Capstone Seminar: Other Minds

Catalog description

Capstone seminar for the major. We are born into, and live in a world that includes other minds, minds both similar to our own (a best friend), and minds completely unlike our own (an octopus). We seem to enjoy intersubjectivity, empathy, and certainty in Others. We experience this in the form of a cultural world. There are traces of human consciousness everywhere we go, like in our basic linguistic practices and cooperative interactions, in our tools, in our aesthetic experience. We gain a world through Others - initially from those closest to us, who raise us, and then in our most personal spheres life. We participate in communal traditions, holidays and rites of passage. But we also experience Others in a more direct way. When we have a conversation with a sibling, or see a stranger on the street, we experience them as having a mind - a nest of thoughts, feelings, emotions. Even if we are not sure exactly what they are experiencing, we are assured that they are experiencing something. And yet, in philosophy, the classic problem of other minds won't go away. I believe that I have a mind; but the data and methods I use to arrive at this belief are not available to me when it comes to others. I form my concept of mind out of my own experience, and I apply that concept to myself using criteria that also are based in my own experience; but these criteria cannot be met, and thus not applied, to others. In this seminar, we will explore the problem of other minds, and its possible solutions and dissolutions, by reading selected works from both the analytic and continental traditions, including (possibly) writings by Descartes, Locke, Reid, Husserl, Stein, Scheler, Sartre, Fanon, Levinas, Austin, Ayer, Wittgenstein, Kripke, Cavell, Nagel, Godfrey-Smith, Avramides, Gallgher and Zahavi.