Past Content
Here is a list of papers/books we have read, guest speakers we hosted, and courses we completed in our group. It should give an idea of what kind of material we discuss. You can find our current schedule here.
Guest Speakers
Can AI Technologies Make Us More (Artificially) Intelligent? - Prof. Sven Nyholm
Socially Constructed Norms and Moral Obligations - Prof. Laura Valentini
Formal Assumptions Behind Different Approaches To Number Problems - Prof. Martin Rechnauer
Brain-Computer Interfaces - Sebastian Drosselmeier
Consciousness & Mind
Brains and Behavior - Hilary Putnam
Consciousness and its Place in Nature - David Chalmers
Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons - Derek Parfit
Idealism, Panpsychism, and Emergentism - William Seager
Is it Enough to Get the Behaviour Right? - Hector Levesque
Minds, Brains and Programs - John Searle
The Extended Mind - Andy Clark and David Chalmers
What Is It Like to Be a Bat? - Thomas Nagel
Ethics
Animal Rights (Excerpt from 'Anarchy, State and Utopia') - Robert Nozick
Eating Animals The Nice Way - Jeff McMahan
Famine, Affluence and Morality - Peter Singer
Greater Happiness for a Greater Number: Is that Possible and Desirable? - Ruut Veenhoven
Hippias Minor - Plato
How it is not “Just Like Diabetes”: Mental Disorders and the Moral Psychologist - Nomy Arpaly
Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem - Judith Jarvis Thomson
Moral Plularism - Susan Wolf
Overpopulation and the Quality of Life- Derek Parfit
Secrecy in consequentialism: A defence of esoteric morality - Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer
The badness of death, The deprivation account - Shelly Kagan (50 min video lecture)
The Right to Privacy - Judith Jarvis Thomson
Voluntary Euthanasia: A Utilitarian Perspective - Peter Singer
Why It Is Better Never to Come into Existence - David Benatar
Epistemology
Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? - Edmund L. Gettier
Moral Epistemology: The Mathematics Analogy - Justin Clarke-Doane
Pragmatism's Conception of Truth - William James
The Inescapability of Gettier Problems - Linda Zagzebski
The New Riddle of Induction - Nelson Goodman
Vagueness - Bertrand Russell
What Mary Didn't Know - Frank Jackson
What RoboMary Knows - Daniel Dennett
Free Will
Are We Free to Break the Laws? - David Lewis
For The Law, Neuroscience Changes Nothing and Everything - Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen
Freedom and Resentment - Peter Strawson
Metaphysics
The Absurd - Thomas Nagel
On Sense and Reference - Gottlob Frege
On What There Is - W. V. Quine
The Unreality of Time - J. M. E. McTaggart
Two Dogmas of Empiricism - W. V. Quine
Political Philosophy
Apology of Socrates - Plato
Crito - Plato
Just and Unjust wars - Michael Walzer + On the moral equality of combatants - Jeff McMahan (4+6 page excerpts)
Justice as Fairness - John Rawls
On the Limits to the Authority of Society over the Individual - John Stuart Mill
Optimal Deliberation - Ian Shapiro
The false promise and bitter fruit of Neoliberalism: political economic disembedding, cultural transformation, and the rise of proto-fascist politics - Thomas I. Palley
The Case of the Speluncean Explorers - Lon L. Fuller
Second Treatise on Government (Chapters 3-5, 7, 9) - John Locke
What (if Anything) is Wrong with Capitalism? - Rahel Jaeggi
Religion
Euthyphro - Plato
Evil and Omnipotence - John Leslie Mackie
God, freedom, and evil - Alvin Plantinga (sections 4 through 7)
Why I Am Not a Christian - Bertrand Russell
Science
"Conjectures and Refutations" by Karl Popper + "Change and Crisis in Science: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn (7+7 page excerpts)
The Demise of the Demarcation Problem - Larry Laudan
The Fine-Tuning Argument - Neil Manson
The Paradoxes of Time Travel - David Lewis
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences - Eugene Wigner
Why Is There Something, Rather Than Nothing? - Sean Carroll
Social Philosophy
Modernity - An Incomplete Project - Jürgen Habermas
The Subject and Power - Michel Foucault
What is Enlightenment - Immanuel Kant
Other
Are You Living In a Computer Simulation? - Nick Bostrom
Existentialism Is a Humanism - Jean-Paul Sartre
Feminism is for Everybody - bell hooks (first and last chapter of book)
In Defense of Posthuman Dignity - Nick Bostrom
Letter To Menoeceus - Epicurus
On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense - Nietzsche
Principal Doctrines - Epicurus
Where Am I - Daniel Dennett
Zhuangzi & Taoism - Philosophy in Motion (videos)
Books and Courses
Bacon to Kant - An Introduction to Modern Philosophy - Garrett Thomson
Introduction to Philosophy - coursera course
Political Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction - David Miller
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas S. Kuhn
Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy - Simon Blackburn