Ph 24 David Banach
Philosophy of Mind
Well, now, said Socrates, are we not part body, part soul? ...
Did we not say some time ago that when the soul uses the instrumentality of the body for any inquiry ... it is drawn away by the body into the realm of the variable, and loses its way and becomes confused and dizzy, as though it were fuddled, through contact with things of a similar nature. ... But when it investigates by itself, it passes into the realm of the pure and everlasting and changeless...
The soul is most like that which is divine, immortal, intelligible, uniform, indissoluble, and ever self-consistent and invariable, whereas body is most like that which is human, mortal, multiform, unintelligible, disolluble, and never self-consistent.
(Plato, Phaedo, 79b-80b)
Philosophy has succeeded, not without a struggle, in freeing itself from its obsession with the soul, only to find itself landed with something still more mysterious and captivating: the fact of man's bodiliness.
(Nietzsche, The Will to Power)
The Course: This course examines the nature of consciousness and the basic powers of conscious entities: knowing feeling, and doing. We will be interested in discovering what consciousness is and how it performs these activities. Many scientific fields, such as psychology, physiology, cognitive science, and computer science, have some of these same objectives. This course, however, will be philosophical both in its methodology and subject matter. With respect to its methodology, it will be philosophical, first, because it will be concerned with first principles, or most basic causes and properties of consciousness, rather than particular features and manifestations. Second, it will not be committed to any one methodology or sets of assumptions, such as govern the particular sciences. Third, it will deal with the conceptual relationships and consistency of our ideas about consciousness, rather than with he discovery of new facts. With respect to its subject matter, it will be philosophical because it will be centered around a set of traditional philosophic problems such as the nature of the mind and its place in nature, the nature of human action and freedom, and the nature and possibility of knowledge, and the meaning of human existence.
I. Consciousness and Scientific Methodology: This course will consider the problem of the place of consciousness in nature as described by scientific methodology, the Mind-Body problem. The topics considered will be:
A. Scientific method and its application to the mind.
B. Alternative views of the relation between mind and body.
1. Dualism.
2. The Identity Theory.
3. Eliminative Materialism.
4. Functionalism and Artificial Intelligence
II. The Unity of Consciousness and the nature of the Self: Daniel Dennett and Contemporary views of the self.
Texts:
Daniel Dennett: Consciousness Explained.
Dennett and Hofstadter, The Mind’s I
Office: Bradley House 309 Office phone: 641-7062
email- dbanach@anselm.edu personal webpage: www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach course webpage: www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/ph24.htm
Grading: Your grade will be determined as follows.
Grading Scale:
Midterm 300
Participation/Attendance 200
Final 500
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Total 1000
A --- 950 and above C- -- 700 to 724
A- -- 900 to 949 D+ -- 670 to 699
B+ -- 875 to 899 D --- 600 to 669
B --- 835 to 874 E --- below 600
B- -- 800 to 834
C+ -- 775 to 799
C --- 725 to 774