Week 6 Lectures Now Available!

Welcome to Week 6 of Know Thyself. This week our focus will be on the work of the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, particularly his book, Descartess Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain . In this highly innovative and influential book the Portuguese-born neuroscientist Damasio (who now works at the University of Southern California) argues in detail in favor of an intimate connection between rationality on the one hand, and emotion on the other. In particular, Damasio will try to show that rational agency (as opposed to rational thought) is seriously compromised in the absence of an agents ability to tap into her gut feelings about past, current, or future states of affairs. The full text of Damasios book may be found online here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/54406862/Antonio-Damasio-Descartes-Error In the course of our discussion of Damasios theories, we will recount the sad and gruesome tale of Phineas Gage. More about Gages story may be found at a website devoted to it at the University of Akrons Center for the History of Psychology: https://www.uakron.edu/gage/story.dot In addition, for a basic primer on the human brain, you may find the following website from the U.S. National Institutes of Health helpful: http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/brain_basics/know_your_brain.htm Also, the discussion thread I created a few weeks ago, Ask a Question! has now become unmanageably large, thanks in no small part to all the excellent questions that have been posted there. My staff of Community TAs and I have not been able to answer all the questions that have been posted there, but we have done our best. I have just created a new thread for the second half of the course, entitled, Ask a Question, Part II. Please use this new thread to post any new questions you may have. I will also lock the earlier forum so that no new material may be added to it. However, my staff and I will continue to look into the earlier forum to see if there are any unanswered questions that it would be useful for us to answer. We will post any such questions and our answers in the new thread. Finally, now that we have made our way through Professor Wilsons work on the adaptive unconscious, I would like to suggest that you go back to the list I suggested you make earlier in the term of your 20 most significant personality characteristics. Review that list and update it if necessary. Now make another one that is different from it, though not dramatically different

from it. Make sure list #2 does not, in your estimation, describe you. Now send or show both lists to several (4-6) friends, acquaintances, or family members, making sure not to indicate to them which list is the one that you feel describes you. Ask them to judge which of the two lists better describes you. I will open up a thread for you to post your results. Sincerely, Mitch Green Mon 8 Apr 2013 12:12 AM PDT -0700

Week 5 Lectures Live: Wilson on How We are Strangers to Ourselves

Welcome to Week 5 of Know Thyself. This week for the first time we will study the work of a contemporary scholar rather than one from the past, namely Professor Tim Wilson, also of the University of Virginia. Wilson takes inspiration from much of Freuds work, but unlike Freud is at pains to establish the existence of an unconscious in ways that meet the highest standards of experimental rigor. Synthesizing work by himself and his colleagues, as well as that of other scholars, Professor Wilson argues that there is substantial experimental evidence for an unconsciouswhat he calls the adaptive unconsciousalbeit not quite the unconscious reservoir of sexual and violent urges postulated by Freud. Lectures this week will largely summarize and on some issues respond to Professor Wilsons discussion in Strangers to Ourselves. For those who do not have accesss to this book in either hard copy or electronic form, here is a link to an article providing an overview of some of Professor Wilsons research in the area co-authored with psychologist Elizabeth Dunn: http://www.people.virginia.edu/~tdw/annual.review.final.pdf Please remember that on Tuesday, April 2, I will interview Professor Wilson, inviting him to respond to some of the questions that you pose for him about his work. He will also have the opportunity to respond to questions posed by my University of Virginia students. Accordingly, if you have any questions you would like Professor Wilson to consider answering, please post them here: https://class.coursera.org/knowthyself-001/forum/thread?thread_id=783 I ask you to bear in mind that there will be insufficient time to answer all the questions posed. Finally, one theme of Professor Wilsons book is a form of unconscious prejudice known as implicit bias. Because such biases are subconscious rather than pre-conscious, they are not

open to introspection. As a result, a person might sincerely disavow prejudice towards other individuals or groups, and yet her behavior might suggest otherwise. You can find out whether you harbor implicit biases at the Project Implicit website, https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ This contains a number of online psychological assessments to help you determine whether you harbor biases. Warning: you may find some surprising news about yourself! Yours, Mitch Green Mon 1 Apr 2013 12:00 AM PDT -0700

Week 4 Lectures Live-- On To Freud!

Welcome to Week Four of Know Thyself. This week we will discuss Sigmund Freuds Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. If you are not in possession of a hard copy of this book, you may link to an online version here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/31127286/Freud-Introductory-Lectures-on-Psycho-Analysis-19161917 I recommend that you read Parts I and II, which are about Parapraxes and Dreams respectively. That is a fair bit of reading, but I believe you will find, as have my students at the University of Virginia, that Freuds writing is not as dense as that of the philosophers we have read thus far. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was one of the towering figures of Twentieth Century psychology. Although he was not the first to posit an unconscious level at which mental events occur, his theory of the unconscious was immensely influential. It was also quite shocking for its time. A great many of Freuds theories are so familiar in contemporary culture that it takes an effort to appreciate just how controversial they were when he introduced them. We speak of Freudian slips; in fact there is a lingerie shop with this name! People unflinchingly describe themselves as being neurotic. In fact, we think little of describing a persons behavior as anal, in, for instance, explaining why he insists on keeping all his pencils sharp or responding to all his emails. How did we arrive at a point at which it is nearly second-nature to suppose that some aspect of a persons early childhood experience in toilet training could have anything to do with how fastidious he is forty years later? We will not in this course have the time to attempt a social history of the reception of Freuds

theories. However, we will try to understand how he sought to provide evidence for the claims he did make. We will attempt to understand how one could possibly establish claims about the unconscious, and why some of those routes appear to be more fruitful than others. We will also attempt to shed light on why Freuds theories have now fallen upon hard times: psychoanalysis has considerably less influence in contemporary life than it did in, say, fifty years ago. Is this change simply a matter of the vagaries of fashion or is there a deeper reason for this shift? I have also opened a thread under Open Commentary for you to post your parapraxes and dreams. Please try to remember your slips and dreams, and share them with the rest of us. You are welcome to do so anonymously. You might describe a dream from your past that you still recall, or write about one you experienced recently. One good method for remembering recent dreams is to keep a notepad next to where you sleep. Try to write down any dreams you can recall as soon as possible after waking up. I ask only that you adhere to the following limitation: because there is no age restriction on enrollment in this class, please make sure that the dream you report (at least at the level of manifest contenta term that is defined in the video lectures) is suitable for all age groups. (This puts a limitation on our inquiries, but incorporates a compromise between open discussion of an aspect of our inner lives, and concern for the effects that such a discussion could have on our younge st classmates.) After collecting a large number of parapraxes and dreams, we will then scrutinize them to see whether they fall into any of the patterns that Freud claims to discern. If Freud is right, then most of us know vastly less about ourselves than we think we do. This is not just a challenge to the Cartesian notions of phosphorescence and infallibility. It is a challenge to my claims to know why I perform the actions that I do. We therefore do well to pay attention not just Freuds claims, but to the reasons he gives for them. Sincerely, Mitch Green Mon 25 Mar 2013 12:30 AM PDT -0700

Week 3 Is Live and Important Quiz Information

Welcome to Week 3 of Know Thyself. This week we move into the Twentieth Century as we consider the work of the influential British philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900-76). Ryle taught at Oxford University for most of his career. As he remarks in his book The Concept of Mind, at an early point in his career he accepted the (by then) widely accepted dualistic picture inherited from Descartes. However, as he thought further about these issues he came to think that this view might harbor confusion. As a result, Ryle became a figure in the ordinary language movement in Philosophy, thereby sharing common ground with Ludwig Wittgenstein and J.L.

Austin. This movement sought to show that many traditional philosophical problems rest on confusions having to do with misunderstanding the language in which those problems are couched. Instead, this movement held, once we attend to the ordinary language with which we discuss such concepts as mind, intelligence, reason, and understanding, we will find that such questions as, What kind of entity is a mindmental or physicalrest on misunderstandings of language that we speak. Wittgenstein noted how language can bewitch our intelligence, and Ryle would have concurred. Our course syllabus contains a link to an online copy of Ryles (very long) book. However, I am only recommending that you read Chapters One, Two and Six. Also, as has been pointed out in some of the discussion forums, a few pages seem to be missing from Chapter Two. Accordingly, here is a link to a pdf of Chapters One and Two hosted at Carnegie-Mellon University where there are no gaps: http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/kk3n/80-300/ryle1949.pdf Next, many of you are finding the quizzes more challenging than you may have expected. In order to take some of the stress out of quiz-taking, we are adopting the policy of dropping the lowest of your ten quiz scores in determining your overall average for the course. So your course average will be based only on your top nine scores. I believe that this policy, together with the very good chance that you will get more proficient at these quizzes as the weeks progress, should increase your confidence in passing the course with ease! Finally, please let me clarify some distinctive features of the field of philosophy. Most philosophers realize that their views are controversial and that other intelligent people will disagree with them. This does not mean that there are no right answers. (Perhaps there arent, but I doubt that any of us is in a position to know that there are no right answers to philosophical questions.) Rather, progress in philosophy is more about formulating new ideas, clarifying obscure concepts, and more generally making our minds more supple. As you will see, Ryle himself suggests that philosophy is largely a matter of replacing habits of thought with disciplined ways of thinking, where that discipline is very much about not only having ideas, but knowing how to justify and clarify them in response to criticism. One of my best teachers, Professor Joe Camp, who recently passed away, used to have students over to his house in the evening to discuss philosophical questions. We usually would leave at about the time the sun was rising! Let me close by remarking that I continue to be amazed by the level of engagement in the discussion forums. It is an awe-inspiring experience to be part of a global community discussing self-knowledge with such passion, curiosity, and eagerness to help one another! For this I thank you.

Mitch Green Sun 17 Mar 2013 9:00 PM PDT -0700

Quiz Two Posted! And Community TAs

We here at Know Thyself have been inspired by the level of engagement, enthusiasm, and critical thought that this group has brought to the course material thus far. We are encouraged by the way you have created a dialogue with each other on the forums, and we hope to see the community grow even more in coming weeks. To help facilitate that dialogue, we are pleased to announce that we will be receiving some help from some "Community TAs" moving forward. These Community TAs are current and/or former students of Professor Green's, or have worked with him in some other philosophical capacity. Many of them either have taken Know Thyself already at UVa or are taking it now. We have thus invited the Community TAs to join the discussions you are having on the forums to provide their own perspective on the issues of the week, as well as gather any feedback or questions you might have for Professor Green. After all, 76,592 students (our current enrollment) is a lot to keep up with! We ask that you show the Community TA's the same level of respect you have shown one another thus far. Second, the Quiz for Week 2 on the Meditations of Descartes has been posted. Remember, there is no hard deadline to the quizzes, but they may only be attempted once, so take your time with the questions and review the video lectures if need be. Finally, some of you seem to have been a bit confused regarding content distribution. It would not be feasible to send you video material or quizzes as e-mail attachments. Instead, to access that material you will need to log in directly to the Coursera platform and access the Know Thyself page in order to gain access to the course content. That site can be found at this address: https://class.coursera.org/knowthyself-001/class/index Thanks very much, and we hope you are enjoying Week 2! Tue 12 Mar 2013 9:00 PM PDT -0700

On To Week Two!
Welcome back to Know Thyself! This week we will jump ahead about eighteen centuries to explore the thinking of Rene Descartes, who initiated what is today termed the modern period in Philosophy. Descartes was a mathematician and scientist in addition to being a philosopher, and he is credited with inventing the Cartesian coordinate system as well as analytic geometry.

You will notice that in my lectures for this week I spend a good deal of time reading from and discussing particular passages from DescartesMeditiations . This is due in part to the fact that Descartes writing is quite dense, and I am hoping to unpack that dense material a bit for you in order to make it more comprehensible. As the syllabus makes clear, you can get access to a free, online version of the /Meditations/ here: http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/de.html The version of the text I will be discussing is the one published by Hackett, which is accessible here as Kindle download for less than $1: http://www.amazon.com/Meditation-on-First-Philosophyebook/dp/B00AE1P7MQ/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1362963867&sr=8-2-fkmr1 Also, if you are at all pressed for time, then I suggest you focus your reading on the following: Meditation I, Meditation II for Lecture 1, and, for Lecture 2, Meditation VI. (I will summarize the III, IV and V, but they are a bit tangential for our purposes.) These three Meditations are very rich and tightly argued, and it may be a good idea to read them at least twice before attempting to answer the Study Questions for this week. (The first time I read DescartesMeditations was in college thirty years ago, and I find something new in them every time I return!) On the topic of quizzes, some of you were puzzled by aspects of the first quiz. My staff and I made a decision to keep the course open to new enrollees as long as possible, and for this reason, students are allowed to take all the quizzes near the end of the course. This in turn prevents me from being able to publicize the answers to any quizzes that have been posted. However, I should make clear that in question #1 of Quiz 1, I am trying to encourage students to hone their skills of close reading and literal interpretation of language. That means that if a priestess says that no one is wiser than Socrates, she means that no one is, and not merely that no one in Athens is wiser than he is. Similarly, if you are asked whether two propositions A and B are consistent with one another, you should be able to answer that question while paying NO attention to the question whether either A or B is actually true. The question is, rather, whether there is a possible situation in which they both are. (An illustration of the importance of careful interpretation: According to one legend, a general came to Delphi to ask whether he should attack another army. The priestess answered, If you make war, a great victory will be won. The general attacked, and was soundly defeated. The oracle was, of course, correct!) So, on to Week Two. This week the rain and cold drove us indoors for the filming of our lectures. As spring makes its way into Virginia, you will see more lectures taking place outside. Also, in not too long my big Newfoundland dog Clementine will make an appearance. My videographer has, by now, forgiven her for licking his camera lens (it helped a bit when I told

him that Plato held that dogs are the most philosophical of animals!) Yours, Mitch Green Sun 10 Mar 2013 8:50 PM PDT -0700

Quiz 1 Now Available

Dear Know Thyself Students, We here at Know Thyself hope you are enjoying the cours so far, and that the lectures we prepared were engaging and interesting! We wanted to let you know that the Quiz for Week One should be available to take now. We were planning on releasing it a bit sooner, BUT, as those of you in the United States may know, the East Coast of the United States is getting a huge snowstorm, so we lost electricity for the past 24 hours or so. Our apologies-- Mother Nature is indeed difficult to control. Remember, the quizzes are designed to assess your engagement with the video material and your ability to reason about that material. We purposefully DID NOT place particular deadlines on the quizzes, so feel free to take a look at the questions and, if you are having a difficult time with a question, re-visit the course material before submitting your answers. Our only request is that you please DO NOT directly discuss particular questions and/or answers with other students. Doing so is in violation of the Honor Code for this class. Thanks and Good luck! We hope you've enjoyed the course thus far and will continue to engage with the material and each other moving forward. -The Know Thyself Staff Wed 6 Mar 2013 3:00 PM PST -0800

Welcome To Know Thyself!

Welcome to Know Thyself, and thank you so much for joining us! My Teaching Assistants and I are excited to have you with us for the maiden online voyage of this course, and are looking forward to learning with you. Here are some things to bear in mind as we start our ten-week session: 1. I realize that many of you (and over 70,000 students are currently enrolled from around the globe) have been away from formal education for some time, or may never had access to education beyond an elementary level. In addition, I would wager that most of you lead very

busy lives, and don't have a great deal of time to spare. For these reasons, I have tried to make this course as "user-friendly" as I know how, while also trying to make it INTERESTING, ILLUMINATING, ENJOYABLE, and NOT TOO DEMANDING. 2. Accordingly, there are no required readings, and no required essays to write (though we *hope* you will do some reading, and we *hope* that you will take the time to write short essays in answer to the study/discussion questions). Whether you pass the course will be determined entirely by your performance on TEN QUIZZES, each of which is associated with a week's lectures. Passing the course is just a matter of achieving an average score of 70% for all ten of your quizzes. 3. How does that work? Each week we will post TWO lectures, each of which will be broken up into a number of short segments. Each of those segments will be about 5-10 minutes long. Feel free to watch only one or two segments at a time. I realize that many of you work full time or have other considerable commitments, and may not find it easy to sit and watch an entire lecture in one sitting. Please proceed at a pace that works best for you. 4. In each week after this one, you can always go back and review lectures from previous weeks. However, you won't be able to "peek" ahead. Week #N's lectures will only be posted on the class site on week N (but they will stay up until end of the term). 5. Associated with each week's lectures, I will provide links to readings that are *recommended* only. No readings will be required for this course. However, you will probably get more out of the course if you can find time to do some of the readings I will be recommending. 6. With the posting of each pair of lectures, I will post a few "study/discussion" questions. Those questions are intended to help you engage with the material more deeply than you might just from watching my lectures on your computer screen. Philosophy is best learned by doing, not by watching. For each question I pose, I suggest you find a notebook, either electronic or paper, and write out a paragraph or two as an answer. If you have difficulty formulating an answer, post a question in an appropriate discussion forum. It is very likely that one or more of your peers will have some useful suggestions, and after reading those suggestions, you might go back and revise or otherwise improve your answer. 7. In the second half of each week, I will then make that week's quiz available. Watching the lectures and working out your answers to the questions are the best ways of preparing for that quiz, and if you've done your work, the quiz should not be terribly difficult. Also, while you can take any quiz whenever you want before the course ends, IDEALLY you will take the quiz for week N at or near the end of week N. So, ideally, when I post the quiz for week 5, you will take that quiz at or near the end of week 5. I realize, however, that people travel, have crises at

work or at home, or otherwise get distracted. As a result, you can take a quiz for a given week even after that week. 8. However, please bear in mind that you will only get ONE CHANCE at each quiz. You cannot take any single quiz more than once. It will thus be important to watch the video lectures carefully, and to do your best work on the study/discussion questions. 9. I will try to be involved in the discussion forums as best I can, and I am looking forward to reading those discussions as they progress. In addition, I have ten energetic and talented students who are versed in the topic of self-knowledge, and they will serve as "Community TA's" on the discussion forums. I believe you will find them helpful in clarifying issues, redirecting discussions in helpful ways, and serving as resources. 10. So to sum up, the GENERAL pattern for your work, which you may well need to modify to suit your circumstances, would be as follows for each week: Watch Video Lectures Do Readings if Possible Answer Study/Discussion Questions (and share your thoughts/questions with others in the discussion forums) Take the Week's Quiz

Got it? Okay then, let's get started! Yours, Mitch Green Sun 3 Mar 2013 9:30 PM PST -0800

Know Thyself Pre-Class Announcement

A warm hello and welcome from your Professor and "tour guide" on our journey through the nature, value and limits of self-knowledge. My students and staff here at the University of Virginia share my excitement to begin the course in just two weeks, and we are honored that you have summoned your curiosity and are preparing to join us. While the course will not officially begin until March 4, I wanted to give you some idea of the texts from which much of the information in the video lectures will come. These texts are completely, entirely, 100% OPTIONAL, but, should you wish to explore the class topics to the fullest extent or engage in some digital discussion on the forums, we would recommend

reading them if you are able. One important note: many of the readings will be available through direct links that we will post on the class syllabus when the class site officially opens in two weeks, so you need not feel that you must purchase any of these texts immediately, even if you do plan to do the suggested reading. With all that said, here are some of the topics and OPTIONAL readings: 1. Socrates and the value of the examined life: Optional reading: Plato, The Apology (Hackett) 2. Rene Descartes, the mind-body problem, and introspection: Optional reading: Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (Hackett) 3. Gilbert Ryle, the Ghost in the Machine, and category mistakes: Optional reading: Selections from Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Chicago) 4. Psychoanalysis and the unconscious: Optional reading: Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Norton) 5. Recent work on the unconscious: the adaptive unconscious: Optional reading: Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves (Harvard) 6. Neuroscience, emotions and somatic markers: Optional reading: Damasio, Descartes Error (Putnam) 7. Self-deception: Optional reading: Mele, Self-Deception Unmasked (Princeton) 8. Zen Buddhism, archery, and koans: Optional reading: Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery 9. Indian Buddhism and the self: Optional reading: Siderits, Buddhism as Philosophy Also, if you'd like to familiarize yourself with, or refresh your memory of, philosophy in a general way, you might consider my textbook, Engaging Philosphy: A Brief Introduction, which I wrote for readers who are new to the subject. The book explores some of the main topics in the field, while also giving a brief overview of some methods useful for our subject matter, such as how to assess arguments, different kinds of fallacies, and varieties of rationality. Again, all of this is strictly optional. A link to the publisher's site is here:

Hackett Publishing and to an online retailer's site is here: Amazon Yours, Mitch Green Professor of Philosophy University of Virginia http://people.virginia.edu/~msg6m/ Mon 18 Feb 2013 9:00 PM PST -0800