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Instructor: Alva Noë (Moses 303A)
510 643 8412 \ noe@berkeley.edu \ socrates.berkeley.edu/~noe
Office Hours: Thursday, 2-3:30 pm
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Thought is directed to the world. But is it an actual relation to the world? This seminar will explore the possibility that thought, no less than perception, is a species of direct contact to the world.
This is a graduate research seminar. It is designed primarily for graduate students in the philosophy department. Other students with appropriate background will be admitted space permitting.
REQUIREMENTS [ top ]
Students taking this course for credit will write a term paper due no later than one week after the last day of class. Students are expected to attend each meeting of the seminar and to participate in discussion.
All students attending this seminar -- including auditors -- must write short, weekly essays (two pages or less in length) unless they are specifically exempted from this requirement by the instructor. Students are permitted to miss two weekly essays. These essays are due at the beginning of class. Occasionally students will be asked to read their essay to the class aloud. The essays will not be graded.
Term papers can be handed in late only by prior arrangement.
READINGS [ top ]
Copies of all readings will be placed on reserve in Howison Library. Many readings will also be available online.
For an excellent overall guide to the area, students may wish to purchase:
The Elements of Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford 2001), by Tim Crane.
ROUGH SCHEDULE [ top ]
This is only a sketch of the schedule. Depending on the course of our investigations, it may be necessary (and the instructor reserves the right) to alter the plan of the course.
NOTE: There will be no class on 23 November 2005 and 30 November 2005.
I Presence and Absence (one week)
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary, (Routledge, 2004, trans. by Jonathan Webber), pp. 3-16 and 179-188.
Jean-Paul Sartre, "Intentionality: A fundamental idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology." Trans. by Joseph P. Fell, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 1970, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 4-5.
[P.F. Strawson, "Imagination and perception," in Strawson’s Freedom and Resentment, Methuen, 1974: 45-65.]
[John R. Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. (Cambridge, 1983), chapter one.]
[Tim Crane, Elements of Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind. (Oxford, 2001), chapter one.]
II Neo-Empiricism: Experience as Prior to Thought (one week)
John Campbell, Reference and Consciousness, chapters six and seven.
[Tyler Burge, “Belief de re.” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 74, No. 6, 1977: 338-362. Available online at www.jstor.org.]
[Zenon Pylyshyn, Seeing and Visualizing, chapter five (“The Link between Vision and the World”), MIT, 2003]
III A Kantian Response: Thought as Prior to Experience (one week)
John McDowell, "De re senses." Philosophical Quarterly, 34 (1984): 283-294, and in Meaning, Knowledge and Reality (Harvard, 1998).
John McDowell, "Intentionality as a relation," (Lecture III of the Woodbridge Lectures), Journal of Philosophy, XCV, 9, 1998: 471-491. Available online at www.jstor.org.
[John McDowell, "Intentionality de re." John Searle and his Critics, ed. Ernest Lepore and Robert van Gulick, Basil Blackwell, 1991: 215-225.]
IV Presence in Absence (one week - 28 September 2005)
Alva Noë, "Real presence." Manuscript. Available on Noë's web site.
Alva Noë, Action in Perception, chapter six. Available here.
V Overintellectualizing the Mind? (one week - 5 October 2005)
Hubert L. Dreyfus, "The myth of the mental: how analytic philosophers can profit from what phenomenologists tell us about everyday skillful coping," 2005 Presidential Address of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association. Forthcoming in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association. Available from the course web site.
Adrian Cussins, "Meaning, normativity and commitment." Manuscript. Available here.]
[Adrian Cussins, "Experience, thought and activity." Manuscript. Available here.]
[Susan L. Hurley, "Overintellectualizing the mind," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LXIII, 2 (2001): 423-431. Version available on Susan Hurley’s web site.]
VI Motor Intentionality (one week - 12 October 2005)
Sean Kelly, "The Logic of Motor Intentional Activity." Manuscript. Available here.
Sean Kelly, "Closing the gap: phenomenology and logical analysis." Available here. Note: Sean Kelly will be visiting and will participate in discussion.
VII Toward a New Theory of Intentionality (two weeks - 19 and 26 September 2005)
Presentation by Noë.
Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference, chapters four, five and six, Oxford, 1984.
VIII The Hardest Case: Thought about Nonexistent Particulars (one week)
Tim Crane, "Intentional inexistence and non-existent objects of thought." Manuscript. Available here.
IX The Extended Mind (three weeks)
Andy Clark and David Chalmers, "The extended mind." Analysis. 58:10-23, 1998. Version available on Dave Chalmers' web site.
Robert Wilson and Andy Clark, "How to situate cognition: Letting nature take its course." Forthcoming in Murat Ayded and and Philip Robbins (editors), The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition. Version available on Rob Wilson's web site.
[S.L. Hurley and A. Noë, "Neural plasticity and consciousness.”"Biology and Philosophy 18: (2003): 131-168. Available on Noë web site].
[Chapter seven of Noë's Action in Perception.]
Robert Rupert, "Challenges to the hypothesis of extended cogntion," Journal of Philosophy, 101, 2004: 389-428. A version is available on Rupert’s web site.
X Intelligibility (one or two weeks)
J.J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, selections. On reserve in Howison Library.
Alva Noë, "Experience of the world in time." Forthcoming in Analysis, 66/1, January 2006. Available on Noë's web site. This paper is part of an exchange with Andy Clark. I'll post Andy's paper here when it is available.
[Martin Heidegger, selections from The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. (Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 55-76, 154-176.]
Term papers are due one week after the last meeting of the seminar, by 5 pm, in the instructor's mailbox in Moses 314.