Shifting gears

So it’s an hour past midnight on the day I usually put my philosophical lectures up. After covering God, ethics, politics, and the mind, I thought I’d finish up with truth, knowledge, and all that jazz. I got about half a posts worth of material on truth out, and realized that I don’t actually know [...]

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Free Will

Today, just like last time, we’re talking about a metaphysical topic that has implications for ethics: free will. We think free will is important for moral responsibility: if someone doesn’t do something of their own free will, they can’t be held morally responsible for it. These ethical implications bleed over into philosophy of religion: many [...]

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Persons and personal identity, with a side of ethics.

In the first lecture on the mind, we just discussed the mind, period, no qualifications. In the second lecture there was a little more focus specifically on consciousness, and I noted that we have to be careful about what our arguments regarding the mind really prove. Descartes started out thinking he had proved the immortality [...]

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Mind Body Problem II: The modern debate

In today’s lecture, I want to cover two things: first, modern, more scientifically oriented motivations for rejecting dualism. Second, consciousness, why many philosophers consider it a problem, and why some philosophers think it may provide the basis for a non-Cartesian form of dualism.
I mentioned last lecture that Leibniz worried about Descartes’ dualism on the grounds [...]

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Mind Body Problem I: Descartes

Let’s look at where we are in this course: we started off with whether God exists, then moved on to discussing individual ethics, and then the structure of society. The first unit dealt with one big question of what there is in the world, and the second two dealt with what we ought to do. [...]

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