Course: Philosophy for Engineers (Phil 830)
Room: CL 135 CL
Time: 3:00 - 4:15
Instructor: Rick Grush (grush+@pitt.edu)
Office: CL 1028J
Office Hours: Thursday 1:30 - 2:30
Office Phone 624-5790
Note: Email is BY FAR the easiest way to reach me.
This syllabus is subject to change. Alterations will be announced in class. An up-to-date version of the syllabus will be maintained at my website (http://www.pitt.edu/~grush).
Texts:
Hume, David (1990) Dialogues Concerning Natural
Religion.
There is also a reader available at Copy Cat for this course containing
a number of articles.
Furthermore, there may be a few additional readings required that
are not in the reader. I will make these available as handouts
as the course progresses.
In addition to these texts, a small number of books and articles will be on reserve in the Philosophy Reading Room (CL, 14th Floor). These additional texts and articles are not required, but some students may find them helpful. I will announce in class what I put there and when, and will try to keep that information on this website as it becomes available.
Class Organization:
In this class, we will try to gain exposure to the nature of philosophical reasoning, as well as some of the central problems of philosophy, traditional and current. The course will be divided roughly into thirds. The first unit will examine proofs for the existence of God. We will use Hume's Dialogues as a main text, but will supplement it with a number of articles from the reader. The second unit concerns biomedical ethics -- specifically topics such as the ethical considerations surrounding euthanasia and genetic engineering. Finally, we will examine the enterprise of artificial intelligence: Can machines think and have minds, or is this something that only humans, or other biological animals, can have?
Schedule:
The schedule is somewhat flexible, but to a first approximation it will be as follows. The material listed under readings should be read before the class session in question. We will be discussing it in class. If you do not fully understand the material when you read it, don't worry. That's what the class sessions are for. But make sure that you read it beforehand, and try to make as much sense of it as you can. If it becomes apparent that students are not doing the readings before class sessions, I will start instituting short quizzes at the beginning of class.
Session 01 (01/07): Intro to course, intro to the first part of the class, and initial discussion of the Design argument.
Session 02 (01/12): Design Argument: Dialogues, Paley
Session 03 (01/14): Design Argument: Dialogues
Session 04 (01/19): Cosmological Argument: Dialogues
Session 05 (01/21): Cosmological Argument: Edwards, Taylor
Session 06 (01/26): Ontological Argument: Plantinga
Session 07 (01/28): Ontological Argument: Plantinga
Session 08 (02/02): Arg. from Evil: Dialogues, Hick
Session 09 (02/04): Arg. from Evil: Edward & Hare
Session 10 (02/09): First Midterm (Arguments concerning the existence of God)
Session 11 (02/11): Genetic Engineering: Anderson
Session 12 (02/16): Genetic Engineering: Walters
Session 13 (02/18): Genetic Engineering: Glover
Session 14 (02/23): Euthanasia: Rachels
Session 15 (02/25): Euthanasia: Beauchamp
Session 16 (03/02): Euthanasia: Stinson & Stinson
Session 17 (03/04): ??
Session 18 (03/16): ??
Session 19 (03/18): Second Midterm (Biomedical Ethics)
Session 20 (03/23): AI: Turing
Session 21 (03/25): AI: Newell & Simon
Session 22 (03/30): AI: Newell & Simon
Session 23 (04/01): AI: Searle
Session 24 (04/06): AI: Dennett
Session 25 (04/08): AI: Dennett
Session 26 (04/13): AI: Churchland
Session 27 (04/15): AI: Churchland
Session 28 (04/20): AI: ??
Session 29 (04/22): Third Midterm (Artificial Intelligence)
Homework:
There is no homework except for the readings.
Quizzes:
There will be a small number (5 - 10) of quizzes on the readings at the beginning of some of the class sessions (chosen randomly). The quizzes will be very short, and will not require that you have understood all the material, only that you have read it and tried to understand it. An example question would be:
True or False: In the first part of Hume's Dialogues the following phrase is used by Philo:
In a large sense, indeed, we may be said to have an idea, or rather a notion of spirit, that is, we understand the meaning of the word, otherwise we could not affirm or deny anything of it. Moreover, as we conceive the ideas that are in the minds of other spirits by means of our own, which we suppose to be resemblances of them, so we know other spirits by means of our own soul, which in that sense is the image or idea of them, it having a like respect to other spirits, that blueness or heard sounds perceived by me has to those ideas perceived by another.
Anyone who has read the the first part of the dialogue will know that this passage is nowhere in it -- Philo never discusses the idea of 'spirit' in the dialogue, nor do any of the other participants. The quizzes will have 5 questions such as this, and you will have only 3 - 5 minutes to complete the exam.
NOTE: I don't want to make and administer these quizzes any more than you want to take them, so as long as it is clear that everyone is doing the reading before class, we will be able to dispense with them.
Exams:
There will be 3 midterm exams, and no final exam. Each midterm will focus exclusively on the topics covered in that segment of the course. All exams are in-class.
The format of the exams is as follows: During lecture, I will from time to time point out that a certain phrase or issue may appear on the exam. At that time, I will make clear what the question will consist of. There will be 2 kinds of question: sort answer/definition, and essay questions. The exam that I will hand out in class for the midterm will consist of some subset of these questions. I don't have the exact numbers worked out yet, but it will be something not too far from this:
During each 5 week period, I will point out in lecture something like 15 - 20 potential short answer/definitions, and something like 4 - 6 potential essay questions. For the actual midterm, I will select about 7 short questions, and of these, students will be required to answer 5 of their own choosing from those 7. I will also select 3 essay questions, and students will be required to answer any 2 of those 3. There will not be any questions on the exam there are not explicitly flagged as such during the lectures, so there should be no surprises, provided you attend all class sessions.
An example of a short answer question would be: Hume attacks the Argument from Design. State the main structure of this argument.
An example of an essay question would be: In the Dialogues, it is pointed out that the design argument leads easily to anthropomorphization. Explain why this is so. Discuss some of the conclusions Philo draws from the argument that its proponents do not want to be drawn.
Final Paper:
In addition to the three exams, a final paper of 6 - 9 pages is required. The paper will be due on the day of the scheduled final exam (though this class will not have a final exam as such), and can either be emailed to me, or turned in at the philosophy department office. No later than the end of March I will hand out in class a sheet with a number of suggested paper topics. Students are also free to write on a topic of their own choosing, provided they get the topic approved by me beforehand.
Class Participation:
Students are required to attend class, and join in the discussion to some extent. If you have read the material carefully beforehand, then you shouldn't worry at all about asking a 'stupid' question -- the only questions that bother me are the ones that make it clear that you have not read the material. But much of this material is difficult and obscure, and so I expect may student that have read it to still have questions on even the basic aspects of it. Also, students are welcome to email questions or points of discussion (even answers to questions raised in previous classes) to me, and I will bring them up in class, anonymously if you prefer. For students who are uncomfortable joining in the discussion verbally in class, using email is my recommendation for making sure that you do well on the 'class participation' component of the class.
Grades:
Grades will be based on the 3 exams, the final paper, and class participation. Each will count for roughly 20% of the final grade.
Make-up exams:
Make-up exams are offered only with a very good excuse, such as a doctor's note. Make-up exams will also consist of a selection of short-answer and essay questions, but a different selection that those given for the normal exam. Also, since students taking a make-up exam will have had more time to prepare, in order to be fair to the students who took the regular exam the make-up will be a bit longer -- 2 additional short-answer questions per week delay.
Recommendations:
1. Be sure to read the assigned material before class. This will help to insure that our class time is quality time, and not wasted with me and some of the students reiterating the material to those who haven't read it. Again, if it becomes clear that students are not reading the material before class, I will institute quizzes at the beginning of class.
2. While you are reading the material, before class, make notes about the reading, and especially any parts that do not make sense to you.
3. During class, make sure that your questions get answered. This may require you to actually raise the question yourself. But this is fine, and what I want. Don't be shy.
4. The idea is that 3 things will happen during class. You will gain a better understanding of the material, your questions will be answered, and you will learn about some of the questions that may appear on the exam.
5. After class, re-read the material for the session, paying special attention to the questions that you had before. Hopefully the material will make much more sense to you now.
6. As you are re-reading, keep the possible midterm questions in mind, so that you can nail the answers. In fact, you might want to write out the answers for each question at this point. If you do, then before the midterm, you will have all the answers to all the questions already in your notes, and studying for the exam will be easy.
Paper Topics:
1. According to Newell and Simon, having a mind is a matter of instantiating the correct formal system. According to Searle, it is a matter of being the right kind of 'stuff' -- something with the appropriate causal powers. So imagine that every day a scientist, while you are sleeping, replaces one-tenth of one percent of your neurons with functionally equivalent artificial neurons made of silicon. After 1000 days, your biological brain is now gone (flushed down the toilet, or fed to the scientist's cat, or perhaps just flung to some random part of the lab). Presumably Newell and Simon would say that you are still you -- but now you have a silicon brain (similarly, one can replace the wooden chess pieces with plastic chess pieces, one at a time, while people are playing chess -- and as long as one puts them in the right place, it is still the same game of chess they are playing -- they didn't stop playing one game at a given point and start playing some other game at that point). Searle would presumably say that you, at some point, were killed -- your brain is scattered over a large area of the earth (or the lab) in a manner similar to what would result from having a grenade go off in your mouth. Which view do you agree with, and why? What arguments could someone mount against your position, and why do you not think those arguments are persuasive?
2.