Nov 16, 2016  Cognitive Science combines the interdisciplinary streams of cognitive science into a unified narrative in an all-encompassing introduction to the field. This text presents cognitive science as a discipline in its own right, and teaches students to apply the techniques and theories of the cognitive scientist's 'toolkit' - the vast range of. Forgot your password? Enter your email address below. If your address has been previously registered, you will receive an email with instructions on how to reset your password.

• Jose Luis Austin
• Jose Luis Meaning
• Jose Luis Joyerias

Overview

The Third Edition of this popular and engaging text consolidates the interdisciplinary streams of cognitive science to present a unified narrative of cognitive science as a discipline in its own right. It teaches students to apply the techniques and theories of the cognitive scientist's 'toolkit' - the vast range of methods and tools that cognitive scientists use to study the mind. Thematically organized, Cognitive Science underscores the problems and solutions of cognitive science rather than more narrowly examining individually the subjects that contribute to it - psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and so on. The generous use of examples, illustrations, and applications demonstrates how theory is applied to unlock the mysteries of the human mind. Drawing upon cutting-edge research, the text has been substantially revised, with new material on Bayesian approaches to the mind and on deep learning. An extensive on-line set of resources is available to aid instructors and students alike. Sample syllabi show how the text can support a variety of courses, making it a highly flexible teaching and learning resource at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

This reading list is both too long and woefully incomplete. It is also imperfectly organized, as it must be, since there are entries that deserve to go under many different headings and speak to many different topics. The topics are roughly organized alphabetically and the works chronologically. In the most recent version, many SEP links have inserted for both introductory and organizational purposes; students interested in further reading in those subjects should consult the citations and selected works mentioned in the particular SEP article.

• Bertrand Russell. The Problems of Philosophy (1912).
• Simon Blackburn. Think (1999).
• Timothy Williamson. Tetralogue (2015)

Additionally, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy contain hundreds of articles on a wide variety of topics and philosophers.

Introduction

• José Luis Bermúdez. Cognitive Science (2010).
• Andy Clark. Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science (2001).
• Tim Crane. The Mechanical Mind (2003).
• Daniel Dennett. 'The Part of Cognitive Science That is Philosophy.' Topics in Cognitive Science 1 (2009), 231-236.
• Howard Gardner. The Mind's New Science (1987).
• Paul Thagard. Mind: Introduction to Cognitive Science (2006).
• Alan Turing. 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence.' Mind 59 (1950), 433-460.

Challenges to Cognitive Science and the Computational Theory of Mind

• John Searle. 'Minds, Brains, and Programs' Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3.3 (1980), 417-457
• Hubert Dreyfus. What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason (1992).
• Frank Jackson. 'Epiphenomenal Qualia' The Philosophical Quarterly 32.127 (1982), 127-36.

Connectionism and its Discontents

• Andy Clark. Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and Parallel Distributed Processing (1989)
• David E. Rumelhart, James L. McClelland, and the PDP Research Group. Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition 2 vols. (1986).
• William Bechtel and Adele Abrahamsen. Connectionism and the Mind: Parallel Processing, Dynamics, and Evolution in Networks (2002).
• Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn. “Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: a Critical Analysis” Cognition 28 (1988), 3–71.

Extended and Embodied Cognition

• Frederick Adams and Kenneth Aizawa. The Bounds of Cognition (2010).
• Anthony Chemero. Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (2009).
• Andy Clark. Supersizing the Mind (2008).
• George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (1999).
• Alva Noë. Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons From the Biology of Consciousness (2009).
  
• Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch. The Embodied Mind (1993).
  
• Mark Rowlands. The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology (2010).

Existentialism

Existentialism is a name for a philosophical and cultural movement that developed in Northern Europe in the late nineteenth century and was popularized by a number of French philosophers in the mid-20th century. More information can be found in the SEP article on the subject. Other useful introductions include Jean-Paul Sartre's 'Existentialism is a Humanism', and Gordon Marino's Basic Writings of Existentialism (2004).

Popular existentialists include Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Søren Kierkegaard, and Sartre.

German Idealism and its Critics

J.G. Fichte, F.W.J. Schelling, and G.W.F. Hegel are the three philosophers generally associated with early German Idealism. Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) is the most influential work of the period. A good guide book for students is Robert Stern's Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit (2001). After Hegel, German philosophy was dominated by various Hegelians, including Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx.

Friedrich Nietzsche needs no introduction. On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) and Beyond Good and Evil (1886) are good books to start with, while The Will to Power should be avoided. Those interested in the best translations should seek out the (yet-incomplete) Stanford series or the Cambridge Texts In the History of Philosophy.

Marxism

Marx and Communism

The marxists.org archive has a truly exemplary number of original sources, including those of Marx and Engels, Lenin, Bernstein, Trotsky, and Luxemburg. Robert Tucker's The Marx-Engels Reader and The Lenin Anthology contain print versions of everything you would want other than a complete version of Das Kapital (only selections). For a short introduction, Robert Heilbroner's Marxism: For and Against (1980) offers a clear view of the basic philosophy and economics.

Frankfurt School and 'Post-Marxism'

Martin Jay's The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research (1996) is the standard historical overview of the Frankfurt School. Important members of the school included Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Georg Lukács, Herber Marcuse

'Post-Marxism' is a very broad category that often involves a high level of difficulty due to its reliance on concepts as diverse as Freudian Psychoanalysis and Foucaultian biopower. Influential contemporary philosophers include Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Slavoj Žižek, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.

Phenomenology (and German Existentialism)

Phenomenology is a movement that developed in Germany in the early part of the 20th Century. Crucial figures include Hans-Georg GadamerMartin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Structuralism and Post-Structuralism

A pair of philosophical movements in France in the middle-late 20th Century. Sometimes called postmodernism. Often confused with the cultural movement of post-modernism. Notable figures include: Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jean-François Lyotard.

Epistemology is the philosophical study of knowledge. It has been one of the central areas in philosophy for two thousand years, but gained extra importance with the modern Cartesian turn. Important historical works from this period include:

• René Descartes. Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). Available Online.
• John Locke. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). Available Online.
• George Berkeley. Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710). Available Online.
• David Hume. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). Available Online.
• Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason (1781).

The 20th Century brought a number of important new developments in epistemology. The first of these was Quine's rejection of the analytic (and with it, the a priori), which lead to the development of Naturalized Epistemology. See

• W.V.O. Quine. 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' The Philosophical Review 60 (1951), 20-43. Available Online.

Second, there is Gettier's famous paper on what constitutes knowledge. See

• Edmund Gettier. 'Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?' Analysis 23 (1963), 121-23. Available Online.

Other important developments include the rise of statistical analyses, the internalism/externalism debate and the contextualist account. Particularly important contemporary philosophers include John McDowell, Ernest Sosa, Michael Williams, and Timothy Williamson

Note: see also Keith De Rose's list of recent contemporary publications in Epistemology, which is frightfully exhaustive.

Introduction

• The Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy has a number of great articles on free will, including Free Will, Causal Determinism, Incompatibilism, Compatibilism, and Fatalism.

Important Works

• R. E. Hobart, 'Free Will as Involving Determination and Inconceivable Without It,' Mind 43.169 (1934), 1-27.
• P.F. Strawson, 'Freedom and Resentment,' Proceedings of the British Academy 48 (1962), 1-25.
• Roderick Chisholm. 'Human Freedom and the Self,' The Lindley Lecture, 1964. University of Kansas.
• Roderick Chisholm 'He Could Have Done Otherwise,' Journal of Philosophy 64.13 (1967), 409-17.
• Harry Frankfurt. 'Alternate possibilities and moral responsibility' The Journal of Philosophy 66.23 (1969), 829-39.
• Harry Frankfurt. 'Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person' The Journal of Philosophy 68.1 (1971), 5-20.
• David Lewis. 'Are We Free to Break the Laws' Theoria 47.3 (1981),113-21.
• Peter van Inwagen. An Essay on Free Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
• Galen Strawson. 'The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility' Philosophical Studies 75 (1994), 5-24.
• John Martin Fischer & Mark Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
• Gary Watson. 'Free agency,' Journal of Philosophy 72 (April):205-20 (1975).
• Gary Watson. 'Two Faces of Responsibility,' Philosophical Topics 24 (2):227-248 (1996).
• Timothy O'Connor. 'Agent Causation.' Agents, Causes, and Events: Essays on Indeterminism and Free Will, Oxford University Press (1995), 173-200.
• Robert Kane. The Significance of Free Will, Oxford University Press (1996).
• Derk Pereboom. Living Without Free Will, Cambridge University Press (2001).
• Randolph Clarke. Libertarian Accounts of Free Will, Oxford University Press (2003).
• Al Mele. Free Will and Luck, Oxford University Press (2006).

What is logic?

The study of logic is (in its most abstract form) the study of what follows from what. In contemporary times the study of logic is practised by many different disciplines, including not only philosophy and mathematics but also computer science and linguistics, amongst others. Logic often serves multiple purposes: to some it is interesting because it is one of the foremost ways to examine mathematical structures (mathematicians), to others it is a useful tool to formulate arguments for clarificatory purposes (philosophers) and to many others it is a precise way of talking about the structure of natural language (linguists and philosophers).

Given that this is a reading list for philosophy, we will set aside some of the various ways of studying logic. For the most part philosophers study logic in three (general) ways: mathematical logic, philosophy of logic and philosophical logic. Mathematical logicians generally concern themselves with the technicalities of logic - what we are able to prove in some given system and the connections between logic and other areas of mathematics. Although the line between philosophy and mathematics is very thin across the entirety of the study of logic, it is least clear here, and for that reason we set it aside.

Thus the two areas of logic that philosophers generally concern themselves with are that of philosophy of logic and philosophical logic. Despite the similar names these two subfields are very distinct - philosophy of logic is concerned with the general philosophical issues surrounding logic, including what counts as logic, what constitutes correct logical reasoning, how we justify logic, and so on. Philosophical logic on the other hand is use of the formal methods of logic applied to philosophical problems, most notably the paradoxes.

As a final note: Prof. Peter Smith (Cambridge) has compiled an extensive reading list to teach oneself logic - i.e. to acquaint oneself with the formal systems used in studying logic. For any and all technical reading, I recommend the reader Smith's list. This list will serve as a complement to Smith's, because rather than doubling up I will focus on primarily philosophical texts (assuming requisite technical background).

Philosophy of Logic

There are many issues in the philosophy of logic - due to length constraints, this guide can only begin to scratch the surface with respect to the contemporary scenes. To that end I have decided to cover primarily what is perhaps the most longstanding issue in philosophy of logic - which logic is the 'correct' logic (whatever that turns out to mean!). Because very few students learn anything besides classical logic during their undergraduate education, I have elected to provide readings for the major contenders for the grand title. Afterwards, short reading lists for other issues in philosophy of logic follow.

Classical Logic

Classical logic has the unique position of being the default logic - it is the logic that most philosophers and mathematicians take prima facie. Given its default position, it oddly has few philosophical defences; rather it is generally justified via pointing out weakness of the attacks from other positions. For a quick gloss of classical logic, I suggest:

• SEP: Classical Logic

Intuitionistic Logic

Intuitionistic logic is the logic gained by removing the Law of Excluded Middle (LEM) from classical logic. For a brief technical and historical overview of intuitionistic logic I recommend:

• Dirk van Dalen - ``Intuitionistic Logic', from The Blackwell Guide to Philosophical Logic, ed. Goble.pdf)

For philosophical motivations for intuitionistic logic, see:

• Michael Dummett - 'The Philosophical Basis of Intuitionistic Logic', from Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings, ed. Benacerraf, Putnam
• Roy T. Cook - 'Intuitionism Reconsidered', from The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic, ed. Shapiro
• Neil Tennant - Anti-realism and Logic: Truth as Eternal

Relevance/Relevant Logics

Relevant logics are the result of altering structural rules in order to avoid certain issues, notably the paradoxes of strict implication. They lack the inference rule ex falso quod libet or explosion, and thus are a type of paraconsistent logic. The following are good introductory sources:

• Neil Tennant - 'Relevance in Reasoning', from The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic, ed. Shapiro
• Stephen Read - Relevant Logic: A Philosophical Examination of Inference

Many-Valued Logics

Many-valued logics are sublogics of classical logic which change the set of truth values in the system. As is well known, classical logic has two truth values: true and false. Many-valued logics, via extending this set, have vastly different consequence relations than classical logic. Below I give readings for three of the most popular many-valued logics. For an overview of many-valued logics in general, I suggest:

• Jc Beall and Bas van Fraasen - Possibilities and Paradox
• Graham Priest - An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic

Introduction

• Michael Loux. Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (2006).
• Michael Loux, ed. Metaphysics: Contemporary Readings (2001).
• Cynthia MacDonald and Stephen Laurence, eds. Contemporary Readings in the Foundations of Metaphysics (1998).
• Peter van Inwagen and Dean Zimmerman. Metaphysics: The Big Questions (2008).
• Peter van Inwagen. Metaphysics (2008).
• Jaegwon Kim, Daniel Z. Korman, and Ernest Sosa, eds. Metaphysics: An Anthology (2011).

Causation

• John Collins, Ned Hall, and L.A. Paul, eds. Causation and Counterfactuals (2004).
• Ernest Sosa and Michael Tooley, eds. Causation (Oxford Readings in Philosophy) (1994).
• Helen Beebee, Christopher Hitchcock, and Peter Menzies, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Causation (2012).
• Bertrand Russell. 'On the Notion of Cause' Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 13 (1912), 1-26.

Material Constitution

• Michael C Rae, ed. Material Constitution: A Reader (1996).
• David Wiggins. 'On Being in the Same Place at the Same Time' Philosophical Review 77 (1968), 90-5.
• Judith Jarvis Thomson. 'Parthood and Identity Across Time' Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983), 201-20.
• Michael Burke. 'Dion and Theon: An Essentialist Solution to an Ancient Problem' Journal of Philosophy 91 (1994), 129-39.

Mereology

• Henry S. Leonard and Nelson Goodman. 'The Calculus of Individuals and its Uses' The Journal of Symbolic Logic 5.2 (1940), 45-55.
• Peter Simons. Parts: A Study in Ontology (2000).
• David Lewis. 'One, But Almost Many' in Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology (1999).
• Peter Unger. 'There are no Ordinary Things' Synthese 41 (1979), 117-154.
• Peter van Inwagen. Material Beings (1990).

Modality

• Saul Kripke. Naming and Necessity (1980).
• Michael Loux, ed. The Possible and the Actual (1979).
• Joseph Melia. Modality (2003).
• Theodore Sider. 'Reductive Theories of Modality' in The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics Michael J. Loux and Dean Zimmerman, eds. (2003), 180-208.
• John Divers. Possible Worlds (2002).
• David Lewis. On the Plurality of Worlds (1986).
• Robert Adams. 'Theories of Actuality' Nous 8 (1974), 211-31.
• Alvin Plantinga. Essays in the Metaphysics of Modality (2003).
• Robert Stalnaker. 'Possible Worlds' Nous 10 (1976), 65-75.

Time

• Robin Le Poidevin and Murray MacBeath, eds. The Philosophy of Time (1993).
• J.M.E. McTaggart. 'The Unreality of Time' in The Philosophy of Time Robin Le Poidevin and Murray McBeath, eds. (1993), 23-34.
• Adrian Bardon and Heather Dyke. A Companion to the Philosophy of Time (2013).

Universals

• David Armstrong. Universals: An Opinionated Introduction (1989).
• D.H. Mellor and Alex Oliver. Properties (Oxford Readings in Philosophy) (1997).

What is Philosophy of Mathematics?

The philosophy of mathematics is, at its core, the study of mathematics from a philosophical perspective rather than a strictly mathematical one. Often times philosophers of mathematics concern themselves with the foundations of mathematics - what mathematics is, what kind of objects, if any it refers to, how we come to have knowledge of these objects, and how we are to think of mathematical objects and theories. Because the philosophy of mathematics often deals in foundations, in some senses it is a deviating branch of metaphysics and epistemology. However philosophy of mathematics is not just foundations - it includes questions about the nature of mathematical explanation, computation, proof, set theory, infinity and more. For this reason we will treat the philosophy of mathematics as a separate subfield, within the larger category of the philosophy of sciences and mathematics.

Introductory Readings

Books

• Stewart Shapiro - Thinking About Mathematics. Shapiro's book is a masterpiece of introductory philosophy - it's easy to read and covers nearly all the ground you would hope, starting with a brief gloss of the history of philosophy of mathematics and moving forward into the major schools of foundations, with equal focus on both the historical views (e.g. Russell/Whitehead, Frege and Brouwer) and contemporary movements (e.g. Hale/Wright, Field, Shapiro).

Encyclopedia Articles

As always the SEP is of great help. In particular, the following articles are essential:

Further Readings

Anthologies

• Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings ed. Benacerraf and Putnam - this is the bible of philosophy of maths, containing almost two dozen of the most important papers ever written in the subject. It's a bit out of date at this point, but still a classic. Rather than listing all of the must-read papers in the philosophy of mathematics one should just read this book cover to cover.

• The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic ed. Shapiro - This book has articles on every major movement in philosophy of maths and logic written in a fantastically accessible way. It is a massive resource to anyone with interest in the field.

Primary Texts (Books)

• L.E.J. Brouwer - Cambridge Lectures on Intuitionism
• Richard Dedekind - Essays on the Theory of Numbers
• Gottlob Frege - Grundlagen der Arithmetik or The Foundations of Arithmetic
• Gottlob Frege - Grundgesetze der Arithmetik or The Basic Laws of Arithmetic. OUP has the first full translation of the Grundgesetze forthcoming, translated by Ebert, Rossberg, Wright and Cook. Reading it alongside Richard Heck Jr.'s Reading Frege's Grundgesetze is highly recommended.
• Hartry Field - Science Without Numbers: A Defense of Nominalism
• Bob Hale and Crispin Wright - The Reason's Proper Study
• Stewart Shapiro - Philosophy of Mathematics: Structure and Ontology

Metaethics

What is Metaethics?

Metaethics stands at the top of the hierarchy of moral philosophy. In normative moral theory we ask questions about how one ought to act with regard to others. In metaethics we ask questions about what whether or not such a theory is even possible and, if it is, what do the notions that we employ in normative theories like 'ought' mean? Metaethics overlaps with other fields in philosophy that aren't typically related to moral philosophy. It overlaps with philosophy of language by asking what is meant by moral sentences, epistemology by asking questions about moral knowledge and how we come to know moral facts (if that's possible), and metaphysics by asking whether or not there are moral facts and, if so, just what are they. Below are listed four prominent views in metaethics, divided by their proposals about the status of moral facts (whether or not there are any) and, if there are, whether they're parts of the natural world or not.

Moral realism is the view that there are moral facts. It falls under moral cognitivism, which holds that moral sentences like 'murder is wrong' express propositions that can be evaluated as either true or false. What sorts of things count as truth-makers for these moral propositions? According to moral naturalism there are some empirical facts about the world determine the truth value of moral propositions. Proponents of moral non-naturalism often counter by arguing that goodness is not something that we can observe in the typical sense, like we would observe the colors of a rainbow or the shape of a car, so moral facts must appeal to something to some non-natural properties.

Moral anti-realism can either be a variety or moral cognitivism or moral non-cognitivism. Proponents of the former might admit that, while moral sentences seem to be propositions that can be evaluated as true or false, they are all false. See Mackie below for more on this view called error theory. Philosophers who argue for that latter, on the other hand, hold that moral sentences express merely that one approves of some act, or dislikes it, and so on.

• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaethics (2011). Available Online.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaethics (2012). Available Online.

Important Works

Moral Realism

• Steven Finlay. 'Four Faces of Moral Realism,' Philosophical Compass 2 (2007). Available Online.
• Michael Smith. The Moral Problem (1994).
• Philippa Foot. Natural Goodness (2001).
• David Enoch. Taking Morality Seriously (2011).

Moral Constructivism

• Christine Korsgaard - The Sources of Normativity (1992). Available Online.
• Sharon Street. 'What is Constructivism in Ethics and Metaethics?' Philosophical Compass 5 (2010). Available Online.

Moral Anti-Realism

• Nietzsche. (See above)
• J.L. Mackie. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977).

Normative Ethics

What is Normative Ethics?

Normative ethics includes mostly work about how one ought to act with regard to others. Normative moral theories are typically divided into three schools of thought: consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics, although there are others. Consequentialism is used to describe theories that take the relevant material of moral judgments to be the outcomes of the object being evaluated. Act utilitarianism, the view that an act is permissible just in case doing that act would maximize overall utility compared to the other possible acts, is one well-known form of consequentialism. However, there are other less strict versions of consequentialism. Deontological ethics were made famous by Kant, who held that one ought morally to do what the categorical imperative, or the dictates of reason itself, commanded. In spite of its Kantian roots, there have been more recent deontologists that take a lighter approach. Ross, for instance, held that we receive prima facie moral duties from common sense and that those serve as a guide to right action. Unlike consequentialism, deontological theories take there to be some inherent feature of particular acts that makes them right or wrong; the outcomes of the acts are not the main. Finally, proponents of virtue ethics argue that what is good, or the way things ought to be, is determined by certain virtues. The project of determining which traits are virtues is the main problem facing virtue ethicists. A common theme among these philosophers is an appeal to the sort of traits that an ideal member of the kind being evaluated might have.

Historically, most work in normative theory has been work on the three theories discussed above. However, recently with more work being done in metaethics, philosophers have begun to include more diverse theories and questions as parts of normative ethics. Some examples include normative moral theory modeled as problems in game theory (see Lewis and Gauthier), theories that borrow from, but try to move beyond the historical three, theories such as Parfit's or Scanlon's, and work about topics that are not immediately tied to normative decrees, topics such as welfare or moral agency.

• Michael Sandal's (Harvard) Justice lectures are an excellent introductory resource for normative ethics.
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Normative Ethics (2009). Available Online.

Important Works

Normative Ethical Theories

• Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. (Virtue Ethics)
• Immanuel Kant. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). (Deontological Ethics)
• JS Mill. Utilitarianism (1861). Available Online. (Consequentialist Ethics)
• G.E. Moore. Principia Ethica (1903). (Consequentialist Ethics)
• T.M. Scanlon. What We Owe to Each Other (1996). (Deontological Ethics)

Issues in Normative Ethics

• Derek Parfit. Reasons and Persons (1984). (Personal identity)
• Chris Heathwood. Welfare from the Routledge Companion to Ethics (2010). Available Online. (Welfare)

Applied Ethics

What is Applied Ethics

Applied ethics studies specific, often controversial, cases to try and decide whether they are right or wrong. Noteworthy examples include moral issues like abortion, capitol punishment, and assisted suicide. It might seem strange to work on very specific issues. Shouldn't a true normative theory (if there is one) make it clear what we should do in most controversial cases? Applied ethicists sometimes work with one normative theory in mind, but often times they try to draw out facts about controversial moral cases that are either important no matter which normative theory is true or that have implications for all normative theories. Applied ethicists might also try to reduce complicated cases into moral intuitions that everyone agrees on. If we reduce these controversial cases to the sorts of claims that we also sometimes use to evaluate our normative theories (claims like 'it's wrong to light a cat on fire for no good reason'), then we might be able to solve the controversial cases without necessarily knowing the true normative theory.

Important Works

• Peter Singer. Animal Liberation (1975)
• Peter Singer. Practical Ethics (1979)
• Tom Regan. The Case for Animal Rights (1983)
• Judith Jarvis Thompson. 'A Defense of Abortion,' Available Online
• David Benatar. The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and Boys (2012)
• Michael Sandal. What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (2012)

Introduction

• Michael Devitt and Richard Hanley. The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Language (2006).

Important Works

• Bertrand Russell. 'On Denoting' Mind 14.56 (1905), 479-93. Available Online
• Peter Strawson. 'On Referring' Mind 59.235 (1950), 320-44.
• Hilary Putnam. 'Meaning and Reference' The Journal of Philosophy 70.19 (1973), 699-711. (See also Putnam's extension of the article 'The Meaning of 'Meaning.')
• David Lewis. 'Scorekeeping in a Language Game' Journal of Philosophical Logic 8.1 (1979), 339-59.
• Saul Kripke. Naming and Necessity (1980).
• HP Grice. Studies in the Way of Words (1989) is a collection of Grice's important essays.
• Paul Horwich. 'A Use Theory of Meaning' Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 68.2 (2004), 351-72.

Introduction

• Jaegwon Kim. Philosophy of Mind (2011)
• Paul Churchland. Matter and Consciousness : A Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (1988).
• Tim Crane. *The Mechanical Mind: A Philosophical Introduction to Minds, Machines, and Mental Representation (2003).
• David Chalmers' Philosophy of Mind: Current and Contemporary Readings (2002) is a good (and very large) sourcebook and includes excerpts from a number of the other important works listed here.

Intentionality and Mental Representation

• Robert Cummins. Meaning and Mental Representation (1989).
• Jerry Fodor. 'Fodor's Guide to Mental Representation' Mind 373.94 (1985), 76-100
• Stephen Stich and Ted A. Warfield, eds. Mental Representation: A Reader (1994).
• William Ramsey. Representation Reconsidered (2006).
• Jerry Fodor. The Language of Thought (1980).

Consciousness and Qualia

• David Chalmers. The Conscious Mind (1996).
• Daniel Dennett. Consciousness Explained (1991).
• Thomas Nagel. 'What is it like to be a Bat?' The Philosophical Review 83.4 (1974), 435-50.
• Frank Jackson. 'Epiphenomenal Qualia' The Philosophical Quarterly 32.127 (1982), 127-36.

Behaviorism and its Discontents

• Gilbert Ryle. The Concept of Mind (1949).
• Noam Chomsky. Rev. of Verbal Behavior, by B.F. Skinner. Language 35.1 (1959), 26-58

Philosophers have often been preoccupied with science; scientists have often been preoccupied with philosophy. From its origins until the present moment, the philosophy of science has often been a driven mixture of the two groups. Thus, modern history of philosophy of science often begins with three principle figures who had a feet in both worlds: Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton, whose philosophy of science has recently received increased attention. A number of modern philosophers—such as Locke, Hume and Kant—are also recognized as having had important and influential discussions of science.

Contemporary philosophy of science can be traced back to the turn of the century, and the influence that a number of scientist-philosophers—such as Henri Poincare, Pierre Duhem (whose The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory is still often read the philosophy of science classes), Albert Einstein, and Ernest Mach—had on the logical empiricists of the Vienna Circle. The Vienna Circle was instrumental in bringing a focus on the philosophy of science to the Anglo-American philosophical community, particularly through the (contrasting) works of Rudolf Carnap (seriously, SEP?) and Karl Popper. Particular classics from this period include:

• Nelson Goodman. Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (1955).
• Karl Popper. The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959).
• Ernest Nagel. The Structure of Science (1961).

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) challenged earlier views that had placed an emphasis on scientific progress with his focus on revolutions and the 'incommensurability' of theories. The book massively divided the field. The question was not whether Kuhn needed to be responded to, but how:

• Paul Feyerabend sided with Kuhn (arguably going much further) against Popper’s more traditional analysis. See his Against Method (1975).
• Imre Lakatos is generally considered to have taken the opposite route. See his Proofs and Refutations (1976).
• Bas van Fraassen responded to the Kuhnian challenge with his constructive empiricism, particularly The Scientific Image (1980).
• Ian Hacking and Nancy Cartwright (among others) developed what has been called “new experimentalism”; the respective works of interest are Representing and Intervening and *How the Laws of Physics Lie (both 1984).

There have been two notable overall trends, post-Kuhn. First, there has been an increased focus on the history of science. Second, there has been an increased focus on the different sciences (particularly biology) and the differences that exist between the sciences. For good introductions to the general topic, see Alexander Bird’s Philosophy of Science (1998) or Alex Rosenberg’s The Philosophy of Science: A Contemporary Introduction (2000/2011).

Jose Luis Austin

Machiavelli's The Prince (1513) is often considered the one of the first modern works of political philosophy. What developed after him was the 'Social Contract' tradition. The major works of this tradition include Thomas Hobbes's The Leviathan (1660), John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1689), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin Of Inequality Among Men (1754) and The Social Contract: or Principles of Political Right) (1762).

Important works post-dating the social contract tradition include a number of essays by Kant, such as 'Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?' (1784) and 'Perpetual Peace' (1795) as well as John Stuart Mill's masterpiece On Liberty (1859).

Contemporary political philosophy has been massively shaped by the influence of John Rawls, particularly his A Theory of Justice (1971). Important responses include:

• Robert Nozick. Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974).
• Michael Sandel. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982).

Truth is an ancient topic in philosophy. Traditionally, two theories--correspondence and coherence--have dominated the discussion about what truth amounts to.

The 20th Century saw major changes, however, stemming mostly from the work of Alfred Tarski. Tarski's papers on defining truth have set the debate on the subject for the last 70 years. See:

• Alfred Tarski. 'The Semantic Conception of Truth: and the Foundations of Semantics' Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4.3 (1944), 341-76. Available Online.

Jose Luis Meaning

Tarski's work set the groundwork for the various deflationist theories that have come since. These theories typically stress the importance of the role that the word 'true' plays in our language as opposed to a particular 'inflationist' theory that presents truth as having some special role in the world. Important and influential works include:

Jose Luis Joyerias

• W.V. Quine. 'Meaning and Truth' in The Philosophy of Logic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970.
• Grover, D., Camp, Jr., J., & Belnap, Jr., N. D. 'A prosentential theory of truth' Philosophical Studies 27 (1975) 73-124.
• Saul Kripke. 'Outline of a Theory of Truth' The Journal of Philosophy 72.19 (1975), 690-716.
• Gupta, Anil. 'A Critique of Deflationism,' Philosophical Topics 21.2 (1993), 57-81.
• Horwich, Paul. Truth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Kitcher, Philip. 'On the Explanatory Role of Correspondence Truth' Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64.2 (2002), 346-64.
• Azzouni, Jody. Tracking Reason: Proof, Consequence and Truth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Recently, Pluralist of truth have also been gaining prominence.