Links: all supervision subjects; supervision instructions.

Here are the topics, questions, and reading lists for the Part II Philosophy of Mind supervisions in the Philosophy Tripos at Cambridge. Students must choose just one question when more than one is listed. Only four topics will be covered.

1 Intentionality

Question:

‘Thermostats really have beliefs and desires.’ Discuss.

Required reading:

  • Dennett, ‘Intentional systems’.
  • Searle, ‘Minds, Brains, and Computers’.
  • Haugeland, ‘Understanding: Dennett and Searle’.

2 Consciousness

Question:

Can science explain consciousness?

Required reading:

  • Thomas Nagel, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’.
  • Frank Jackson, ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’.
  • Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (ch. 3).

3 Knowledge about the mind

Questions:

  1. Do we have privileged access to our own minds?
  2. Is introspection reliable?

Primary reading:

  • Tyler Burge, ‘Our Entitlement to Self-Knowledge’.
  • Carruthers, ‘How We Know Other Minds: The Relationship Between Mindreading and Metacognition’.
  • Eric Schwitzgebel, ‘The Unreliability of Naive Introspection’.

Further reading:

  • Christopher Peacocke, ‘Entitlement, Self-Knowledge and Conceptual Redeployment’.
  • Sydney Shoemaker, ‘Introspection and the Self’.
  • Gareth Evans, ‘Self-Identification’.
  • Jane Heal, ‘On First-Person Authority’.
  • Amie Thomasson, ‘First-Person Knowledge in Phenomenology’.

4 Imagination

Question:

Why do I cower when watching a horror movie, despite knowing that it is not real?

Primary reading:

  • Amy Kind, ‘The Heterogeneity of the Imagination’.
  • Kendall Walton, ‘Fearing Fictions’.
  • Amy Kind, ‘The Puzzle of Imaginative Desire’.

Further reading:

  • Tyler Doggett and Andy Egan, ‘Wanting Things You Don’t Want: The Case for an Imaginative Analogue of Desire’.
  • Susanna Schellenberg, ‘Belief and Desire in Imagination and Immersion’.

5 Perceptual content

Questions:

  1. Can you see that someone is angry? (To get permission to take this option, explain in a two-sentence email what the question means.)
  2. Do perceptual experiences have contents?

Primary reading:

  • Tim Crane, ‘Is Perception a Propositional Attitude?’.
  • Susanna Siegel, ‘Do Perceptual Experiences Have Contents?’.

Further reading:

  • Charles Travis, ‘The Silence of the Senses’.
  • Susanna Siegel, ‘Cognitive Penetrability and Perceptual Justification’.

Thanks to Alex Fisher for help with this page.