Readings

Specific readings for a given lecture are provided on the lecture's page, linked from the schedule on the home page. However, it can help (especially later in the semester) to have a single page that collects all the readings so you don't have to hunt through lectures to find them. To that end I will compile readings from the lectures into a master list here. Note that I will add readings to this list as necessary, roughly in the same order in which we cover them in lecture.

• Plato, "The Republic", Book IV (selections)
• Aristotle, "De Anima", (selections)
• Descartes, "Meditations: Meditation VI"
• Hume, "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding", (selections)
• Gilbert Ryle, "Descartes' Myth"
• Hilary Putnam, "Brains and Behavior"
• John Haugeland, "Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea" (pdf, 2mb)
• Terry Bisson, "They're Made Out of Meat"
• Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"
• Alan Turing, et. al., "Can Automatic Calculating Machines Be Said to Think?"
• A.M. Turing, On Computable Numbers, With an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem (Optional)
• David Hilbert, Mathematical Problems (Optional)
• Boolos & Jeffrey, "Computability and Logic" (excerpt, pdf)
• Antony Galton, "The Church-Turing Thesis: Its Nature and Status" (pdf)
• John Searle, "Minds, Brains, and Programs"
• John Searle, Watson Doesn't Know It Won on 'Jeopardy!'
• Margaret Boden, "Escaping from the Chinese Room"
• John Searle, "Is the Brain a Digital Computer?"
• Ned Block, "The Mind as the Software of the Brain" (section 4)
• Fred Dretske, "If You Can't Make One, You Don't Know How It Works"
• Fred Dretske, "Minds, Machines, and Money: What Really Explains Behavior"
• Dan Dennett, "True Believers (Introduction)"
• Dan Dennett, "True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why It Works"
• Dan Dennett, "True Believers (Postscript)"