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.

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