Hello, I’m a sophomore at a U.S. university and I am required to spend a semester studying abroad. As much as I welcome this opportunity, I need some ideas for a good location to study. I’m a Philosophy/English major and I’m currently taking an Ancient Greek Language course. English is the only language I speak, but I would like to experience studying in a country where English is not the first language.
I want to study philosophy in another country. Does anyone have suggestions for where I might go and/or what programs I should look into?
Depends on how deep into the rabbit hole you want to go.
Personally, right now I’d go to Turkey. It has a very rich philosophical tradition (best of Greek and Arabic philosophy) and right now the tension between western and (middle) eastern philosophy is alive and well so it would be a bit of a live wire!
Given your background, Greece is also a good call. Athens is my favorite city in Europe, so you can’t go wrong there.
Germany and France are also classical strongholds for philosophy. I can’t say much for France, but Germany has some great cities (Berlin is my #2 city in Europe).
The China/Japan/Korea axis is also worth considering. Rich philosophical traditions and any of those languages can be parlayed into big money in the business world. Ditto on the French and German, not so much the Turkish and Greek. Food for thought.
India would also be interesting, but English is so prevalent there that I’m not sure it would be a linguistic challenge, but the cultural challenge would more than make up for that, IMHO.
Turkey’s an interesting choice, and I have already been thinking about Athens. I’ve been to both Germany and France before, but if there was a particular school or program that was really good I might go back.
without checking your other posts to see what you’ve written, maybe you should look for a place that is close to who you are reading or the general topic?
Marx? Aristotle? Feuerbach? Taoists? Confucians? Rand? more contemporary? agamben hails from italy, irigaray from france and zizek is from slovenia. whether any of these places really influenced them is another matter. just some ideas
I think I listened to some lecture-on-tape by Chalmers a while ago. Seemed like some interesting stuff. Or maybe he was just referenced in a paper I read, I get confused easily.
Yeah, Chalmers is one of the biggest names in Phil of Mind right now. He does research in a lot of areas, but specifically he deals with problems of consciousness. He has a famous “zombie” argument.
The Australian National University is huge for grad/post-grad work and research in philosophy. There’s a lot going on here. I’d recommend looking into it if you’re looking for a place to do graduate or doctoral work.
No he’s not. Chalmers is an idiot, I don’t know how any biologist studying consciousness even SEES a problem. Philosophical zombies CAN’T PERFORM THOSE TASKS, demonstrability consciousness has ADAPTIVE FUNCTION in predictive power.
The biggest names in TOM are people studying the SPECTRUM of theory of mind in autistic people, animals, brain damaged. Platek and etc scientists actually studying consciousness and TESTING predictions. I hate Chalmers, go read the last 5-10 years of ToM research in animals.
His zombie would be severely autistic or aquire MASSIVE resource wasting to produce, it’d require expensive biological machinery, ie NEVER EVOLVE.
Might as well ask yourself about a philosophical kidney.
A lot of apes have ToM in tasks envolving decieving other apes, should give an idea.
the computational power it’d require to predict other minds is TOO VAST to evolve outside of adaptations specialized and functionally complex for the task. Theres no problem of consciousness theres a problem imagining impossible philosophical zombies.
Maybe a brilliant race of superhumans could build a philosophical zombie not evolution.
Seriously I could have a kidney 1000X as complex to accomplish the same tasks BUT ITS NOT A PROBLEM OF “kidney function” that I don’t, its exactly what we’d expect. AND combinatorial explosion makes adaptations LIKE ToM neccessary.
So we should see biologically efficient spectrums of ToM and what more/less of it can accomplish, and we do. Seriously the reason autistic people are so out of it (in many cases) is they have no ToM abilities.
Why don’t we have 4 horse legs? Is that a “problem” for walking?
Philosophical zombie would need to be a supercomputer the size of a star to engage in predicting minds without ToM. ToM is just an efficient adaptation that solves that problem, it ASSUMES regularities, without that prediction is near impossible.
ToM is like facial recognition adaptations, theres an infinite way to construe that information, say the pixels in a photo of a face, why do we need that experience? ITS EFFICIENT.
All you need to know is that your ancestors who started developing ToM more fully
Sure he is, I think calling him the BIGGEST name in ToM is an exaggeration but if its not that reputation will die fast. Evolutionary cognitive neuroscience in its very birth breath stomped Chalmers ideas to dust. Many other animal researchers/cognitive neuroscientists and selectionist thinkers including even Daniel Dennet critisizes him. DD is whacked and rejects huge amounts of animal research (including human) but still distances himself from Chalmer esque quackery.
Fuse - congrats on finding a program that is supportive of your intellectual needs
Cyrene - you seem to be taking this issue very personally. Did ToM touch you inappropriately as a child? (*EDIT - I have to pat myself on the back for that one. Triplepun!)
If you claim there is no ‘problem of consciousness’, what would you propose that it (consciousness) is, exactly? To date there is no complete and satisfactory answer that is universally agreed upon, but you seem to imply you could do it better than Chalmers so have at it (perhaps in a new thread? the title of this one is increasingly irrelevant).
Also, ‘stomping his zombie to dust’ does not eliminate the incredibly vast amount of work he has done in the field (of which the zombie is only part). You have pointed to one thing that you believe to be falsehood and extended it to “hatred” of everything the man stands for. Take a deep breath and read “The Conscious Mind” (by David Chalmers) rather than just listen to what you’ve heard about it. I don’t think you’ll find you hate it nearly as much as others seem to be telling you that you should hate it.
It bothers me because ToM isn’t a problem and suggesting it is in such a grandoise way is horrendous, especially in light of A LOT of scientific literature on consciousness/ToM.
I’m familiar with Chalmers work, thanks. I’m a lot more impressed by dozens of researchers. Lack of full understanding isn’t a problem when scientific research is revealing more and more daily.
So clearly you praise the materialist view of mind. There is certainly a lot to be said for the infinitesimal dissection we’ve made of the brain of late. I take the materialist viewpoint also, and applaud the research thereof, and its continuance. We’re certainly agreed there.
I also am an acolyte of evolutionary and developmental psychology.
I take the spiritual, soulful stance too.
Additionally, I find neurophilosophy to inform my worldview,
As well as those investigating A.I.
A thing can only be fully known when it is viewed from all possible perspectives. The trick becomes knowing whether you have found them all out yet, or if there is yet some eye through which you cannot see.
I would appreciate knowing what this particular saying means. Heard it before. Never got the point. Maybe I’m not much of a tailor or weaver.
What I was referring to are only ‘human’ perspectives insofar as they are engendered and held by humans. Different methodological approaches to a given issue provide insight. Ultimately any kind of symbolic representation of a thing will, by definition, fall short of the thing itself. Thus, given that we are confined to symbolic representation, the only way to reach higher fidelity is to approach the issue in question from as many tangential viewpoints as possible, to represent it in all possible linguistic forms. In this way we create a frame of words around the picture.
If you only have one viewpoint (e.g. the materialist view of mind vs. all the others that are available) then you only have one side of the frame, and your picture looks lopsided and kind of silly.
If you really have every perspective, you have no perspective at all. One can understand many perspectives without believing that they are all truly useful. Some just aren’t. I understand the Christian worldview, even if I think it’s wrong.