Annotation
The Character of Consciousness
James Hill and Jakub Mihálik
Time: Thursday 15.50-17.25
Place: Room 225V in the Philosophy Faculty
The aim of this course is to offer a critical insight into some of the problems of consciousness as they are discussed in contemporary philosophy of mind. Our course will be centered around David Chalmers's 2010 book The
Character of Consciousness and we will try to understand and philosophically evaluate Chalmers's nonreductive view of consciousness which can be seen as a critical reaction to various kinds of reductionism that have been prevalent in the 20th century English-language philosophy of mind. While we will spend some time inspecting the motivations of the nonreductive approach, we will also look into some of the positive alternatives to materialism, such as property dualism, dual-aspect monism and panpsychism and try to decide whether any of these deserve to be taken seriously.