Topics in Recent and Contemporary Philosophy: Consciousness, Selves, and Embodied Wills

This course ranges over metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethics and specific aspects of the history of philosophy. We investigate what it is rational to care about in caring about survival or continued existence, and whether our account of what it is rational to care about should change if we discover either that (1) there is no separable human soul or (2) there is no self or subject behind our various conscious acts or (3) that selves are merely conventional or even merely apparent objects or (4) we are laid out in time in the same way as we are in space by having temporal parts as well as spatial parts.