The course will meet Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 1pm, in Sayles 200. We will generally discuss a different paper each meeting, and each student is required to post a "respone" to the reading to the course's Canvas site by no later than 10am the day we will be discussing it. (This is to give us time to read and digest your responses.) Course meetings will consist of a mixture of lecture and discussion, shaped by and based upon students' postings to Canvas. Students are not specifically required but are encouraged to read each other's postings, to comment upon them, and generally to use Canvas as a platform for discussing the readings and asking questions.
Grades for the course will be determined as follows.
The short papers are due at 1pm on the day specified. (Electronic submissions are of course acceptable, as well. Please send me a PDF if you wish to submit electronically.) I will not accept late papers. On the other hand, you will find that I am quite prepared to grant extensions, so long as they are requested in advance, that is, at least one day prior to the due-date. Extensions will not be granted after that time except in very unusual and unfortunate circumstancess.
Because I am so reasonable, exploitation of my reasonableness will be taken badly.
Contemporary analytic philosophy began with certain discoveries in formal logic, and much of the work we shall be reading is informed in one way or another by logic: Arguments, premises, and conclusions are often stated using the concepts of formal logic. A working understanding of basic logic, such as one would acquire in Phil 0540, is therefore essential.
Prior exposure to philosophy is also essential: Much of the material we will be reading is difficult. As usual with 1000-level courses, then, at least one prior course in philosophy is required, and two are really preferred.
There is one required text for the course: Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity, which should be available at the Brown Bookstore.
Other readings will be distributed electronically. Many of these are available online, through Brown's digital journal holdings; others will be scans of articles, or chapters from books, that are not otherwise available digitally. Students will be able to download these from the course website.
The files are usually available in two forms. There are (i) a DjVu file and (ii) a PDF file. Why both forms? They have different virtues.
There is another advantage to DjVu. It is a file format specifically designed for scanned text, so then we're dealing with page scans (as we often are with older articles), the DjVu encoder produces files that are typically much smaller than the corresponding PDFs, sometimes dramatically smaller.
To view the PDFs, you will of course need a
PDF reader. For the DjVu files, you will need a DjVu reader. Free
browser plugins for Windows and Mac OSX are available from Caminova; Linux users can likely just install the djviewlibre package using their distro's package management system. Another option is Okular, which was originally written for Linux's
KDE Desktop Environment but which can now be run, experimentally, on Windows and OSX, as well. A list of other
DjVu resources is maintained at
djvu.org. There are also DjVu readers available for Android and iOS. Go to Play Store or whatever to find them.
The program I've used to convert PDFs to DjVu is
a simple Bash script I wrote myself, pdf2djvu. It relies upon other programs to do the real work and should run on OSX as well as on Linux.
Students may use laptops and the like to take notes in class or to access material we are discussing in class, but all other use of computers, tablets, and mobile devices is prohibited during class. This includes but is not limited to checking email, texting, and searching the web, even if the search is related to the course. I establish this rule not for my benefit, not even for yours, but rather for that of your peers.
In a study entitled "Laptop multitasking hinders classroom learning for both users and nearby peers", Faria Sana, Tina Weston, and Nichola Cepeda showed eactly that. It is not just that students who "multi-task" during class—check e-mail, text, or whatever—received significantly lower grades in the study than students who did not. This is not surprising, since the human brain simply cannot focus on very many things at one time. (If you're skeptical about this, then watch this video or perhaps some of these ones.)
Rather, the surprising conclusion was that students who were sitting near other students who were "mutl-tasking" also received significantly lower grades than students were who not. In fact, they were almost as distracted as the students who were actually doing the multi-tasking. There is thus evidence that "multi-tasking" does not only hurt the person doing it. It also harms the people around them. And that is the basis of my request that students not engage in such activities during class. If someone near you is doing so, you should feel free to ask them to stop.