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.
Here is a page of links to articles and videos about animal minds.
As I said yesterday, I don’t expect anyone to try to read/watch all of these. But I do ask you to make a good faith effort to spend time browsing some of them, and/or the selection from the Dr Dolittle’s Delusion book, or doing your own research, before Friday’s class. I will be inviting you to summarize and react to some of what you learn.
That was a great discussion of “mother” yesterday. This is like the wax on/wax off training in Karate Kid. The shape of things we said about the concept “mother” will come up again for the concepts mind/self/I/point-of-view, on the one hand, and the concepts of being free/having a choice/things being up to you, on the other.
For Monday, continue reading the pages linked to on Wednesday. I already mentioned that the “Glossary” page from those links isn’t important for now, also the “Conditionals” page is one that we’re going to spend more time on later, so do read that page now, but don’t worry if the details aren’t entirely clear to you yet.
Come to class with questions. The review lists from some of those pages are reproduced on (the front side of) the last page of yeterday’s handouts. There are also some exercises on the handout; think about them and we’ll talk them through.
The back side of the last page of the handout has some passages on it (taken from the readings) that “look argumentative,” but don’t count as having arguments in the philosopher’s sense, or at any rate, no good arguments. An exercise we’re going to do in class is break into groups, each group chooses two passages and comes up with ways to add in more premises/claims so that the result does look more like an argument. (It doesn’t have to be an argument you agree with!) Give some thought to which passages you can imagine some natural ways to do this for. We’ll do this exercise after we get through questions/discussions about the readings. It might be on Monday, or perhaps on Wednesday.
After we finish working through these preparatory readings, we’re going to take up our first main topic, that of animal mentality or cognition. We’ll get to some philosophical readings on this. (I have them on the Calendar for Fri Jan 24, but we may end up adjusting that.) Before we do that, it will be helpful for you to learn about surprising things that some animals can do, and things they can’t do. I said already, the exact details here aren’t going to matter so much for our discussion. But it still will be helpful to have a rough feel for the details. There are different ways to do this. I have a long selection from one book that talks about animal cognition in general, and their linguistic abilities and limitations in particular. That’s here:
That pdf looks long, but if you go through it there’s a lot of partial pages. It looks to me to sum up to about 85 pages altogether. I think it’s a useful overview of the kind of information we want to be drawing on. But as I said, we don’t need to master the exact details. Alternatively, another thing you could do is browse through videos and popular science news articles showing off this or that surprising animal ability. I have some collections of these; I’ll try to curate a list of them for you over the next days. You can also search on your own on YouTube or Google for keywords like “animal cognition” or “intelligent animals.”
I put the Dr Dolittle reading on the calendar to read before our class next Friday, Jan 17, but I don’t mind if you want to instead spend your prep time watching/reading the other links I provide, or searching on your own. I don’t expect you to do all of these. And I don’t mind if some of you read through the whole Dr Dolittle selection quickly, and others get interested in some of the details in one section and read there more closely, never making it through the whole text. For this initial reading about animal minds, I’m just going to trust that you’ll each put in good faith efforts to read/watch/learn some more about the surprising things some animals can and cannot do. We can share highlights with each other in class.
Our later reading assignments won’t be so free-form as this. We’ll generally all want to be looking and talking about the same texts. But this seems to me a useful and interesting way to start off.
Our first class meeting is on Wed Jan 8 (today). I’ll introduce you to our course topics and to what philosophical activity looks like.
There is no reading assigned before that meeting. But there is a substantial chunk of reading you should do afterwards, and be ready to discuss/ask questions about in our subsequent meetings. That is the group of web pages at this link:
(The last of those pages is a Glossary that I hope will be useful but is less important than the earlier pages.) Also this brief selection:
(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.)
Those pages already have developed explanations of the relevant concepts, and I’m not planning to repeat/summarize those in class. But I will take questions about the material on Friday and Monday, and we’ll talk through the Review lists at the end of the pages. Come to class with ideas about what you find confusing or would be helpful to explore further.