The course will meet Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 1pm, in Alumnae Hall 212. Course meetings will primarily consist of discussion, though I will lecture when that seems advisable.
We will generally discuss a single paper each meeting. Each student is required to post a `response' to the reading to Canvas by no later than 12:01am the day we will be discussing it. A typical post would be a short paragraph commenting upon, or asking questions about, some aspect of the reading. It's fine to write more if one has more to say, but a short paragraph is all that's required. Note, in particular, that you do not need to answer any of the questions asked in the reading notes, let alone all of them.
After shopping period, the class will be divided into two groups. For each meeting, one group will be required to post in the way just described; students in the other group will be required either (i) to post one question they'd like us to discuss in class or (ii) to comment upon one of the other students' posts. Students should plan to read each other's postings and generally to use Canvas as a platform for discussing the readings and asking questions.
Class periods marked as 'Discussion' are an opportunity for us to try to synthesize some of what we've been studying. (They also occur when papers are due, so you do not have any additional reading for those days.) You should plan to review the papers we've read since the previous Discussion session. For the Canvas site post, it will be enough to post one question you'd like us to discuss in class.
Office hours are listed on the Instructors page. You may attend either in person or by Zoom. Please note that you do not need to have some fantastic question to attend office hours. You're more than welcome to stop by just to chat about the readings, or about philosophy. This is time set aside specifically for this purpose, so you should not feel as if you are 'interrupting' or 'bothering' your instructors when you stop by.
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, and logic symbolism will appear frequently. A working understanding of basic logic, such as one would acquire in Phil 0640, is therefore essential. A course in logic is not a formal prerequisite, but those who have had absolutely no exposure to logic should consult the instructor. Really, the main thing you need to know is what something like:
∃x(Fx ∧ ∀y(Fy → x = y) ∧ Gx)
means.
Prior exposure to philosophy is also essential: Much of the material we will be reading is difficult, and some of it is very 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 and from the Canvas site.
Most of what we will be reading was written by white men. This is because most of what we will be reading was written at a time when Western philosophy was dominated by white men (even more than it is now). Later in the course, when we read more contemporary material, there will be some readings by women. I'll also list readings by women among the optional readings. People of color are even less well represented, unfortunately.
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.
DjVu is a file format that was specifically designed for scanned text, so the DjVu encoder produces files that are typically much smaller than the corresponding PDFs. Note that the DjVus posted here are almost always searchable.
There's an online utility you can use to convert DjVU to PDF: djvu2pdf.com. The results are not searchable, and many of the PDFs that accompany the DjVus are not searchable, either.
To view the DjVu files, you will need a DjVu reader. Linux users can likely just install the djviewlibre package using their distro's package management system. There are also free (as in beer and as in speech) readers for
Windows and
Mac OSX.
If you follow those links, you will see a list of files you can download. Just download the most recent one. (Do not download the file mentioned above the list of files as the "latest version". That is source code.)
There is also a
Chrome extension
that should work on any OS, and also one for Firefox.
A list of other DjVu resources is maintained at djvu.org. There are also DjVu readers available for Android and other mobile OSs. Go to the Play Store or whatever to find them.
The program I've used to convert PDFs to DjVu is
a simple Bash script, pdf2djvu. It relies upon other programs to do the real work and should run on most varieties of Unix.
Jim Pryor, a friend and former colleague who is now at UNC, has written two pieces that address the questions how to read philosophy papers and how to write philosophy papers. You may find them here:
If you are new (or newish) to philosophy, then they are very highly recommended. And, even if you are an old hand, you are sure to find something of value in what Jim has to say.Here is another set of pages, written by Joe Cruz, who is at Williams College, about how to write a philosophy paper. It presents an example of a short philosophy paper and shows how it develops, from initial sketches through a series of drafts.
Here's my advice: The first time you read a paper, just read through it, and don't worry too much if you're not getting everything. At this point, you're just trying to get a general sense for what the author is trying to do. The second time you read the paper, you should slow down. This is when you really do want to pause and think carefully through the various arguments that the author is giving. You will find extended reading notes to help you on the syllabus. If you have questions about the reading, you should feel free to post those to the Canvas site. This is better than emailing me: As usual, if you have a question, then it's very likely that other people will have the same question.
Grades for the course will be determined as follows.
Pay no attention to Canvas's report of your cumulative grade. It is useless.
All work for the course should be submitted on Canvas.
The short papers are due at the beginning of class on the day specified. Late papers will have one grade 'level' deducted for each day they are late. (So, e.g., a B+ would become a B after one day late, a B- after two days.) That said, I am quite prepared to grant extensions, so long as they are requested at least one day prior to the due-date. Extensions will not be granted after that time except in very unusual and unfortunate circumstancess.
You should thus expect your total time commitment for this class to be about 188 hours.
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 "multi-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.
Brown University is committed to full inclusion of all students. Please inform the instructor early in the term if you have a disability or other condition that might require accommodations or modification of any of the course procedures. For more information, please contact the Office of Student and Employee Accessibility Services. Students in need of short-term academic advice or support can contact one of the deans in the Dean of the College's office.