Phil/Psych 447

Office hours (HH368): M 1:00-2:00; F 12:30-1:30, and by appointment.

Seminar in Cognitive Science

Week 10: Making Sense of Everything

Topics

1. Creativity
2. Responsibility
3. Descriptive-normative
4. Why is there something?

Next week: Neural naturalistic approaches to politics, mathematics.

Discussion Questions from Chapter 10

1. How is descriptive information relevant to normative conclusions?
2. Could there have been nothing? Is this question intelligible?
3. Does religion explain why there is something and not nothing?
4. What made the big bang?
5. Does brane theory provide a satisfactory explanation of why there is something?
6. Does the anthropic theory explain why the universe is like it is?
7. What do literature and the arts contribue to understanding the meaning of life?
8. Does this book increase or diminish wisdom?
9. Over your lifetime, will human wisdom increase or diminish?

Phil/Psych 447

Computational Epistemology Laboratory.

Paul Thagard

This page updated Nov. 10, 2008