Chalmers and His Critics (Philosophy)

The seminar “Chalmers and His Critics” (Philosophy of Being, Cognition, and Value at University of Warsaw) takes place every Wednesday, at 18:30 in room 12 (Institute of Philosophy, Krakowskie Przedmieście 3).

The purpose of the seminar is to analyze main ideas of David Chalmers, especially in the light of criticisms. We will focus mainly on his seminal book and two most important papers. And maybe on his latest book, The Character of Consciousness (just appeared with OUP).

Tentative reading list (open to suggestions)

• David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, Oxford: Oxford UP 1996.

  Introduction:

  • Chalmers, David J., 1999. Precis of the Conscious Mind. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59, no. 2: 435.

    2-D Semantics:

  • David J. Chalmers (2006). Two-Dimensional Semantics. In E. Lepore & B. Smith (eds.), Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Language. Oxford University Press.

  • Stalnaker, Robert C. 2004. Assertion Revisited: On the Interpretation of Two-Dimensional Modal Semantics. Philosophical Studies 118, no. 1/2: 299-322.

  • Schroeter, Laura. 2004. The Rationalist Foundations of Chalmers’s 2-D Semantics. Philosophical Studies 118, no. 1/2: 227-255.

    Conceivability and Zombies:

  • Polcyn, Karol. 2006. Conceivability, Possibility, and A Posteriori Necessity : on Chalmers ’ s Argument for Dualism. Diametros, no. 7: 37 – 55.

    Conceptual Analysis, Reduction and Supervenience:

  • Chalmers, David J, and Frank Jackson. 2001. Conceptual Analysis and Reductive Explanation. Philosophical Review 110, no. 3: 315-360.

  • Polger, Thomas W. 2008. H2O, ‘Water’, and Transparent Reduction. Erkenntnis 69, no. 1: 109-130.

    Intrinsic Properties:

  • Esfeld, Michael. 2003. Do relations require underlying intrinsic properties? A physical argument for a metaphysics of relations. Metaphysica. International Journal for Ontology & Metaphysics, no. 1: 1-14.

  • Tadeusz Ciecierski, TBD.

    Naturalistic Dualism, Zombies, Qualia, Reactionism:

  • Frankish, Keith. 2007. The Anti-Zombie Argument. The Philosophical Quarterly, 57, no. 229: 651-666.

  • Bayne, Tim. 2001. Chalmers on the Justification of Phenomenal Judgments. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62, no. 2: 407-419.

  • Don Ross (2005). Chalmers’s Naturalistic Dualism: The Irrelevance of the Mind-Body Problem to the Scientific Study of Consciousness. In Christina E. Erneling & David Martel Johnson (eds.), The Mind as a Scientific Object: Between Brain and Culture. Oxford University Press.

  • Daniel Dennett, Sweet Dreams (chap. 1 & 5), MIT Press, 2005.

Against the Metaphysical Philosophy of Mind

• Ross, Don & Spurrett, David (2004). What to say to a skeptical metaphysician? A defense manual for cognitive and behavioral scientists. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27 (5):603-627.
• Additional reading: A. Chemero and M. Silberstein, “After the Philosophy of Mind”, Philosophy of Science, 75, 1-27, 2008.

First-person and third-person science of consciousness

• David Chalmers, How Can We Construct a Science of Consciousness?, in The Cognitive Neurosciences III, edited by Michael Gazzaniga (MIT Press, 2004).
• Daniel C. Dennett, Sweet Dreams, chapter 2.

The Extended Mind

• Andy Clark, David Chalmers, The Extended Mind, Analysis, 58:10-23, 1998.

  • The Extended Mind ed. by Richard Menary (MIT Press, June 2010)., especially chapter 4 & 7.

Computationalism and its critics

• David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, chapter 9.
• Hilary Putnam, Representation and Reality, MIT Press, chapter 4

Chalmers on other accounts of consciousness

• David Chalmers, Consciousness and its Place in Nature, In The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind, edited by Stephen Stich and Fritz Warfield (Blackwell, 2003)

Representation and Experience

• David Chalmers, The Representational Character of Experience, in The Future for Philosophy, edited by Brian Leiter (Oxford University Press, 2004).

Handouts

• Leon Ciechanowski – Two-dimensional semantics
• Kaśmir Ciechanowski – The Conscious Mind, chapter 2, section 4 – conceptual truth and necessary truth
• Kinga Jęczmińska – Supervenience

Additional reading

• Christian Nimtz – Two-Dimensional Semantics – The basics
• Daniel Dennett – Quining Qualia