Course Blog

These posts are in reverse-order, so the newest posts will always be at the top. The dates are when the post was first made.

Readings are in a restricted part of this site. The username and password for these will be announced in class and on Canvas.

Here is a sparser evolving index of all the handouts, webnotes and readings we’ve used during the course. Or you could look under the Canvas “Modules” tab.

Wed Oct 29

For Friday, read the rest of Night 2 in the Perry dialogue, and all of Night 3. (It goes quickly.) We’ll talk about these issues on Friday and Monday.

Mon Oct 27

Here are notes on fission cases, that we discussed today.

On Wednesday we’ll have our next in-class quiz.

Fri Oct 24

For Monday, just be sure you’ve caught up on the reading (and video) posted earlier this week.

Here are the questions we discussed today in class.

: In a couple of weeks, we’ll be discussing another movie by the same director, Memento.

Wed Oct 22

Here are notes summarizing the circularity objection to Proposal #5, and attempts to fix it using the notion of “quasi-memory”.

For those of you who missed class, here is the handout on shapes of relations that I distributed today.

For Friday, be ready to discuss The Prestige.

Also read a bit further in the Perry dialogue: to the bottom of p. 33 in my print copy. Stop where Dave Cohen says It does amount to a change of position. But what of it?… (which is at the top of p. 34 in my copy).

Also watch this 10 min video.

Mon Oct 20

For Wednesday, read a bit further in the Second Night of Perry’s dialogue. In my print copy, you should read to the middle of p. 32. Stop where Sam Miller says Exactly. Are you satisfied now that survival makes perfectly good sense?

For those of you who missed class, here is the handout of special words that I distributed today. As I said in class, I’ll give you opportunities to ask questions reviewing what the philosophers’ special meanings for these terms mean at the start of upcoming classes.

One of the things we discussed today was strategies to focus on for analyzing passages better (as you did in Quizzes 4 and 5). I polled the class on whether you wanted more practice doing this, as this would be one of the skills assessed in the final exam. A majority said they did want more practice. So I will make sure we get more opportunities to work on this in our remaining classes and quizzes. I’m not decided yet whether to do it immediately in our next quiz (not this week, but Wednesday of next week). But I will work it into what we do.

Wed Oct 15

Here are sample answers to quiz 5.

I’ll post the grades for Quiz 5 in a moment. This was a challenging exercise and even the strongest of your attempts still had some notable shortcomings. But I took the difficulty into consideration in assigning grades. On the whole, I think our work over the past week or so at diagnosing and summarizing passages has gone pretty well. You’re making progress at this skill, which is what matters. Not whether you’re yet able to do it perfectly.

See Monday’s posting (2 days ago) for the reading to do for next Monday. Here are some summaries of these critics of Locke, but I strongly encourage you to try reading the texts for yourself first, and trying to figure them out, and only looking at my summary afterwards.

Mon Oct 13

On Wednesday, we’ll have a quiz analyzing/summarizing another passage from Locke. On Friday there’s no class (fall break).

For next Monday, Oct 20, read Chapters 5, 6, and 7 in the Perry collection (one selection from Butler and two from Reid). As I said in class, each selection is short, but they each raise a number of different points criticizing Locke. I recognize that it’s challenging trying to keep track of all their points and organize them in your mind. I’ll post a summary of what to pay special attention to. But before you look at my summary, do try to read through these selections yourself first and see what message you get from them.

For the later part of next week, we’ll be going back to the Perry dialogue again and reading a few more pages from the Second Night. By the end of the week (Fri Oct 24) we’ll probably be ready to start discussing the film The Prestige. (Later in the semester we’ll be discussing the film Memento, by the same director and with a very different story.)

Some of you after class today were talking to me about The Maze Runner films and the TV series Severance. I haven’t seen either of these yet, but from what I understand, yes these also illustrate some of the issues we’ll be talking about in coming weeks.

Fri Oct 10

Here are some notes giving you an overview of the Locke chapter.

Wed Oct 8

I posted all the lecture notes on the Perry dialogue readings we’ve done so far. (See links below.)

Here are sample answers to quiz 4.

Mon Oct 6

I had suggested we’d be discussing The Prestige next week, but after shifting some topics around on the Calendar, it looks to me now that we’ll be discussing it shortly after Fall Break (which is Fri Oct 17). So you have a bit longer window to arrange a time to watch this. Do be ready to discuss it when we come back from Fall Break though.

As announced earlier, on Wednesday we’ll have a quiz where you summarize what the philosophical arguments are in a passage taken from our readings. For Friday, I want you to read Chapter 2 of the Perry collection. (Note this is different than the Perry dialogue, which is what we were reading before. Chapter 2 of the Perry collection is a text titled “Of Identity and Diversity” authored by John Locke.) This was first published about 330 years ago. I expect that you’ll find this text very challenging to read. Try to get through the whole thing for Friday; I’ll be explaining parts of it and you’ll have to reread it, or parts of it, several times for later meetings.

Some assistance with this text:

Despite this text being more challenging to read, it will reward our study. The view Locke is working towards will be similar to the Proposal #5 that we discussed in class today.

new I said I’d post lecture notes on the material we’ve discussed the past few classes (Friday’s zoom meeting and today). Some of these notes will be posted later this week; other notes are ready now:

Fri Oct 3

For Monday, continue reading in Perry’s Second Night. In my print copy, you should read to updated the top of p. 27. Stop where Sam Miller says Well, what’s the problem now? (As before, you’re welcome to continue reading, as we’ll be discussing the rest of the Second Night over the coming classes. But I’m just asking you to focus on these initial pages for Monday.)

Sometime over the next week or so few weeks, you should watch the film The Prestige. Even if you’ve seen it before, I recommend watching it again, so that it’s fresh in your mind. (I will be asking you to discuss and write about the plot.) My casual research suggests that the movie is currently available for rent on YouTube Movies, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Fandango at Home, Xfinity, and DIRECTV. If you have difficulty obtaining the movie from any of these services, perhaps you can join up with someone else in the class who can access them. Another option is that I have a physical DVD of the movie, which you could borrow and watch on a DVD player. (But then you’d need access to one of those, which is becoming rarer these days. Perhaps the library has some?)

We will have a quiz this coming Wednesday. As I said in class earlier, this next quiz will ask you to summarize a passage of philosophical discussion of personal identity (one you’ve seen before) in your own words. The passage will be provided; you won’t need to have physical copies of the texts we’ve read to take the quiz.

I will post notes summarizing today’s Zoom meeting, but not until later next week. In the meantime, if you missed today’s session but want to watch a recording of it, email me for a link.

Wed Oct 1

Reminder on Friday our class will be by Zoom rather than in person. Be sure to use the first Zoom link on that page, not the one for office hours.

For Friday, read the first few pages of the Second Night of the Perry dialogue. In my print copy, this goes to the top of p. 22. Stop where Gretchen says Well suppose — and I emphasize suppose — I grant you all of this. Where does it leave you? (You’re welcome to continue reading, as we’ll be discussing the rest of the Second Night over the coming classes. But I’m just asking you to focus on these initial pages for Friday.)

Here are my lecture notes on Perry’s First Night. I’ll make some of the text display in purple. Those will be the parts where I’m summarizing Gretchen Weirob’s criticisms of Sam Miller’s three strategies. In other words, my attempts to summarize the parts you were summarizing in class today. As I said, I think you all did good jobs of identifying where in the text the action was happening, and what the core idea of each of Gretchen’s criticisms was.

Mon Sept 29

As I said in class, on this Friday we’ll meet by Zoom rather than in person. Be sure to use the first Zoom link on that page, not the one for office hours.

For Wednesday’s class, reread the First Night of the Perry Dialogue, noting down when Gretchen makes her challenge to Sam’s proposal, and where he articulates each of his three strategies for responding to that challenge. These are the three moves we talked about at the end of today’s class, at the end of the handout. In Wenesday’s class, we’re going to do a group exercise, where each group tries to identify in the text where Gretchen criticizes each of those moves, and summarize for the class what her criticisms were.

Please try to bring a physical copy of the First Night to our class meeting. If you didn’t buy a physical copy of the book, try to bring a printout of at least the First Night.

For those of you who missed today’s class, Sam’s theory is that A and B are numerically the same person if and only if (“iff”) they have numerically the same soul.

Gretchen’s challenge to this view is: If Sam’s theory is right, how can we know / acquire good reason to believe that A and B are the same person, in the way that ordinary people often seem to do?

Neither Gretchen nor Sam wants to give up on ordinary people being able to know / acquire good reason to believe such things. Sam wants to try to explain how his theory could make sense of them doing that.

Sam’s first proposal is: our judgments of personal identity (that A and B are numerically the same person) are based on the hypothesis that if A and B have the same body, then they probably have the same soul.

Sam’s second proposal is: First, we observe whether A’s body and B’s body display the same psychological characteristics; second, we reason that if the psychological characteristics are (qualitatively) the same (and the body is numerically the same), then the body is probably inhabited by numerically the same soul.

Sam’s third proposal is: He can establish a correlation between (numerically) the same body and (numerically) the same soul in his own case. This gives him some reason to think that in other people’s cases, too, sameness of body goes along with sameness of soul.

Gretchen criticizes each of these proposals. So she thinks Sam’s theory can’t explain how ordinary people acquire knowledge / good reasons to reindentify people in the way we think they often can.

Fri Sept 26

Today we talked more about Leibniz’s Law. We’ll start discussing the First Night of Perry’s dialogue on Monday.

Here is the timeline of different philosophers and families of views about personal identity that I passed out as a handout on Wednesday.

Because of the timing of when we’ll be discussing which topics, I’m canceling the quiz we were going to have next Wed (Oct 1). The questions that would have been on it won’t be ones we’re yet ready for on that date. Instead I’ll move them to the next quiz, on Wed Oct 8.

Wed Sept 24

Here are answers and comments on the exam.

Mon Sept 22

Here is the review sheet updated for Wednesday’s quiz. (updated As I said in class, I added some entries to the review sheet to emphasize some additional issues we discussed today. They’re not on the printed version handed out in class.)

(Optional) If you want to read some more arguments for dualism, there are two pages of notes from another course. Also relevant are pp. 262–65 in the van Inwagen reading (parts I didn’t assign for this course).

(Optional) If you want to read about arguments against dualism, there are some notes from another course. They correspond roughly to middle p. 226 – middle p. 229 and p. 260 – top p. 262 in the van Inwagen reading (parts I didn’t assign for this course).

For Friday, please read “The First Night” of the Dialogue and Personal Identity and Immortality by John Perry that I asked you to buy for the course. In coming weeks, we’re going to spend a lot of time with this text. I’ll refer to it as “the Perry dialogue.” (The other textbook for this course is a collection of papers, edited by the same philosopher John Perry. I’ll refer to that as “the Perry collection.”)

You should expect to be reading each Night in the Perry dialogue several times, aiming for a closer and more careful understanding of the arguments each time. But for Friday, it’s enough for you just to have read it the first time.

Fri Sept 19

Read for Monday:

Wed Sept 17

Read for Friday:

I’ve graded the quizzes and will post to Canvas. Most everybody got a little bit wrong but not too much. I often gave partial credit if you gave answers that said some of what was important but not all of it, or if you also said some things that were incorrect. 10 of you (almost half) got As, 8 got A-s, 4 got B+s.

We went over answers at the end of class, but I’ll repeat some points. Being a dualist in the sense of holding thesis D gives one lots of latitude about what else they say. Even if you agree with them about D, you may disagree with their other views. They don’t have to think that people are identical to their souls (they might be identical to a combination of a living body and a soul); they don’t have to think people can exist after the body dies (for example, if people are such combinations, there is no combination anymore when there’s no living body). They may have different views than you do about what AIs or animals are capable of, and whether they have souls.

Another point worth mentioning is the meaning of “essence.” When you’re talking about a particular object, its essence is the properties it’s impossible for it to exist without. Or in other words, the properties it has to have, in order to exist. Some of you said instead, the properties it has to have, in order to be that thing. This is a slightly different idea. Some philosophers use “essence” to express the second notion rather than the first, so I didn’t penalize anyone for it. But with the vocabulary I was teaching you, I’d call that second notion your “identity conditions,” not your “essence.” What is the difference between the first notion of essence (the properties you have to have, in order to exist) and this second notion, that I’m calling your identity conditions? Well, with the first notion, it might be for example, that what I need to exist is to have a living human body, and that’s also what you need to exist. So you and I could have the same essence. But with the second notion, if I am a different person than you, what I need in order to be me would presumably be different from what you need in order to be you.

Whichever way you understand “essence,” saying you are essentially alive would still be compatible with your dying. It would just be that after dying, you would no longer exist (as yourself, and presumably you wouldn’t exist as something else, either). By contrast, saying you are immortal would be incompatible with your dying.

new A third way some of you interpreted “essence” was as being any property you had (perhsps something in your history, or part of your social identity) that played an important role (perhaps even a necessary role) in making you the way you are now. That is, as having some of the properties that you now happened to have, such as personality traits. It’s important that you recognize this is not the way philosophers use the notion of “essence.” The kinds of properties you’re referring to may be important to your life history, and could in some ways be more important to you than the ones philosophers call “essential” to you. But when philosophers talk about “essences” and “essential properties,” those are not the properties they mean. (See the page on Identities and Essences for more.)

Fri Sept 12

I’ve updated the review sheet for next Wednesday’s quiz.

I’ve also posted notes summarizing our discussion a few classes back about Personhood.

new Some followups about arguments that got raised in today’s debate game.

As we said in class, being a dualist doesn’t commit you to any particular view about which creatures do and don’t have souls.

At one point the Dualist team connected the notion of a soul to the notion of consciousness, which they said came in degrees. It would have been natural to ask whether having souls also came in degrees? How would that work? (A different view might say that all creatures have souls, just some have more complex souls.)

At one point, the Materialist team linked the Materialist picture of what minds are like to the claim that everything we do is predetermined and unfree. This is an interesting connection, and may be part of what motivates some people to accept (or to reject) Materialism. But as a matter of fact, many philosophers count themselves as Materialists and deny that everything we do is predetermined. (Many philosophers also reject the equation between predetermined and unfree; but we don’t need to pursue that right now.) There have even been some philosophers who are Dualists and yet also think that everything we do is predetermined. Only a few examples of that combination, but it is a coherent option. So the step from claims about the Dualism/Materialism debate (also known as “the metaphysics of mind” or “the mind/body problem”) to claims about things being predetermined or not, or the reverse, isn’t an automatic straightforward one.

Wed Sept 10

Read for Friday: Dualism and Materialism

There’s no class this coming Monday. Next Wednesday we’ll have a quiz. I’ll update the review sheet before we meet on Friday.

Mon Sept 8

I re-ordered the web pages I posted on Friday, and inserted an additional page. I asked you to read the Messiness and Ontology notes from that list for today; please read the remaining three for Wednesday.

Fri Sept 5

I want to summarize (and to some extent expand on) what we said about persons last Friday. Also some observations about different kinds of questions we ask, and different ways of answering them, have come up in different ways over the past weeks, that’d be helpful for me to summarize. So I will make two webnotes on those:

I don’t have those webpages written up and ready to go yet, so I’ll have to post them later. But take this as a notice that tney’ll be forthcoming.

For Monday and continuing into next week, there is no primary text to read yet. But the first of the following webnote pages summarizes (and expands on) what I was saying at the end of class today, and the other pages summarize material that we’ll be working through next week. Please read at least the first and second page for Monday, and read the other two pages for later in the week. It’s fine if you want to read ahead. Normally I won’t post webnotes until after we’ve introduced ideas in class, but in this case, because the ideas are so abstract, it will be especially useful for you to have lots of time to digest and think about them (and ideally to come to class ready to ask questions).

Wed Sept 3

Here are answers and comments on the exam. I’ll post grades now in Canvas.

There won’t be any primary texts to read for a few classes. I’ll post some more web notes here to read, by Friday if you can else by Monday.

updated I wasn’t able to post the new web notes yet, so look for them over the weekend.

Fri Aug 29

Here are notes summarizing materials discussed in the past few classes:

The last page summarizes and expands on material that we won’t get to until today’s class.

Here is a review sheet of material that’s candidates for being on our quiz next Wednesday. As we’ve discussed in class, you’ll be allowed to consult any printed or written notes during the quiz, but not use laptops, tablets, or phones. However, the time to complete the quiz will be limited.

Wed Aug 27

In class today, we discussed one kind of question What makes something be a church? What does it take?, and a different kind of question What makes something stay the same church, rather than becoming a new object (which could also be a church)? The sense of “same” invoked in this second kind of question means “one and the same,” that is numerical identity, rather than meaning “having all the same qualities,” or qualitative identity. We discussed a version of the second question involving the Ship of Theseus, where there are more than one candidate for being numerically identical to the original object, and some lines of reasoning would say the one candidate is the original ship, and other lines of reasoning would say the second candidate is the original.

One of the assignments for Friday is to watch this short video and continue to think about that puzzle:

I encourage you also to think of things you might say to avoid having to choose one of the candidates over the other. Is it plausible to say neither one is the original ship anymore, they’re both new ships? Is it plausible to say one is “numerically the same ship” in one sense and the other is “numerically the same ship” in another sense, and neither of these senses has priority? Is it plausible to say it depends on what we want from the ship, or how we feel about the ship? That we can decide which one to count as the same ship? Similar to how, if a church changed its name and leadership and I asked you whether it’s still the same church — whether there’s been one church that underwent those changes, or whether one church stopped existing and was replaced by a second one, you might feel that it’s up to us which of those is the better way to talk. We can decide what counts as “the same church.”

I don’t know which of these is the best thing to say about ships and churches. But it looks appealing to not have to choose one of the candidate ships as being definitely the original, and the other as definitely not. And it looks appealing to not have to give a definite yes-or-no answer to questions like Is this still one and the same church?

When it comes to parallel questions about persons, though, it’s going to be a lot harder to think there’s no definite answer. We’ll talk about this on Friday.

The second assignment for Friday is to watch this short video about what it takes to be a person (compare to What does it take to be a church?):

I will post some more materials here by Friday, summarizing the past few class discussions and giving you more review materials for the quiz next Wednesday.

Mon Aug 25

For Wednesday please read:

As mentioned last week:

Fri Aug 22

If you’re interested, here is more about the film Moon I mentioned today in class. Here is some optional reading on cloning, cloning humans in particular, and here is a video about surprising ways that identical twins (and so also clones) really turn out to be different. (None of this is assigned/required. These are just links to follow up on if/when you have interest. Whenever I provide such links, I’ll say explicitly that they’re optional.)

On the topic of films, there is a series of philosophy-related films showing on campus. Here is the current schedule:

The assigned reading for Monday is to continue reading the Terms & Methods pages and the two further texts:

For Monday, also watch this series of short videos:

As I said in class, the details of these aren’t important. We’re looking at them to get a sense of another way of thinking/talking about “identity” (or maybe it’s a family of several related ways of thinking/talking about identity), that we’re going to try to distinguish from the concept of identity our course explores.

Wed Aug 20

Here is the sci-fi reading for Friday: from The Ophiuchi Hotline.

Our topics for Friday will be the debriefing about your discussion of the questions about the Egan article, plus your thoughts/reactions to the new sci-fi reading, plus we’ll start to review/field questions about the Terms & Methods pages. As I said in class today, I realize there’s a lot of reading on the table right now and I’m not expecting everybody to get through all of those Terms & Methods pages immediately. But do get started on them, and try to make enough progress that you can ask questions and benefit from class discussion of them on Friday and Monday. The most important of the Terms & Methods pages are the first three entries/links.

I will post a link and/or bring to class a handout pointing out the main ideas you should be developing an understanding of from reading those pages. You could use that as the start of notes for yourself, that you’re welcome to consult when we have a quiz on that material in two weeks.

In addition to the Terms & Methods pages, I asked you to read the first of these short texts:

When you do, also have a look also at the second page — which is also short. It will help you with the kind of task described in the Pojman reading. (That’s the author’s name.)

Tue Aug 19

As I emailed you, our classroom will be changing to Wilson 217. We meet there starting tomorrow.

Mon Aug 18

updated Our first class meeting was today. I introduced our course topics and started to talk about what philosophical activity looks like.

For Wednesday, watch this podcast (or read the transcript, either way is fine):

Also read this short sci-fi story:

(Pages with a “restricted” URL like that one need a username/password, which will be announced in class and on Canvas. You should only need to enter it once per device.)

Over the next few meetings, we’re going to continue developing our understanding of the questions our course will be addressing. And we’ll continue talking about the kinds of tools and strategies philosophers use for answering questions. Here’s a group of web pages, starting at this link:

that talk about those tools and strategies. Start reading these pages, aiming to get through them all by early next week. The last of the pages is a Glossary that I hope will be useful but that you don’t need to memorize. Just save it to come back to later. Also the page on Conditionals may be harder than the others. We’re going to go through that page together carefully in a few weeks. For now, maybe just skim it.

Together with the Terms & Methods pages, read this brief selection:

Our plan for the classroom this week is:

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