The one-credit courses, under 391 or 399 numbers, are all overload courses, not part of my teaching load, and have generally been on topics or issues I wanted to investigate and write about. I've offered one of these each semester, with a few exceptions, and for a couple of semesters have done more than one. The reading groups generally involve meeting for an hour and a half once per week to discuss a reading, with short papers (now all emailed or posted to the group's website) and then a summary paper at the end. Bob Snyder and Benjamin Shaeffer have co-taught some of these with me, as noted. The three-credit courses under 485 (formerly these were 390) numbers are the Philosophy Department Seminars, which rotate among the faculty. That is, we each get to teach these once every three to four and a half years. For those seminars, I generally survey the philosophy majors, presenting two or three alternatives I like, and then research, design, and teach the one for which they show the most interest.
            Course numbering during this time period changed in ways that may affect reading the lists. The one-credit reading groups were numbered 399 up til spring 2000, 391 afterwards. At that time the department also made it policy that three graded 391s could be used by philosophy majors as a substitute for one of the regular (three credit) electives for the major. And the three-credit seminars were numbered 390 up til fall of 2005, 485 after. Because the seminars are rotated among faculty, my first seminar under the 485 number was spring 2008.

The following list of course titles with some annotations is now roughly complete, but a few of the addresses for syllabi and materials are dead links. If you are particularly interested in a syllabus which does not yet have a live link (or where the link has failed), send me an e-mail at jwp2@humboldt.edu.

• Fall 2014: 485 Seminar: Selected Issues in Philosophy of Language . This is the third iteration using this title, after Fall 2011 and Spring 2008. Each is heavily revised from what went before. Added to earlier offerings this time is work on a recent attack against philosophical accounts of language, that they all require a violent pulling of accounts of language out of their gimbals, i.e., examples outside philosophy. "What is Language?" moves more toward center stage in this particular semester.


• Spring 2014: 391 Reading Group: Selected Philosophical Issues Regarding Educational Reform. This follows up on the Introduction and Survey of Reform in Higher Education offered in Spring 2013. After a recap of basics the group decided to prioritize the most urgent issues regarding higher ed reform, clarify issues, and make recommendations in the form of a manifesto to legislators, accreditors, and concerned citizens. In particular, the group recommended that accountability initiatives currently soaking up enormous resources be put on hold until the underlying thinking is closer to being ready for prime time; that the dangers of centralizing power over educational structures need to be re-examined; and that education's purposes are complex and most of those recommending reforms are oversimplifying.


• Fall 2013: Three credit seminar. There was no 391 Reading Group this semester, becasue I was offering 485 Philosophy Seminar: War. It was clear this course was going to be a large project even separate from my ambitions to attack the standard approaches to the issues and work out new approaches and positions, as well as attempting to assemble important readings. Some of the problems we addressed regarding war included the following: Both just war theorists, on one side, and pacifists, on another, have been conspicuously afflicted with tunnel vision, ignoring their opponents. In part this is due to the thinkers emphasizing abstract and deductive arguments rather than the historical and personal narratives that characterize actual wars. War is only conceivable as a separate topic by doing violence to all the connections it has--to socioeconomic class divisions, to greed, to bankrupt concepts of honor and face and pride, to toys for little boys and for little girls, to sexism, to assumptions about what life is for, to the tendency for Cartesian dualism to license exaggerated individualism and subjectivism, and philosophy's struggle not to dissociate itself from the rest of everything. One of the shocks to my system was finding out that Simone De Beauvoir, like Iris Murdoch, sometimes shows signs of a cool dismissiveness toward philosophy's arrogance and neglect of examples or narratives. I think this may be the most urgent issue for making progress toward resolving the enormous disasters of war in the world. This project to think about war kept becoming larger and larger. It currently is a central focus in my work.


• Spring 2013: 391 Reading Group: Philosophy and Educational Reform Some of the tracks of this interest show in my website page on Thinking--articles on what education is for, a review of a report on attempts to reform General Education, an attack against Outcomes Assessment and other tunnel-vision attempts to establish accountability in higher ed, presentations to Navajo Studies Conferences on how Western Civ thinking can be healed by reference to Navajo stories and rituals and sandpaintings, pieces on how education erroneously buys into philosophical models of definitions and "higher level thinking skills" aka Bloom's Taxonomy. Perhaps one of the most severe problems is the widespread move to make education more efficient and more productive, a move in complete ignorance of what it is that education produces. This topic was used again in Spring 2014, above, with less introductory work and more intense investigation of a few selected issues.


• Fall 2012: 391 Reading Group: Paradoxes This semester's project began about a year before when I was asked to comment on a manuscript of a friend's book in which Wittgenstein's methods sometimes are taken to be just the right battery acid to throw on many of the traditional paradoxes. On the other hand, another friend has a long history of working on some of the logical paradoxes and takes their point to be in part that they are resilient questioners of traditional logical thinking and so offer insight into limits of logic. We worked on several examples, never in enough depth. I think we did accomplish the task of informing and interesting several students, and making most of them into tougher customers.


• Spring 2012: 391 Reading Group: History of the Concept of Philosophy. K.T. Fann remarks that important results in philosophy often have the effect of changing our concept of the discipline. (T.S. Eliot makes a similar point in literature with his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," and Ernst Mach comments about progress in physics often arising, not from reassessing answers to problems but from asking new questions.) This reading group worked on getting a broad historical view of those processes. What innovations have shaped changes in the concept of philosophy, and what characteristics of philosophy have remained unchanged?


• Fall 2011: 485 Three-credit Seminar: Selected Issues in Philosophy of Language After comments about how many problems in philosophy have come to be regarded as problems about language, the intro to the syllabus says, "There are a couple of remarkable bits of background about philosophy of language of which we have to take account at the top of the garden path. First, even though philosophers cannot agree about what rationality is or whether writing is a good or an evil or better or worse than speaking or whether there is such a thing as mind, there is an amazing near-consensus about what language is, up at least to a certain point. We'll start by reading some philosophers who cannot agree about anything else but who agree on this basic story about language. Now, one might be tempted to think, that if everybody, or rather every philosopher, says it is so, then it is almost certain that it is not so. One would be right. At any rate, that is the first bit, that philosophers agree about something, agree about a great deal regarding language, and that in their agreement they are atypical of philosophers in general and they may be dead wrong.
                "The second thing is that there is a revolution going on, a Copernican revolution spreading out from within philosophy of language, which threatens to turn almost all philosophy inside out. It begins with heightened scrutiny of (not answers but) issues or problems and then findings that at least some of them arise out of oversimplifications and begged questions. The revolution, however, is not a done deal. Indeed, most respected journals and authorities seem to have written it off. We will read some commentary, both play by play and color.
                "These two bits or circumstances make doing a balanced investigation into philosophy of language difficult. We will cope by stressing fundamentals and working on some central, classic problems which remain of interest to current scholars. What is language, really? What is the meaning of a word? How do words refer to the world? How do we do things with words? With each of these we will read classic and contemporary sources, including challenges to the standard view. We will then take a look at how linguistic analysis might help (or harm) our philosophical work in other areas of philosophy, such as ethics and epistemology."


• Fall 2011: 391 Reading Group: Defensibility of Religious Belief. "There are some Wittgensteinians who have been adopted as allies by those who defend religious belief. There's also, of course, a gout of attacks against religious belief among current intellectuals. That is not to say that either of those two sides has a shred of anything right. And more of the work by Wittgensteinians gets aired than does Wittgenstein's own work, which takes on characteristics of a voice from under a trap door.
  We will begin with some arguments for and against religious belief, including some of the most notoriously self-assured writers, working in each case to pry the covers off their arguments. Standard arguments for the existence of gods or God will be included, along with some of the stronger critiques of them and some philosophical appraisals. We will take up some questions, psychological rather than logical, regarding why people would ever want to believe, and assess whether those investigations are relevant to the issue of how to appraise justifications of belief (hence issues about methods). For example, Freud has an account for why people might be inclined toward monotheism, and Robert Herbert has a response distinguishing that issue from the question of whether there is a god, claiming that even if Freud is right he has not addressed the main issue. John Wisdom articulates how religious belief may satisfy human needs which go more deeply than the need for justification or the need for that belief to be true. O.K. Bouwsma responds to the notion that the existence of god is flatly unintelligible or unimaginable with the view that denying that notion requires commitments which are just as unimaginable, just as unintelligible. Mystical confrontations with existence may cause faith, and we will look and see whether mysticism calls the relevance of arguments into doubt. We will probably have to examine the possibility that the investigation leads only to stalemate, but as I write this it seems likely--well, possible-- that we can arrive at a resolution." We read excerpts from attackers against religious belief, including Dawkins, Sam Harris, Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and defenders of belief. Members of the group made progress in clarifying and distinguishing substantive issues and concerns from demagogery and preaching to the various choirs."


• Spring 2011: 391 Reading Group: Where Philosophical Problems Come From. In the syllabus I commented on the oddity of syllabi as a genre, and then "This course owes something to an idea from therapy, another odd genre, that sometimes we can heal by tracing problems back to their origins. Not, though, that the work ends after the origins have been made clear--indeed, despite some of my overly happy talk below about problems going away, that is often when the most difficult work begins, or we come up against our own unwillingness to change. Wittgenstein remarks of some of these problems that the work on the problem is like doing therapy on a neurosis. I think this is because, among other things, we work to become conscious in ways we find ourselves resisting. The goal of this kind of work is unlike much, perhaps most, traditional philosophical work in which we try to discover an answer to a philosophical problem--here we focus on discovering the confusions, assumptions, pictures, overextended analogies, and grammatical errors on which the problem rests, such that when we become clear about those mistakes, we hope we no longer have to ask the particular philosophical question. We work, he remarks, not toward a solution but toward the problem's dissolving. Becoming clear about the problem contributes toward preventing the problem from arising.--at least, until we forget the clarity we achieved and find ourselves once again in the grip of the thinking which gave rise to it--and so, once again, in the grip of the issue. This approach seems akin to Zhuangzi's moves in some of his inner chapters aimed at preventing philosophical problems rather than attempting solutions."


• Fall 2010: 391 Reading Group: Where Philosophy Matters. The syllabus gives a chatty account of the origins of this reading group in two papers I gave in Europe, one in Leipzig in 2007 on whether Wittgenstein's remarks on pictures are philosophical or psychological, and the other at Manchester in 2010 on subversion as a characteristic of good philosophy. The reading group worked on when and where there are stakes for other academic disciplines for doing better work in philosophy. For instance, we explored whether it might matter if, e.g. reality, perceptions, consciousness, productivity in education, understanding via definitions, criteria of good arguments, theories as sources of authority in ethics, intuitions as authorities in philosophy, --if those are little more than mythological beasts. This reading group covered a lot of ground, including some work on clarifying the arguments for Wittgenstein's ordinary language methods.


• Spring 2010: 391 Reading Group: Science vs. Philosophy re: Neurology and Consciousness. This reading group was led by Benjamin Shaeffer and myself. We took up a new book by Alva Noe of the University of California, Berkeley, entitled Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. The book responds to temptations many philosophers feel, to think that philosophical problems of mind might be illuminated by brain science. Noe writes in opposition to many of those temptations, but remains within the conceptual frameworks of traditional problems. The result was a comparatively unsatisfying reading group, and though we could agree that the book's main results are obscurantist we could not on our own do a much better job. Those who were fans of neuroscience remained so; those who thought it poppycock that problems of mind are now scientific problems still think so. We probably need to do this over with a better book.


• Fall 2009: 391 Reading Group: Wittgenstein and His Interpreters. Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker, over the course of decades, co-wrote a multi-volume commentary on much of Wittgenstein's work, and then Baker began to develop a more radical and difficult view of the main points he saw Wittgenstein making. In 2007, a group of essayists got together after Baker's death to articulate some main insights they thought they had learned from Baker. The results are captured in Wittgenstein and His Interpreters, ed. Guy Kahane, Edward Kanterian, and Oskari Kuusela, (Blackwell's, London: 2007). In general this group emphasizes a therapeutic and atheoretical approach, paranoid about importing begged questions and philosophical pictures which might mislead us about those examples of which we are trying to give a philosophical account. I wrote a review of the book of essays for the journal Teaching Philosophy. We did read that, David Stern's essay on the beetle in the box, Hacker's account of how Baker's views came to diverge from the earlier view the two of them shared, and other essays.


• Spring 2009: 391 Reading Group: J.L. Austin's Ordinary Language Methods. One of Austin's oft-quoted aphorisms is, roughly, "Oversimplification is the occupational disease of philosophers--except when it is the occupation." We will contrast Wittgenstein and Austin on how they think about the sources of philosophical problems, but they do teach one lesson alike, that before we get to the possible answers, before looking at the competing positions with their supporting arguments, we are well advised to back up and cast a cold eye on the question. Austin is a pioneer, and I think better than Wittgenstein, in setting up examples in which philosophical views ought to be seen or supported but are not, raising issues about the legitimacy of the philosophical views or the underlying issues. We look at excuses, at reality, at the meaning of a word, at performatives.


• Fall 2008: 391 Reading Group: Constructions. In many parts of the academic world it is a commonplace to say that, e.g., gender or race or rights or cultures or knowledge or reality or science or language, is or are constructions. What is meant by this? What is being denied by these claims? How are constructivist claims different from saying that different people have different accounts of e.g. gender and we don't want to step on anyone's toes? What is the point of saying such things? To what extent are we justified in endorsing such claims?


• Spring 2008: 485 three-credit Seminar: Selected Problems in Philosophy of Language. We emphasize central classic issues: What is language? (the standard answer from Augustine and Locke through Saussure, Katz, Ayer, Kripke, and Derrida is that language is a system of signs used for communication. Who do not believe this, and what are the objections?) What are names, and what are their relations to the thing named? What is truth? Is language conventional? What is the ontology of language? How do words relate to the world?


• Spring 2008: 391 Reading Group: Plato vs. Platonism. Many scholars for some unaccountable reason think of Plato as a Platonist, even though he gives crucial and crushing arguments against that view. We will emphasize, rather than the expository question of what Plato really thought, the issue of whether his work justifies Platonism. That is, should we be Platonists?


• Fall 2007: 391 Reading Group: Philosophical Pictures and Examples As Therapy. Rather than answering philosophical questions, Wittgenstein often recommends we question the questions. What were we thinking when we asked? To what extent might the problem be the result of what he calls a picture, an oversimplified model or sketch of how things must be? How can we investigate the underlying picture if we suspect one has been guiding our thinking? His advice in such investigations often includes working with examples from nonphilosophical contexts. Following this advice has implications for how we will think of arguments and how we will conceive of philosophy.


• Spring 2007: 391 Reading Group: Methods: Meno's Paradox . We may be tempted to think that giving a philosophical account (especially, perhaps, a definition) might help us understand something better, but if we do not understand that thing going in, our work to give an account may mislead us. Co-taught with Benjamin Shaeffer. (Note: much later this work led to my article on definitions in the journal Metaphilosophy.


• Fall 2006: 391 Reading Group: Wittgenstein's Conception of Philosophy, co-taught with Professor Shaeffer. Wittgenstein's main accomplishment is not his answers to philosophical problems but rather new methods and a new conception of what it is to do philosophy. We articulate our own views of that method and that conception and the travails they have caused us. We also use readings, including K.T. Fann's book with the same title as this course.


• Spring 2006: 391 Reading Group: Abstraction. How can we appraise philosophical abstractions? Many abstractions seem incontestably and obviously true, but turn out on investigation to be, well, let's use a polite term, problematic. We use insights regarding methods derived from Wittgenstein, though we will not do much exposition of Wittgenstein. Instead the emphasis will be on work with a collection of abstract truisms the group puts together, a collection we are tempted to endorse. We will compare those abstractions with nonphilosophical examples in which we might expect confirmation and then investigate any resulting cognitive dissonance (that is, investigate if we get puzzling or counterintuitive results).


• Fall 2005: 391 Reading Group: Attacks Against Philosophy. Examination of postmodernism's critiques against arguments as covertly ideological, feminist criticisms of logic and science that they decontextualize in a sexist way, poetic and mystical claims that philosophy overintellectualizes or murders to dissect, and some pragmatists' (most conspicuously Richard Rorty) claims that philosophy is toothless in combat against injustice.


• Spring 2005: 3-credit Seminar (the one credit overload reading group got washed away this semester by the seminar--this is the last one under the older numbering system): Philosophy vs. Literature.
  English Major: "Anything philosophy can do, literature can do better."
  Philosophy Major: "Oh, yeah? What's your argument?"


• Fall 2004: reading group: Selected Issues in Native American Philosophy. Native American philosophy is not one discipline, and almost all characterizations of Native American philosophical views are corrupted by romanticized projections whites bring to the subject. We read some work by Iroquois League thinkers and then contemporary work by Indian poets and fiction writers. Then we concentrated on Navajo thinkers, including material out of their oral traditions as well as contemporary writers. We include some work by whites each of whom have spent at least twenty years living among the Navajo, some of them working to pry their white lenses off their accounts. I found this very difficult to teach, partly because of the abundance of experts in the class whose views had ossified prematurely. This of course can be true of Indians as well as whites and so may be true of me as well.


• Summer 2004: a three credit seminar course relevant to this series: Critical Thinking and Educational Reform. The history of educational reform is exceeded in dreariness only by the history of housing reform, and critical thinking theorists too often lack the abilities they speak of reforming. We surveyed and critiqued main approaches to critical thinking. Members of the class issued a white paper calling for added requirements in General Education--two courses at the senior level, each requiring substantial writing critically analyzing an urgent problem of social or environmental responsibility. That document might be regarded as a test of commitment to critical thinking and a test of commitment to educational reform. The White Paper is online.


• Spring 2004: No course (on sabbatical, with a New Mexico and Arizona project centering on Navajo healing rituals, sand paintings, and Navajo philosophy. I have been working to support a claim that the Navajo are able to correct some mistakes in Anglo philosophy.)


• Fall 2003 Reading Group: 391 Derrida vs. Searle re: Context. We work with an exchange between these two most of which is gathered in the book Limited Inc. At first this threatens to become a steel cage match, with escalating ill tempers and accusations of sloppiness and misunderstandings. The issue is partly about who understands John L. Austin's ordinary language philosophy best, and partly about the extent to which understanding (texts and conversations and language) is dependent on context. We can learn a lot about how not to engage in debate and about the politics of analytic vs. continental philosophy, but there are also crucial insights into how to appraise accounts of language (though they go by at well over the speed limit).


• Fall 2003: Three credit upper-division Course for Native American Studies and English: Native American Literature. There's a lot of backstory here, but the course and syllabus stand on their own as an introduction to Native American Literature. I was asked to step in to teach this course after NAS lost two faculty and the prof in English who was teaching a related course decided to take parental leave. I had already been approved for a sabbatical for the following spring on related topics (see above). My interests here go back to my own undergraduate major in English and my years of graduate work in literature. I'm convinced that some Native American thinkers can correct mistakes in Anglo and European philosophical traditions, and I find their literary works to be more effective at this than contemporary philosophical works. I've continued to research and write about (not to mention testifying in court) these matters since this course, and would teach it differently now. I've presented on some of these topics at the Navajo Studies Conference.


• Spring 2003: 391 Reading Group: Dead Link?? YesLanguage As Signs and Wittgenstein's Methods. This reading group read, debated, and helped edit a 70,000 word book mss on language as signs.


• Fall 2002: 391 Reading Group: On Certainty. This reading group was co-taught with Prof. Benjamin Shaeffer, on Wittgenstein's last work, published posthumously. Note the seminar below during the same semester.


• Fall 2002: Three-credit 390 Seminar: The Meaning of Life. We went through classic readings, then some contemporary work along with Eastern approaches which are left out of the available anthologies. We also read some literary works (poetry, short stories, with some armwaving at film), and challenges to, and defenses of, the philosophical question. A better reader on the topic than those now in print would be easy to compile.


• Spring 2002: 391 Reading Group: Derrida re: Language and Searle's Objections(link is to F03). A better version of this reading group, with a tighter focus, harder work, and more results, was a year and a half later in Fall 2003, which is used for this link.


• Fall 2001: 391 Reading Group: Russell's The Problems of Philosophy(dead link). I use this little 1911 book, as many others do, in Intro courses, but concentrate on only the chapters on knowledge and perception. Students asked to take on the whole. On re-examination, the book does not come off well. Among other things, we appraised John Perry's more contemporary Introduction and Russell's later reaffirmations of his views.
  
  
• Fall 2001: (same semester as the above) 391 Reading Group: Pinker's How the Mind Works, (which we trashed). This group was instigated by John Taylor.


• Spring 2001 Reading Group: Methods?Grice and Searle vs. Wittgenstein. John Searle and Paul Grice have very similar objections to Wittgenstein's ordinary language methods. Theirs are the most serious objections, and are perhaps the only objections which should be taken seriously. On investigation, the objections reveal themselves as so circular as to make it puzzling that they are endorsed by other philosophers, so we explored those issues along with exploring the assumption or claim that philosophy is like science in having the goal of revealing hitherto hidden truths.


• Spring 2001: 391 Reading Group: C. G. Jung, Current Issues, cross listed with Religious Studies and co-taught with Madeline McMurray and Shaunna Howell. I don't often get to think about Jungian issues, though I have been interested in and have read Jung for decades. I have too often had the experience of dealing with Jung's True Believers, about whom Jung famously remarked, "Thank God I am Jung and not a Jungian!" Dr. McMurray is much more hard-headed, Shaunna Howell kept directing our attention to where the stakes are most enormous and profound, and this group had lots of delightful and fierce discussion.


• Fall 2000: 391 Reading Group: Examples and Intuitions. We began by looking for philosophers citing intuitions as though they are evidence. Turns out they are all over the place for the last few centuries. We then appraised those moves. Turns out they are very bad moves. Intuitions can as easily express mistaken projections of erroneous pictures as they can provide data or evidence. We tried to find some basis for citing intuitions other than that the speaker has run out of arguments, but were unsuccessful. We raised the issue of whether something similar is at work when people start insisting that a relation or a value is intrinsic--are they only saying that they know it's true though they can't figure out why? If so, there might be a problem.


• Spring 2000: 391 Reading Group: Methods, Issues re: Richard Rorty. This was preparation for a visit to campus by Rorty that semester, working mostly with his book Philosophy and Social Hope. In his longish autobiographical essay "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids" Rorty confirms with his own case that philosophers can become pragmatists because they suffer defeat by philosophical problems such as skepticism. At the same time, Rorty provides a bracing call for philosophers to be engaged in battles against injustice.


• Fall 1999: 390 (old numbering) Three-credit Seminar: Wittgenstein. Kurt Vonnegut tells an incident from his brief career teaching college classes in a preface to a volume of Ann Sexton's poetry. He was to teach Joyce's The Dubliners, and says, "I was game. I'd read the book. But when I stood in front of the class and opened my mouth nothing came out." Wittgenstein can have a similar effect. There's so much and it's so profound and for such high stakes. Where can we possibly begin?


• Fall 1999: 399 (old numbering) Reading Group: Philosophical Methods. We read philosophers endorsing and opposing Wittgenstein and Austin's use of ordinary language examples as ways to detect philosophical mistakes. We then went through some examples of work using those methods to see whether objections to them have merit. Several later reading groups return to these issues, but usually with a narrower focus.
  This reading group helped confirm that the objections to ordinary language methods can be winnowed down to only two or three serious arguments. Those include Searle's assertion fallacy talk, Grice's similar work on conversational implicature, and the claim based on an unexamined analogy with science that philosophy can provide results in the form of new, hitherto unarticulated, insights.


• Spring 1999 Reading Group: Dichotomies: Pro or Con? The title is not entirely a joke. Dichotomies have gotten a lot of bad press, and the discussions often bristle with profundity. Various attacks against dichotomies are surveyed. Alternatives are explored. Vertigo results. Attempts to achieve a nondichotomous consciousness peter out if pursued at an abstract level. (Philosopher A: "Let's achieve a nondichotomous consciousness!" B: "Ummm, what's that?" A: "Well, dummy, it's clearly consciousness which is not dichotomous--ooooh, wait.") Ordinary language methods point toward a different kind of resolution, one involving concrete nonphilosophical examples in which dichotomies get little or no traction. In some of those examples, that is, the law of the excluded middle, that you are either pregnant or not pregnant, may not apply even though when abstractly conceived one might expect it to apply.


• Fall 1998 Reading Group: I had to cancel the offering for this semester, planned to be on Wittgenstein's On Certainty. The syllabus I drafted is online.The course was offered later, co-taught (and better for it) with Prof. Shaeffer.


• Spring 1998 Reading Group: Philosophy of Language: Intentionality and Attacks on Semantics. Semantics is the academic discipline which studies linguistic meaning. A recent school of thought within semantics takes intentions and intentionality (these are two things, not the same thing) to be crucial in understanding meaning. Another recent issue is whether splitting off meaning from whatever else is going on in language (for example, uttering words or sentences) might lead us into error, impossibilities, or nonsense. Those who endorse intention-based semantics often think they are incorporating insights from Wittgenstein about the uses of words (and sentences). This reading group, then, involves poking around inside an extensive labyrinth. Included in the linked page are some of the syllabus-like documents from earlier reading groups dealing with intentionality and intention-based semantics which help set the stage for this semester. The next three on this list, then, keep referring back to this item.


• Fall 1997 Reading Group: Philosophy of Language: Issues re: Intentionality, at http://www.users.humboldt.edu/jwpowell/399s98syl.htm. See above, Spring 98. This syllabus is incorporated into that semester's syllabus. This turned into a multiple-semester reading group.


• Spring 1997 Reading Group: Philosophy of Language Methods: Current Issues re: Semantics and Intentionality (continues and incorporates materials from Fall 1996; syllabus incorporates both semesters).


• Fall 1996 Reading Group: Phil. Language: Classic Readings on Meaning and Intention-Based Semantics, (continued work on these topics the next semester--see link immediately above).


• Spring 1996 Reading Group: Wittgenstein. The reading group was a more successful attempt--better organized, harder-working, with fiercer warnings at the beginning--than the Fall 1994 reading group. This semester I also organized a weekend course bringing in Prof. Don S. Levi of the University of Oregon on Problems of Multiple Personality and Recovered Memory. The issues included the then hot question about whether multiple personality disorder was really caused by horrific, extreme childhood sexual abuse or whether the stories of remembering those abuses might have been the result of therapists' suggestions. Ian Hacking was writing about the philosophical issues. We also worked with Judith Herman's account (including her history) of the relations between trauma and mental illnesses. That account has strong implications for whether therapy as a tool for recovery demonstrates limits on medications-based treatments.


• Spring 1996 Seminar: Madness. Though the literature on this topic still owes a great deal to Foucault's Madness and Civilization, (which we read) this course is not limited to those issues, of the construction of insanity and the political power plays surrounding self defining others by robbing them of their voices. We explore how science, families, artists (including literary artists), and tribal societies give differing accounts for people whom we label as mad. We take up such issues as the circularities in diagnostic criteria, the limits of the anti-psychiatry movement, Navajo sandpainting rituals as counterexamples to Foucault, claimed relations between madness and artistic genius, and attempts at broad synthetic views such as Jung's. This seminar includes some materials put together as part of a University of Oregon Humanities Center Course Award in 1992.


• Fall 1995 Reading Group: On Certainty, co-taught with Prof. Bob Snyder. This reading group discusses, with the necessary background, Wittgenstein's radical approach to skepticism in his last, posthumously-published work. Wittgenstein may be working toward the insight that issues of knowledge and certainty may apply only in certain kinds of examples, and that philosophers' pictures mislead them into thinking the issues can be applied in other cases, such as holding up one's hand and asking whether one knows that that is one's hand.


• Spring 1995 Reading Group: Foucault. This group worked mostly with Madness and Civilization, some interviews, and The Order of Things.


• Fall 1994 Reading Group: Wittgenstein. This was an unsuccessful attempt to find a shallow end of the pool, and introduce students to the Philosophical Investigations. This semester was helpful in clarifying the accomplishment of K. T. Fann's Wittgenstein's Conception of Philosophy. Bouwsma's essay on the Blue Book and John Cook's essay on privacy also were helpful for students.


• Spring 1994 Reading Group: Identity and Human Nature.

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