PHIL 320 - 20th-Century Analytic Philosophy (M&E)

This course will employ the tools of analytic philosophy to address the large topic of the mind, the world, and the relation between them; it also explores the closely related topics of how our concepts get their content and how our language gets its meaning. By analyzing both our concepts and our experience, students in this course will try to answer questions like: What is the relation between experience and the world beyond the mind? Do beliefs about the world amount to knowledge? Is the content of experience conceptual – and so fully expressible in language – or does experience have a richness that always surpasses the expressive power of language? Where do concepts come from? What fixes their content, and what fixes the meaning of the words that express them? If the content of language is based in part on experience, can one understand the language of someone whose experience is different? Course readings will include works by Russell, Carnap, Quine, Sellars, Davidson, and McDowell.

Credits: 1.00
Corequisite: None
Prerequisites: One course in philosophy
Major/Minor Restrictions: None
Class Restriction: None
Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression
Liberal Arts CORE: None

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