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

• The Reality of Free Will - Prof. Christian List

• 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

Computation and Intelligence

• Are You Living In a Computer Simulation? - Nick Bostrom

• Minds, Brains and Programs - John Searle

• Is it Enough to Get the Behaviour Right? - Hector Levesque

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

• What Is It Like to Be a Bat? - Thomas Nagel

• Where Am I - Daniel Dennett

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

• In Defense of Posthuman Dignity - Nick Bostrom

• Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem - Judith Jarvis Thomson

• Moral Plularism - Susan Wolf

• Overpopulation and the Quality of Life- Derek Parfit

• 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

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

• What Mary Didn't Know - Frank Jackson

• What RoboMary Knows - Daniel Dennett

Political Philosophy

• Apology of Socrates - Plato

• Crito - Plato

• Justice as Fairness - John Rawls

• On the Limits to the Authority of Society over the Individual - John Stuart Mill

• Optimal Deliberation - Ian Shapiro

• 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

• Why I Am Not a Christian - Bertrand Russell

• Zhuangzi & Taoism - Philosophy in Motion (videos)

Science

• 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/Diverse

• Existentialism Is a Humanism - Jean-Paul Sartre

• Letter To Menoeceus - Epicurus

• Principal Doctrines - Epicurus

Foundations Track

• Bacon to Kant - An Introduction to Modern Philosophy - Garrett Thomson

• Introduction to Philosophy - coursera course

• Political Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction - David Miller

• Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy - Simon Blackburn