Colorado Summer Seminar 2009

Syllabus

 

Readings

 

Week One

July 13. Aristotelian Theories of Identity (Pasnau)

• Robert Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes 1274-1689 (Oxford UP, forthcoming) chs. 27, 28, 29

July 14. Aquinas on Surviving Death (Van Dyke)

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles IV.79-81
• Eleonore Stump, Aquinas ch. 1
• Robert Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature, ch. 12
• Christina Van Dyke, "The Problem of the Rich Man and the Rich Man's Soul"

July 15. Identity in Descartes (Kaufman)

• Descartes, Synopsis to the Meditations; Principles of Philosophy I.48 - 2.31; letter to Mesland
• Peter King, "The Problem of Individuation in the Middle Ages"

July 16. Identity in Locke (Kaufman & Pasnau)

• John Locke, Essay II.27
• Dan Kaufman, "Locke on Individuation and the Corpuscular Basis of Kinds," Phil. and Phenom. Research (2007)
• Dan Kaufman, "The Resurrection of the Same Body and the Ontological Status of Organisms"
• Robert Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes 1274-1689 (Oxford UP, forthcoming) ch. 30

July 17. Personal Identity and Dualism (Huemer)

Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, pp. 199-210, 213-17, 223-24, 231-38.

 

Week Two

July 20. Deep Freedom and Real Persons (Hanna)

• Robert Hanna, "Deep Freedom and Real Persons" (manuscript)

July 21. Enduring and Perduring (Tooley)

• Sally Haslanger, “Persistence through Time”, in The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics , edited by Michael Loux and Dean Zimmerman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) 315-54.
• Theodore Sider, Four Dimensionalism
  • Chapter 3, “Three- and Four-Dimensionalism Stated”
  • Chapter 5 section 8, “The Stage View”
  • Chapter 6, “Arguments against Four-Dimensionalism”

July 22. Time Travel and Presentism (Monton)

• David Lewis, "The Paradoxes of Time Travel"
• Simon Keller and Michael Nelson, "Presentists Should Believe in Time-Travel"
• Bradley Monton, "Presentists Can Believe in Closed Timelike Curves"
• Berit Brogaard, "Presentist Four-Dimensionalism"

July 23. Coincident Objects (Oddie)

• Pavel Tichy, "Individuals and Their Roles," in Collected Papers in Logic and Philosophy

 

Week Three

July 27. Death (Chwang)

• Report of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death, "A definition of irreversible coma", Journal of the American Medical Association 205, 6 (5 August 1968) 337-40.
• Peter Singer, "Is the Sanctity of Life Ethic Terminally Ill?" Bioethics 9, 3 (July 1995) 327-343.

July 28. The Non-Identity Problem (Heathwood)

• Kavka, "The Paradox of Future Individuals," PPA (1981).
• Parfit, ch. 16 from Reasons and Persons ["The Non-Identity Problem"]

July 29. Harm-Based Solutions to the Non-Identity Problem(Boonin)

• Elizabeth Harman, "Can We Harm and Benefit in Creating?"
• Seana Shiffrin, "Wrongful Life, Procreative Responsibility, and the Significance of Harm"
  
• David Benatar, Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence, Chapter 2   

July 30. The Non-Identity Problem and Public Policy (Boonin)

(a) Cloning

• President's Council on Bioethcs, Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry Chapter 5: The Ethics of Cloning-to-Produce-Children. [The link goes to the whole report. Read Chapter 5.]
• Leon Kass, "The Wisdom of Repugnance" in Kass and James Q Wilson, "The Ethics of Cloning" (pp. 3-59). [This reading is optional. Kass chaired the President's Council and (not surprisingly) many of his ideas made it into the report. Hence there is a fair amount of repetition.]

(b) Slave Reparations

• Robert Fullinwider, "The Case For Reparations"
• Randall Robinson, "America's Debt to Blacks"