Consciousness

Central European University A Program for University Teachers, Advanced Ph.D. Students, Researchers and Professionals in the Social Sciences and Humanities Summer University

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Consciousness

July 8 - July 19, 2002

Course directors:

Tim Crane (University College, London, UK)

Katalin Farkas (CEU, Budapest, Hungary)

Resource persons:

Gergely Ambrus (University of Miskolc, Hungary)

Ferenc Huoranszki (CEU, Budapest, Hungary)

Nikola Grahek (University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia)

Marie McGinn (University of York, UK)

Tadeusz Szubka (Catholic University of Lublin, Poland)

Short biographies

Tim Crane Reader in Philosophy at University College London, and the Director of the Philosophy Programme, School of Advanced Study, University of London. He was educated at the Universities of Durham, York and Cambridge, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1989. He is the author of The Mechanical Mind (Penguin 1995), Elements of Mind (OUP 2001), of a number of articles in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics, and the editor of The Contents of Experience (CUP 1992), Dispositions: a Debate (Routledge 1995) and History of the Mind-Body Problem (Routledge 2000). He has been a visiting fellow at the Research School of the Social Sciences, Australian National University, and a visiting lecturer at the University of Sydney. He is an editor of Routledge's International Library of Philosophy of the Routledge Philosophical Guidebooks, and an associate editor of the interdisciplinary journal Mind and Language. He is currently working on the metaphysics of mind and the intentionality of consciousness.

Katalin Farkas Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Central European University, Budapest. MA in Mathematics and Philosophy 1993, Ph.D. in Philosophy 1998, at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. After receiving her Ph.D., Dr Farkas was a member of the Research Group in Philosophy of Language, affiliated with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She has been Academic Visitor at the University of Liverpool and at the University of Sydney. In 2002, she is junior fellow at the Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study. She published papers on the philosophy of language and mind, and on skepticism. Her current research focuses on the internalism/externalism debate in the philosophy of mind, the origins of the modern conception of the mind and its relation to skepticism.

Gergely Ambrus Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Miskolc, Department of Philosophy. BA in Aesthetics, 1993, MA in Philosophy, 1995, Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Humanities, Ph.D. in Philosophy, 2001, Eötvös Loránd University, Analytical Philosophy Doctoral School. He has been teaching at Miskolc University since 1997, and also taught at the philosophy department of Eötvös Loránd University in 1998 and 2001, and at the University of Liverpool in 1999 Sept.-Dec. Sept. 2001- Jan. 2002 research fellow at the Vienna Circle Institute, Vienna. He is participant in several research projects concerning issues in contemporary philosophy of mind and metaphysics.

Nikola Grahek Associate Professor at the University of Belgrade, Philosophical Faculty, Department of Philosophy, teaching epistemology and philosophy of mind. MA, Ph.D., University of Belgrade. Professor Grahek has been a member of the Mind/Brain research group at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), University of Bielefeld, Germany; Research Assistant at the Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University, USA, and Research Fellow at the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg, Delmenhorst, Germany. He has written extensively, in English, German and Serbo-Croat, in the area of the philosophy of mind, particularly on the neurophilosophical grounds of pain phenomena.

Ferenc Huoranszki Associate Professor of Philosophy at Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. M. A. in Political Philosophy, York, 1989; Ph.D. in Philosophy, Budapest, 1991. After 1991 he taught at the Eötvös Loránd University where he was also Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Humanities from 1993 until 1995. Research fellowships in Paris, EHESS, 1992; Cambridge, 1993; Edinburgh 1996. His research interest has two foci. One is political philosophy, mainly the problems of distributive justice, political obligations, autonomy and the application of decision-theoretic models in ethics and political philosophy. The other is philosophy of mind and action, particularly dualism, consciousness, intentionality and free will. He is the editor of a volume, which contains selections of the works of the major contemporary analytic political philosophers and author of a book on the same topic. He also wrote a book on some of the major problems in contemporary analytic metaphysics (laws and properties, causation, modality, time, dualism and free will) which was published recently.

Marie McGinn Senior Lecturer at York University, UK. D.Phil Oxford, 1981; B.Phil Oxford, 1975; BSc Manchester, 1972. Dr McGinn has written two books on Wittgenstein's later philosophy (Sense and Certainty: A Reply to the Sceptic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) and Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations (London: Routledge, 1997) and articles on Wittgenstein, epistemology and philosophy of mind. She is currently writing a book on Wittgenstein's Tractatus for Oxford University Press. She is Associate Editor of the journal Philosophical Investigations.

Tadeusz Szubka Ph.D. received in 1992; Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Catholic University of Lublin. On completing his graduate education in Poland, he did postdoctoral research at University of Cambridge and Oxford University, University of Notre Dame, USA, and University of Queensland, Australia. In 2000 he was a Mellon Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, and in 2000/2001 academic year held a Fulbright Senior Grant at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. He has published extensively both in Polish (including two books: one on the analytical metaphysics of P. F. Strawson, and the other on semantic antirealism), and in English (including a co-editorship of a widely used collection on the mind-body problem). He is currently working on a book on methods of analytical philosophy, and on papers defending the epistemic conception of truth and exploring the metaphysical consequences of antirealism. He is also preparing a survey article on recent debates in the philosophy of mind.

Course objectives

Consciousness is one of the most widely discussed research topics in contemporary philosophy of mind. A recent (selected) bibliography lists no less than 999 philosophical papers on the subject written in the past few decades. The present course offers an orientation in the key problems of consciousness through lectures and discussions, in order to help participants to design curricula on the subject, as well as to offer a range of research topics of current interest. The specific aims of the course include

	situating the problem of consciousness against a historical background in the philosophy of mind
	placing the problem of consciousness in the context of other issues in contemporary philosophy of mind
	providing an overview of the most important debates concerning consciousness
	engaging participants in an in-depth discussion of some recent results in the study of consciousness (these include research done by the resource persons)

Course level

The course is offered to junior faculty and advanced graduate students (mainly in philosophy, possibly in psychology or cognitive science) interested in the philosophy of mind. Participants are required to read and understand papers prior to the course. Therefore some general knowledge of 20^th century analytic philosophy is necessary.

Course format

The course offers a combination of lectures and seminars, including student presentations, some prepared in advance. As it is customary in the analytic philosophical tradition, the course will focus on analysis of arguments that can be offered for and against various positions in the debate on consciousness. Participants are expected to take an active part in the discussions.

Course content

Consciousness refers to an aspect of our mental life. Conscious creatures are those who experience the world in such a way that it make sense to ask (to use Thomas Nagel's famous phrase), what it is like to be this creature. Paradigmatic examples of conscious phenomena include the subjective experiential features of sense-perception, sensations and feelings.

"How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp" said T. H. Huxley in 1866. More than a century later many philosophers still consider consciousness as the biggest mystery which stands as an outstanding obstacle in our attempt to achieve a scientific understanding of the universe. There are many problems waiting for a solution in physics, biology or neuroscience, but in these cases we have at least an idea about what these solutions might look like. But the scientific explanation of consciousness, it is suggested, is something about which we are entirely in the dark.

The course is built around the following interconnected themes:

In the modern tradition, the agenda of discussing philosophical issues about the mind was set largely by Descartes' work. One panel in the course aims at a problem-oriented reconstruction of Descartes' legacy, partly through a comparison of Descartes' views on the mind with the views of philosophers in the medieval and ancient tradition.

The broadly Cartesian conception of the mind received various criticisms in the twentieth century, famously - among others - by Wittgenstein. There will be one panel in the course devoted to the discussion of Wittgenstein's views on the mental, including his anti-private language argument.

One of the most knotty problems inherited by the modern tradition from Descartes, and often called The Mind-Body problem, concerns the interaction between minds and bodies. In the twentieth century many philosophers became convinced that the only solution to this problem is adopting some version of physicalism, that is, the view that the mind - and everything else in the world - is physical. One variety of physicalism tries to exploit the notion of the supervenience of the mental on the physical - this issue will be examined in detail in one panel of the course.

The problem of consciousness, however - which is often regarded as another, or even "the" major aspect of the mind-body problem – presents an apparently formidable objection to physicalist theories. The problem, in short, is what puzzled Huxley: there seems to be no intelligible connection between whatever neural basis gives rise say to a feeling of pain on the one hand, and what the pain feels like on the other hand. This puzzle, which is often called the explanatory gap, served as a starting point to a number of influential arguments - the so-called knowledge and the conceivability arguments - for the conclusion that consciousness cannot be accounted in a physicalistic framework. Several panels deal with these and other classical arguments; there will be a general overview of the arguments, and one lecture specifically devoted to conceivability arguments.

As our earlier example suggests, pain is often taken as the paradigm case of the qualitative or phenomenal state that is in principle resistant to purely physicalistic or naturalistic accounts. One panel in the course discusses the prospects of objectivist and subjectivist accounts of pain and considers the chances of closing the explanatory gap.

A number of philosophers replied to anti-physicalist arguments from consciousness by acknowledging that certain aspects of the mind, the subjective qualities of experience - also known as qualia - resist physicalistic reduction. Defenders of this view often compartmentalize the mental into a qualitative and an intentional realm, arguing that the problem of consciousness and anti-physicalism emerges mainly for the first type of phenomena. This issue will be discussed and critically assessed in a separate panel of the course.

Course syllabus

TOPICS	PERSON	HOURS	METHOD	DISCUSSION POINTS
The legacy of Descartes; the agenda for the modern tradition in the philosophy of mind	Katalin Farkas	7	Lectures (3) + seminars (4) including presentations by participants	- what is the difference between Descartes and the ancient/medieval tradition on the issue of the mind? - - - are there points of continuity? - are there any Cartesian elements left in the contemporary thinking about the mind?
Wittgenstein's philosophy of mind	Marie McGinn	8	Lectures (4) + seminars (4). The Seminars will focus on the detailed study of the text.	- Wittgenstein's philosophical method. - The method applied to sections of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, in particular, those on private language, on sensation concepts and the distinction between inner and outer.
The mind-body problem: some recent developments	Tadeusz Szubka	8	Lecture (4) + seminar discussion (2) + a detailed discussion of a recent (2000) paper by Nagel (2)	- what are the possible solutions to the mind-body problem? - are the traditional terms of the debate - choosing between dualism - and physicalism - forced on us? - is it possible to solve the problem by a compromise?
Consciousness and supervenience	Ferenc Huoranszki	3	Lecture + discussion	- what is the meaning of supervenience? Is supervenience explanatory? If yes what does it explain? - what forms of consciousness exist? What forms of consciousness seem to be problematic for functionalism and why?
The conceivability arguments	Gergely Ambrus		Lecture + discussion	- is physicalism an a priori or a posteriori view? - is it possible to refute physicalism with the conceivability (or "zombie" argument)?
Pain and the phenomenal mind	Nikola Grahek	8	Lecture (4) + participant discussion and presentations (4)	- to assess the rights and wrongs of the objectivist and subjectivist interpretations of pain and the general thesis of the irreducibility of the phenomenal mind.
Intentionality and consciousness	Tim Crane	7	Lecture (4) + discussion and presentations (3)	- assess the idea that the mental is to be divided into the qualitative and the intentional - assess the idea that consciousness consists in the instantiation of non-intentional properties
Themes in consciousness	Tim Crane and Katalin Farkas	2	Round table discussion	- discuss the main features of the course - discuss possible research projects

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