Philosophy of Mind

I last offered this course at Harvard in Spring 2002; the web site contains material from that version of the course. I will update the web site when I next teach the course.
- James Pryor 7/21/02

Course Description

This course is a survey of central issues in contemporary philosophy of mind. We will consider:

different accounts of the relation between minds and the physical world, including questions about whether computers could ever have thoughts or consciousness
questions about how much our thoughts and experiences depend on the nature of our environments, and how much they're determined by our own intrinsic make-up
problems about how the mental causally interacts with the physical

Who Should Take This Course?

This course is not intended as an introduction to philosophy. It's intended as a survey of contemporary work in philosophy of mind for students with some philosophical background. (Grad students see below.)

I will assume that you have prior experience writing philosophical papers, reading philosophical texts critically, analyzing and criticizing philosophical arguments, and so on. If you've already taken another course or two from members of the philosophy department (this includes some MR courses), that should be adequate preparation. If you've just "read and thought a lot" about the issues this course covers, that tends not to be adequate preparation. It won't have given you practice and feedback on writing philosophical papers; and it won't have given you experience analyzing arguments in the way we'll be doing in this class.

Familiarity with formal logic (such as you'd get by taking QR 22) will be very useful in this course, though it is not a prerequisite.

If you are unsure whether you're prepared to take this course, come speak to Prof. Pryor.

[Philosophy of Mind] [Syllabus] [Notes and Handouts] [James Pryor] [Philosophy Links] [Philosophy Dept.]

URL: http://www.princeton.edu/~jimpryor/courses/mind/index.html
Last updated: 1:08 PM Sat, Aug 24, 2002