Teaching
Duties include designing syllabi, office hours, and final grading
Between Intention and Action (Spring 2023)
An overview of kinds of intentions and theories of action constitutes the groundwork of the core question of this seminar, that is, how human minds fill the gap between intending to do something (e.g. to go on vacation, attend a seminar, drink a cup of coffee) and really acting, or failing to act, on intentions.
Transformative Experience (Fall 2022–23)
Based on the homonymous book by L.A. Paul (Transformative experience. 2014, OUP Oxford), this seminar considers and evaluates the impact of unprecedented subjective experiences on the capacity to imagine and compare future scenarios. Is having a child a rational decision? The normative standard for rational decision-making is that the agent should choose the act with the highest expected value. L.A. Paul contends that it is impossible to know what epistemically and personally transformative experiences would be like for us before we have already committed ourselves. Along the way, the problem of transformative experience and how we can handle preferences over time will be assessed against a few common views in theories of decision-making.
Mental Representations (Spring 2022)
It is widely agreed that the mind represents things and events in the external (or internal) world. It is less agreed by philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists how the mind represents. Students in this seminar will engage with a selection of main theories and debates on the nature, the contents, and the roles of mental representations in human cognition.
Philosophical Problems in Decision-Making (Fall 2021–2022)
Which route should I take to get to the department (out of three possible ways)? Who should be (or should have been) prioritized for Covid-19 vaccines in our society? What is the difference between ordinary choices such as a restaurant order and a political decision with massive societal impact? How do we decide to move our bodies in the environment we live in? What kind of cognitive capacities underlie our choices? Answering these and other questions will provide a philosophical inquiry into some issues surrounding decision theory, from conceptions of utility and rationality to practical reasoning and heuristics, the effect of mentally representing choices and the question of whether (and to what extent) we can compare values.
