Cours de M. le professeur Taylor Carman (Univ. Columbia): Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Mind

Le professeur Taylor Carman (Barnard College Columbia University), professeur invité à l’université Paris 1, donnera un cours intitulé Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Mind les mardi 22, 29 mars, 5 et 12 avril de 16h à 18h au département de philosophie de Paris 1, salle Halbwachs.

Il donnera également une conférence sur Heidegger and the Very Idea of Truth le vendredi 15 avril à 17h30 salle Cavaillès.

 

 

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PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

Taylor Carman (Barnard College – Columbia University)

tcarman@barnard.edu

 

Spring 2016

These lectures offer a critical reading of (parts of) Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie de la perception (1945), set in contrast to Wilfrid Sellars’s Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1956). Is Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to advance a substantive pretheoretical description of perceptual experience rendered obsolete by Sellars’s critique of what he called the “Myth of the Given”? What is perceptual experience? What (if anything) is given in it? If “the given” is a myth, is phenomenology possible? We will also examine Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of language and of our experience of others. Can meaning be said to be “given” to us in speaking and in hearing others speak? If children see themselves and others simply as “empty heads open onto a single evident world” (têtes vides braquées sur un seul monde évident), as Merleau-Ponty puts it, how do we come to understand one another as distinct, concealed subjects, hidden from the privacy of our own self-awareness?

Texts

• Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Harvard, 1997)
• Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de perception (Gallimard, 1945)

 

22 mars

THE MYTH OF THE GIVEN (le mythe du donné)

Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, §§10–18, §§32–45

Empirisme et la philosophie de l’esprit, §§10–18, §§32–45

 

29 mars

OBJECTIVE THOUGHT (la pensée objective) & MOTOR INTENTIONALITY (l’intentionnalité motrice)

Phénoménologie de la perception, Ire pt, INTRO, III (81–6, 114–72)

 

5 avril

SPEAKING SPEECH, SPOKEN SPEECH (parole parlante, parole parlée)

Phénoménologie de la perception, Ire pt, VI (203–32)

 

12 avril

OTHERS & THE TRUTH OF SOLIPSISM (autrui & la verité du solipsisme)

Phénoménologie de la perception, IIe pt, IV (398–419)

Stanley Cavell, , 432–40

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