For Monday, I’m asking you to watch a video (linked in yesterday’s entry).
For Wednesday, read this article: Selections from Pereboom.
By the end of the week:
- listen to this podcast (40 min, transcript)
- read pp. 21–25 of the Lemos text
We may start to discuss this material on Wednesday, but if not should definitely get to it by Friday. The material in the blue box in the van Inwagen reading is stuff you can skim or skip for now; in a few weeks after we’ve introduced more of the debate, we’ll go back to this article and read and think about what’s in the blue box.
I may add some additional texts to this list; am thinking that through now.
For Monday, watch this video by Victor Kumar (6 min) about “the problem of moral luck.” Here is a transcript of the video. (If you find the issues engaging, here is an optional longer discussion with Dana Nelkin (40 min, transcript), and here is an encyclopedia article by the same author.)
Also prepare your index cards saying what are the main idea(s) you will be presenting in your paper (what new arguments or objections or examples you’ll be advancing or responding to). You’ll be sharing these cards with your peers and asking each other questions about them.
Some of you asked for help finding additional reading to help with your papers, especially regarding the Pairing Problem. Here is a selection from Jaegwon Kim’s textbook that discusses epiphenomenalism and most of our arguments against interactionism. (Not much on Conservation of Energy, though, but Gennaro discusses that.) It’s entirely optional to do any extra reading for the papers, but if you want to, that would be a good place to start.
Note that, as I’ve warned you several times in our discussions, different philosophers don’t always define terms exactly the same way. Some of these differences show up between terms as I’ve introduced them to you and as Kim uses them:
- I said that “dualism” leaves open what view you take about the relation between you (the person) and your soul. Kim sometimes characterizes “dualism” as committed to the specific view that you are identical to your soul; other times he characterizes it as committed to the specific view that you are identical to a combination (or “union”) of your soul and your body.
- I said that “epiphenomenalism” leaves open whether mental things (events, processes, states) can cause other mental things. Kim characterizes “epiphenomenalism” as committed to the specific view that they cannot.
I said that “causal closure” says only that physical events that have any causal explanation will have a sufficient physical cause (a physical cause that would be enough by itself). This seems to be Kim’s official understanding too. But he sometimes writes in a way that makes it sound like “causal closure” already directly says that there are no soul causes of physical things:
the physical domain is causally closed. What does this mean? Pick any physical event … and trace its causal ancestry or posterity as far as you would like; the principle of physical causal closure says this will never take you outside the physical domain.
the closure principle is consistent with mind-body dualism … All it requires is that there be no injection of causal influence into the physical world from the outside, including Cartesian minds.
Instead of
will never
andthere be no,
I think Kim should have written thatthere doesn’t need to be
any non-physical causes (or effects).
Here again are the lecture notes on Causal Arguments against Interactionist forms of Dualism.
There’s a quiz due Tuesday night.
Here are the instructions and prompts for your papers, which are due at the end of next week (Friday March 7). The topics for the paper were distributed in class (but are also printed at the end of the instructions handout). Choose a topic and start thinking about it so that we can break into groups and bounce ideas off of each other on Wednesday.
We’re going to start turning to issues about free will. Maybe I’ll be able to introduce this topic on Wednesday, else on Friday. Our initial reading will be:
- Chapter 1 of the Lemos textbook (Freedom, Responsibility, and Determinism: a Philosophical Dialogue)
I won’t expect everyone will have read that until Friday, but if you have time earlier in the week you can get started.
Today we resumed our discussion of Huxley and started to discuss other theories, and worries about, how the mental and the physical causally interact. Here is the handout I distributed in class, for those of you who weren’t there in person. Here is a recording of today’s meeting.
Here are lecture notes on Causal Arguments against Interactionist forms of Dualism. We’ve only talked through some of this material in class; we’ll continue on Monday by discussing the “Pairing Problem” and the worries about “Too Many Causes.”
There is no new reading for Monday. But I’ll be distributing instructions for the midterm paper then, which will prompt you to explore these issues about mental causation that we started discussing with Huxley and are continuing with on Monday. So make sure you’re comfortable with the readings, what we’ve discussed in class, and my lecture notes. Ask questions (either in or outside of class) about any parts of the discussion you’re not tracking.
I can see that some of you are keeping up and others aren’t (at any rate, aren’t entirely). I’m happy to help you get back on track, if you’re slipping, but you’ll probably need to be putting in more effort — reading the texts and notes more than once, making annotations while you do so, formulating specific questions to ask me, and so on. But the longer you let yourself slip behind, the more challenging and overwhelming it may be to remedy.
We’ll discuss the details of the papers next week. You are going to need to work on them multiple sessions, and then turn in the best drafts you can, before spring break. Then I will give you feedback on these drafts, and you will also get some drafts of each others to provide peer feedback on. Then you will rewrite the papers in response to all the feedback, and your further thinking and planning. Both the initial drafts and the rewritten versions will be graded. For your course grade, I am only going to evaluate these papers for effort. But I will also tell you what grade they would have gotten if they were being evaluated for the quality of what you produced.
The best way for you to get strong marks for effort on these papers — as well as the best way for you to develop the skills that other parts of your course grade will be measuring — is to strive to produce the best quality paper you can. Both for the initial draft and for the rewrite.
On Wednesday (or perhaps Friday) of next week, we’ll start discussing Free Will. I’ll assign some initial readings on this on Monday. There will also be a (brief) quiz about the mental causation material, due Tuesday evening (or perhaps Thursday, if we need to continue discussing the issues into Wednesday).
Added: Niko said something at the end of class about “contrapositives” which makes me realize some clarifying remarks could be helpful.
What we’re thinking about now are when some things can cause other things. This is not the same as an if-then relationship, though it will often be what explains why certain if-then relationships hold. But if-then relationships can hold for other reasons too.
If there’s a fire, there will be smoke. Why? Because the fire will cause the smoke. (Fires don’t always cause smoke, but suppose we’re talking about a specific situation where they would.) If there’s smoke, there will be a fire behind it. Why? Again, because the fire causes the smoke. If fire fighters show up, an insurance claim will be submitted tomorrow. Why? Because a fire caused both things to happen. In all these examples, we have a relationship of if-P-then-Q, but sometimes P causes Q, sometimes Q causes P, sometimes they’re both caused by something else. Some if-then relationships don’t involve any causes: for example, if you light a fire inside this room, you will have broken the law. But lighting the fire doesn’t cause you to break the law, as a further effect. It already counts as breaking the law (given what the law prohibits).
As I said, if one thing causes something else, often there will be a corresponding if-then relationship. (But sometimes not. We’ll discuss such tricky cases next week.) But if-then relationships aren’t the same thing as causal relationships. Contrapositives have to do with if-then relationships. “If P then Q” is equivalent to its contrapositive, “If not-Q then not-P.” But when P causes Q, we normally won’t want to say that the absence of Q also causes the absence of P. (My feeding the cat on Monday causes it to be alive on Tuesday; but its not being alive on Tuesday didn’t cause me not to feed it on Monday.)
One way to ask about causes is to ask a Why? question, and one way to describe causes is to say Because… But be careful, because Why? and Because can mean other things too. If I say “Why is the cake baked?” one answer may be to tell me about the actions of the cook that caused the baking. But another answer may be to give you my evidence for thinking that the cake is baked — which might be that, for example, my neighbor promised to bake it before we get home tonight. “Because she promised” can justify my claim that the cake will be baked, but doesn’t have to be what motivated or caused the baking to happen. Another way to answer the question “Why is the cake baked?” may be to explain what we mean by “being baked.” (Perhaps there’s some non-standard methods of baking that you didn’t know about.) So don’t take it for granted that every time someone answers a Why? question, or correctly says “Because…,” they are describing a causal relation.
What then does causing involve? This is a hard question, that much philosophical work has wrestled with. But some initial ideas are that some notions that are more familiar to us have a causal element to them. If you killed a cat, you caused it to die. If you baked a cake, you caused it to heat up for a period of time. The more general notion of causing is some kind of abstraction or generalization from notions like killing, and baking, and so on; and also from what physics tells us about how systems can/will evolve over time.
In some examples, we talk about things or people being causes (as when I said you baked a cake), but many philosophers think that (perhaps sometimes? perhaps always?) this can be understood in terms of something you did, that is, some event you were part of, being the cause. (For example, it was you putting the dough in the oven and turning the knob that caused the cake to bake.) We’ll talk more in later weeks about whether causes should always fundamentally be understood as being events, in this way.
As I said in email, class for Wednesday probably won’t be held in person, given the big storm they’re expecting. If the University doesn’t cancel classes outright, I’ll send you a Canvas announcement Wednesday morning saying explicitly whether we’ll be meeting by Zoom or in person.
We’ll continue to discuss the Huxley article on Wednesday. Here are some lecture notes on that article, covering what we talked about today and also things we’ll talk through on Wednesday.
Huxley is sort-of an example of what van Inwagen and other contemporary authors call “epiphenomenalist,” though Huxley doesn’t use that label himself. (I explain why I only say “sort-of” in the notes.)
If you want to read more about Descartes, or Huxley, or epiphenomenalism, there are some Wikipedia links.
For discussion on Wednesday and Friday, please read:
- re-read/review van Inwagen pp. 260-62 (adding to the pp. 226-29 assigned for Monday)
- some correspondence between Princess Elisabeth and Descartes
- pp. 29 to 44 of Gennaro textbook (this is sections 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3 for those of you with online copies lacking pagination)
Regarding philosophical writing, we’ll talk about this many times over the coming weeks. But you may already find it helpful to read my Guidelines on Writing Philosophy. These are notes I put together (drawing from many sources) when I started teaching. They’ve since become widely used by other philosophy teachers too. I’ve also collected some useful pages of advice others have written. I’m still looking through these to figure out which do I think would be most helpful to give you as supplements.
Read for Monday: Huxley. Also go back and re-read pp. 226–229 of the van Inwagen selection.
Because our class time is short, our opportunities for group discussion are really valuable. It’s disappointing when we find time for them but some of you spend time on your devices instead of engaging in discussion with each other. As announced on the syllabus, participation and engagement with the course makes up 15% of your final course grade. If you participate here and there to a moderate extent, you’ll get a moderate grade for this, not a punishing one. But you are squandering an opportunity to get a strong grade that could help offset other grades for the course that will be more challenging — in addition to squandering opportunities to develop and exercise the skills that the class aims to teach, and will increasingly be drawing on.
The prompt for our in-class writing on Friday is:
First, choose some aspect of our mental lives or kind of mental state and make a case that it promises to be in principle more resistant to being understood as a physical process, explainable by science, than other phenomena like the life cycle of plants. So this part of our mental life should be a top candidate for requiring a non-physical soul. Given the time constraints of this exercise, you’re not expected to be able to go into much detail. But do aim not just to express an opinion, but also to point to some reasons for it. What other mental states in the neighborhood of that one should it be distinguished from, because they might be easier to understand as physical processes? What makes that mental state stand out as being especially hard for physical sciences to explain?
The second part of the exercise is to take the other side, and say what you think would be the most promising responses for someone who thinks the mental state you chose will eventually be explainable as a physical process, in the same way the life cycle of plants has been. Again, you are not expected to be able to go into details. But what can people who have this view say to justify their optimism?
Some of you may be genuinely undecided between these perspectives, and able to sympathetically occupy them each in turn. Others will already have a strong preference for one of the viewpoints. Even if you’re of the second sort, though, for this exercise try to articulate some ideas on behalf of both sides.
Here is some help mapping out van Inwagen’s discussion of the “second argument” for dualism, which is longer and more complex than any of the others.
- First, pp. 233–4 deliver the dualist’s initial complaint: it’s mysterious how physical things could be capable of thought or sensation.
- Second, pp. 234–7 explore how physicalists will reply. van Inwagen thinks their reply is reasonable so far as it goes, but still leaves some things mysterious and unexplained — but, he observes, we also have to consider whether the dualist is really in a superior position. They’re claiming an advantage over the physicalists, but it’s not obvious we have the kind of understanding they’re demanding of how what happens in a soul could amount to thoughts or sensations, either.
- Third, pp. 237–8 summarize where the discussion stands; say that whether dualists can meet this challenge depends on what “positive account” they can give of the nature of souls; and give a story about “Sir Aaron Oldham” and magnets that van Inwagen will use for analogy.
- Finally, pp. 238–40 argue that although dualists do say some positive things about the nature of souls, what they tell us is unexplanatory, like Oldham’s claims about magnets also seem to be.
So in the end, even though the physicalist is giving us less than we’d like, and still leaving things unsatisfyingly mysterious, arguably so too is the dualist. If van Inwagen is right, the considerations of this “second argument” don’t really end up giving us more reason to accept dualism.
There is no class on Monday. For Wednesday, continue with the readings linked below (especially the van Inwagen). Here is one additional webnote to read:
- Read my webnotes Limits to Leibniz’s Law
As I mentioned in class, next week there will be a quiz due Thursday night. Also at some point in the next few classes, you will do some in-class writing addressing a prompt I bring to class.
We’ll continue reading the van Inwagen selection over the next two weeks. For Wednesday, continue reading to the top of p. 233 (the end of his “first argument” for dualism). There are also some a few other readings for Wednesday. Each is short, but together they add up:
- pp. 21 to 28 of Gennaro textbook (section 1.4)
- Re-read more closely the Terms and Methods page on Conditionals that we read earlier in class but postponed discussing
- Read my webnotes Introducing Leibniz’s Law
Remember there’s also a quiz due Tuesday night.
Looking ahead, we’ll be discussing the issues we’re reading about for Wednesday for a few classes; those and the remainder of the van Inwagen reading will be all that’s on our plate until the end of next week. You should continue reading rhe van Inwagen reading to the end as soon as you’re able to. As I said in class, his discussion of a “second argument” for dualism is complex and will take some special attention to follow. I encourage you to try to figure out the structure of that discussion on your own — even if you don’t figure out the details of what he thinks justifies each of the claims he makes. I will give you some input later about how I’d break it up into pieces, so you can compare your efforts to my suggestions. But you’ll learn better by first trying it on your own.
As I also said in class, don’t worry yet about van Inwagen’s discussion of “interactionism” and its alternatives like “epiphenomenalism.” We’ll come back and re-read those sections, and discuss the surrounding issues, later in February.
Those of you who missed class, I forwarded you the Zoom recording. I hope that the video and audio worked OK. Here is an annotated copy of the document I marked up in class today. Those who were in class might also want to look at that. After class, I filled in a few more annotations that there wasn’t time to mention in class. I made those in red so that it was visible which ones I made in class (in black pencil) and which ones I added later.
Here is the page I promised about messiness in philosophy, as for example in the distinction between “abstract” and “concrete,” and in explaining what we mean when we argue about whether something “is a substance.”
I said there will be a quiz coming up soon. I’ll make it due Tuesday night.
For Monday’s class read this handout about reading philosophy articles. Also start reading this selection from Peter van Inwagen’s book Metaphysics. That whole PDF is long and complex, and we’ll be working through it over a couple of classes. For this first discussion, read up to the middle of p. 230. Also, if you haven’t started reading the Gennaro text yet, catch up by reading to p. 21.
When you come to class on Monday, bring either a printout of the van Inwagen text or a device where you can open a local copy of the PDF and annotate it.
Some remarks about the van Inwagen reading. Our thin textbooks like Gennaro’s may be clear and straightforward enough that you don’t need to work hard to understand the structure of their text. The ideas may be hard, but I hope it won’t be a challenge to follow these texts’ discussion of them. Other readings we look at in the course will demand more work from you as a reader. As philosophical writing goes, the van Inwagen reading should be clear and accessible to beginners in philosophy like yourselves. At least, individual sentences and paragraphs should be clear. But it will be a longer and more complex text than anaything we’ve looked at so far. So you should expect to spend some time working on understanding it. You should also expect to read it more than once. It won’t be enough to just get the big picture and overall feel of the text. You need to go through the reading carefully and understand the details. The “Reading Philosophy” webpage tries to give you some guidance about how to do that.
Peter van Inwagen was an important metaphysician based at Syracuse and Notre Dame, but is now retired from teaching. (He still sometimes visits at Duke.)
Note that his family name is “van Inwagen.” Some people’s surnames/family names are made up of more than one word. For example, when you refer to the Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, you don’t say “Márquez said so-and-so.” You refer to him as “García Márquez.” There are various and sometimes complicated histories of how people get compound surnames like this. Sometimes it’s the result of taking a compound name upon marriage (Kim Kardashian West). Sometimes it’s the result of the person’s parents keeping different surnames from each other. Sometimes the explanation lies several generations back (Helena Bonham Carter). In European-derived names, a common pattern is for surnames to begin with “von” (German) or “van” (Dutch) or variations on “de” (several Romance languages). These initial words are part of the surname. You don’t talk about the painters Gogh or Vinci, or the actors Niro or Sydow or Damme, or the director Palma. You talk about van Gogh, da Vinci, De Niro, von Sydow, Van Damme, and de Palma. Sometimes the person (or their parents or more distant ancestors) chose to capitalize the initial “De” or “Van,” other times not. In van Inwagen’s case, the “van” is not capitalized. (You can capitalize it at the start of a sentence.) If you’re going to refer to him, you should use his full name “Peter van Inwagen” or his surname, which is “van Inwagen.” Not “Inwagen” or “Vaninwagen.”
Here is a writeup of some notes on animal cognition. We talked through some of this material on Friday and will continue doing so today.
Readings for Wednesday:
- My webnotes on Basic Ontology and Substances, Monism, and Dualism
- p. 5 to mid p. 21 of the Gennaro textbook (Mind and Brain: a Dialogue on the Mind-Body Problem)