Past Papers

Here is an incomplete list of papers/books we have read and courses we did in our group. It should give an idea of what kind of material we discuss. You can find our current schedule here.

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

• Consciousness and its Place in Nature - David Chalmers

• Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons - Derek Parfit

• 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

• Famine, Affluence and Morality - Peter Singer

• Greater Happiness for a Greater Number: Is that Possible and Desirable? - Ruut Veenhoven

• 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

• Why It Is Better Never to Come into Existence - David Benatar

Epistemology

• Pragmatism's Conception of Truth - William James

• Vagueness - Bertrand Russell

Existentialism

• Existentialism Is a Humanism - Jean-Paul Sartre

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

• What Mary Didn't Know - Frank Jackson

• What RoboMary Knows - Daniel Dennett

Political Philosophy

• Apology of Socrates - Plato

• Justice as Fairness - John Rawls

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

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 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

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