FALL 2007 - COURSES AT BERKELEY

 

 

Professor Mike Martin

Professor of Philosophy, UCL

Mills Visiting Professor at Dept of Philosophy,

University of California, Berkeley

Mailing:
314 Moses Hall #2390
Berkeley, CA 94720-2390

Tel. (510) 643-8409
Fax: (510) 642-4164
E-mail: mgfmartin@berkeley.edu

Office: 230 Moses Hall
Regular Office Hours: Mon 2.30-4

Brief Description

Mike Martin is finishing a book on naïve realism in the philosophy of perception. His current research projects include work on the emotions, desires and pain; the work of David Hume; and the psychology of visual cognition.

 

Courses Fall Semester

132 Philosophy of Mind

From the earliest point in our lives we mark a distinction between the social world of animate beings and the inanimate objects about us. The distinctions we make are fundamental to our ways of finding out about the world and responding to what we discover there. But do the distinctions we mark reflect ultimate differences in the nature of the world around us? These are the questions addressed in this course. We will be looking at some of the oldest and most fundamental questions about the mind: the nature of consciousness, knowledge of our own minds and of others’; physicalism and dualism; functionalism.

 

290-4 Appearance and Expression

Tomatoes have a characteristic look. Some tomatoes lack this look, and other entities – fake tomatoes – can possess the look and thereby mislead someone about what they are. Nonetheless when you see a tomato in plain view you can see it for what it is, a tomato: that something is a tomato would seem to be a perceptible aspect of it. When someone feels resentful, that attitude may be expressed in the way they look at others, how they move, or in the manner of their speech. A skilled actor can mimic such expressions so as to appear resentful too. This doesn’t rule out our coming to know in propitious circumstances that someone is resentful just by looking at them or listening to them. Yet many think that the person’s resentment is not itself a perceptible aspect of the scene: our access to it is mediated through the person’s behaviour or what is expressive of this feeling.

Why should one suppose that there is this difference between the appearance of kinds of fruit and the expressions of feeling or emotion? That is the question we shall be pursuing in this seminar. The aim will be to look at some of the traditional discussions of the problem of other minds; the elusive status of appearance; and the relation between emotional states and their expression.

 

 

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