PHIL 490: Seminar in Philosophy, Spring 2024

Topic: The Nature of the Self

Course Description: What are you? Lots of things: a student, an Earthling, a contemporary of Taylor Swift. But what are you most fundamentally? Are you, for example, an immaterial soul that inhabits a body but could, perhaps, exist without it? Or are you an animal, a biological organism of a certain sort? Or something constituted by an animal but not identical with it? Or a collection of memories or other psychological states? We will investigate these and other answers to the question of what you (most fundamentally) are, assessing arguments offered for and against each answer we consider.

Professor: Gene Mills, Ph.D.