Independent Study Course Proposal

[lennybound]

Next semester I’m enrolled in an independent study course under the guidance of one of my philosophy department’s faculty members. In order for me to take the course I need to propose the course topic, description, and assigned readings to the department chairperson and get it approved. If anyone reading this has some knowledge of Philosophy of

Comments

[roomof0nesown]

that sounds like a good set of questions for the course. :)
i don't know much/anything about the readings, so i can't really comment on that, but the questions seem pretty solid to me.

[my_wits_end]

Goodness, that's a lot of GAP. I am just finishing up a philosophy of mind course and we read maybe a third of that material. M.C. Price has a good article that is coming from kind of a different perspective, "Should We Expect to Feel as if We Understand Consciousness", which is from the book Explaining Consciousness edited by J. Shear, which is a collection of responses to Chalmers' paper Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness. I'm actually surprised not to see Chalmers on the list...not that I think he has a good way of framing the problem and the way he sets it up leads to a kind of crazy pan-psychic solution, but a lot of people have felt it necessary to respond to him. I'm assuming you know of his online papers on consciousness website. Looks like an interesting course.

[lennybound]

I'm about halfway through reading "The Conscious Mind" and absolutely love it.

The reason why I didn't include him was that I want the readings to be as specific as possible to the "Explanatory Gap" and its relation to qualia. Most of Chalmer's stuff is about consciousness, and so is somewhat outside of what I wanted to do. I realize how interrelated consciousness and qualia are, as well as how closely related the "Explanatory Gap" is to the "Hard Problem," but I don't want the course to become too wide.

In other words, the list of readings were the best articles I could find specifically about the "Gap," and I'll probably read a lot more beyond them in my own time.

Also, thanks for the suggestion on the M.C. Price article. I'll have to look into it. :-)

[leokhyber]

It has recipes! And a bunch of Calvin and Hobbes strips!