first major work of his critical philosophy, Critique of Pure Reason.
Reading: Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals
Appendix A: Kant’s Empirical Problems
8. The Trolley
Required Reading: John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism
(Note: Read chapters I & II.)
TL;DR: Crash Course, Utilitarianism
Supplementary Material—
Video: Julia Markovits, Ethics: Utilitarianism, Part 2
Advanced Material—
Reading: IEP, Entry on Utilitarianism, Section 3
9. The Calm Before the Storm
UNIT III
1. 2 + 2 = 4(?)
Required Reading: Mark Balaguer, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry on Platonism in Metaphysics Sections 1, 2, 3, and 4.1
TL;DR:
Video: Closer to Truth, Is Mathematics Eternal?
Video: Closer to Truth, Is Mathematics Invented or Discovered?
Supplemental Material—
Video: TEDTalks, What are numbers? | Kit Fine
Video: Philosophy Overdose, Intro to the Philosophy of Mathematics (Ray Monk)
Advanced Material—
Reading; Mark Balaguer, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry on Fictionalism in the Philosophy of Mathematics
Related Material—
Reading: Paul Lockhart, A Mathematician’s Lament
2. The Master
Required Reading: Plato, Book VIII of the Republic
TL;DR:
School of Life, Plato and the Forms
School of Life, Why Socrates Hated Democracy
Supplementary Material—
Video: The Rugged Pyrrhus, Plato: The Republic - Book 3 Summary and Analysis
Reading: Catalin Partenie, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry on Plato’s Myths
Reading: Plato, The Allegory of the Cave
Advanced Material—
Reading: George Klosko, The “Straussian” Interpretation of Plato’s Republic
Reading: Richard Kraut, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry on Plato
Appendix B: Plato on Math
Required Reading: Andy Clark, Some Backdrop: Dualism, Behaviorism, Functionalism, and Beyond
Note: This file includes the Introduction, Appendix, and Chapter 1 of Andy Clark’s book Mindware. The required reading is the Introduction and the Appendix. However, Chapter 1 may be of interest to some students.
TL;DR: Crash Course, Where Does Your Mind Reside?
Supplementary Material—
Video: Closer to Truth, John Searle—Solutions to the Mind-Body Problem?
Video: Closer to Truth, Dan Dennett
Advanced Material—
Reading: Howard Robinson, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry on Dualism, Section 1.1
Book: Matt Carter, Minds and Computers
Required Reading: Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence
TL;DR: Crash Course, Artificial Intelligence & Personhood
Supplementary Material—
Video: TED-Ed, The Turing Test
Advanced Material—
Reading: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Entry on Functionalism
Note: Most relevant to class are the Introduction as well as Sections 1 & 2.
Reading: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Entry on The Turing Test
Related Material—
Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?
Richard Berriman and John Hawksworth, Will robots steal our jobs? The potential impact of automation on the UK and other major economies
The interested student can also visit Will Robots Take My Job?
Required Reading: John Searle, Minds, Brains and Programs
TL;DR: 60-Second Adventures in Thought, The Chinese Room
Supplementary Material—
Video: Closer to Truth, John Searle
Advanced Material—
Reading: Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, Computer Science as Empirical Enquiry: Symbols and Search
Reading: David L. Anderson, Searle and the Chinese Room
Reading: Eliezer Yudkowsky, Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk
Related Material—
Video: ELIZA, Computer Therapist
ELIZA is a computer program that emulates a Rogerian psychotherapist written by Joseph Weizenbaum.
Link: SHRDLU
SHRDLU is a program for understanding natural language, written by Terry Winograd at the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1968-70.
Audio: The Harvard Business Review Podcast, The State of Nanotechnology
Appendix C: On Searle
Required Reading: N/A
Related Material—
Video: TEDTalk, The wonderful and terrifying implications of computers that can learn | Jeremy Howard
Video: TEDTalk, What happens when our computers get smarter than we are? | Nick Bostrom
Video: Talks at Google, Ray Kurzweil: "How to Create a Mind"
Advanced Material—
Reading: Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence
Reading: Vincent Müller and Nick Bostrom, Future Progress in Artificial Intelligence: A Survey of Expert Opinion
Link: Nick Bostrom’s Home Page
Note: The interested student can find several of Bostrom’s publications and working papers here. Of interest may be his Vulnerable World Hypothesis.
Material on Why Some Governments Might Want AI—
Reading: Vally Koubi and David Lalman, Distribution of Power and Military R&D
Note: The central finding of this article is that the intensity of military R&D is higher when a dominant nation faces a potential challenger. The implication is that both the governments of the US and of China might have interest in exploring machine superintelligence given the recent resurgence of China.
The interested student can also read Graham Allison’s Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?
Also, here is an interview of Graham Allison.
7. Self-less
Required Reading: Mark Siderits, Buddhism as Philosophy: An Introduction, Chapter 2
Note: This PDF includes chapters 2 and 3. Only chapter 2 is required reading, but some students may also have interest in chapter 3.
TL;DR: Crash Course, Buddha and Ashoka
Supplementary Material—
Video: The School of Life, EASTERN PHILOSOPHY - The Buddha
Advanced Material—
Reading: Thomas Metzinger, The No-Self Alternative
Reading: Olaf Blanke and Thomas Metzinger, Full-body illusions and minimal phenomenal selfhood
Book: Mark Siderits, Buddhism as Philosophy: An Introduction
Note: Students interested in Buddhism would do well to read (at least) the first three chapters of this book.
Book: T. R. V. Murti, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism
Note: This is a more advanced study of Buddhism.
Required Reading: Matthias Steup and Ram Neta, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry on Epistemology, Section 4.4 Why Coherentism?
Advanced Material—
Reading: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Entry on Coherentism in Epistemology
Further Down the Spiral—
On Buddhism:
Book: Mark Siderits, Buddhism as Philosophy: An Introduction
Note: Students interested in Buddhism would do well to read (at least) the first three chapters of this book.
On Artificial Intelligence:
Reading: Eliezer Yudkowsky, Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk
On Dualism:
Reading: Howard Robinson, Dualism
On Kant v. Utilitarianism:
Reading: Joshua Greene, From neural ‘is’ to moral ‘ought’: what are the moral implications of neuroscientific moral psychology
Video: Talks at Google, Joshua Greene
Related Video: Here's an interview with Stanford scholar, Robert Sapolsky, on evolutionary misfirings when making moral judgments.
Audio: RadioLab, Chimp Fights and Trolley Rides
Related Audio: RadioLab, Driverless Dilemma
On Moral Relativism:
Appendix C: Cultural Relativism
Note: An important distinction can be made here that is not covered thoroughly in this course: the distinction between weak cultural relativism and strong cultural relativism. This is the topic of Appendix C.
Reading: Michael F. Brown, Cultural Relativism 2.0
On Psychological Egoism:
Video: C. Daniel Batson, Empathy Induced Altruism
Note: In this video, C. Daniel Batson, professor emeritus at the University of Kansas, presents on Empathy-Induced Altruism (the existence of which refutes psychological egoism).
Advanced Material—
Reading: Peter Turching, Chapter 3 of Historical Dynamics
Reading: C. Daniel Batson and Adam Powell, Altruism and Prosocial Behavior
On Free Will:
Reading: Gareth Cook, Neuroscience Challenges Old Ideas about Free Will
Video: Imagine Science Films, How Free Is Your Will? An interview with Michael Gazzaniga
On God:
Video: Closer to Truth, Justin Barrett - Does Evolutionary Psychology Undermine Religion?
Advanced Material—
Reading: Peter Van Inwagen, The Problem of Evil
Note: This is a series of lectures where Van Inwagen defends theism. Most relevant to the course is Lecture I.
Reading: Randy Firestone, Paley’s version of the Teleological Argument is Based on an Equivocation Fallacy: There is No Order in the Universe Which Resembles the Order of a Watch
On the Blank Slate:
Video: TEDTalks, Steven Pinker—Human Nature and the Blank Slate
On Rationalism:
Audio: Philosophy Bites, Dan Sperber on The Enigma of Reason
Audio: The You Are Not So Smart Podcast, Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory
On the Senses:
Video: TEDTalks, Do we see reality as it is? | Donald Hoffman
Video: The Royal Institution, The Physics and Philosophy of Time - with Carlo Rovelli
Podcast: You Are Not So Smart Podcast, How a divisive photograph of a perceptually ambiguous dress led two researchers to build the nuclear bomb of cognitive science out of socks and Crocs – Part One
On Bullshit:
Reading: G.A. Cohen, Deeper into Bullshit
On Philosophy:
Reading: Bertrand Russell, The Value of Philosophy
Video: Oxbridge Philosophy— John Cleese and Jonathan Miller
On Hume:
Video: New College of the Humanities, Simon Blackburn on David Hume
Video: BBC, Philosophy Overdose, David Hume
Reading: William Edward Morris and Charlotte R. Brown, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry on David Hume Sections 3, 4, and 5
On Logical Positivism:
Reading: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Entry on Rudolf Carnap
Note: Most relevant to the course are sections 2, 3, & 4. Although I should add that the section on his life is interesting.
Video: Philosophy Overdose, Logical Positivism & The Vienna Circle
Reading: Jordi Cat, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Entry on Otto Neurath
Video: The Ideas of Quine
9. The Circular Ruins
Required Reading: Jorge Luis Borges, The Circular Ruins