Theories of Concepts

Instructor: Eleonore Neufeld (she/her)

Office hours: By request

Lecture: W 3:30 to 6:20pm, Central Time, synchronous

Meeting link:

🦚 Table of Contents

🗝 Enrollment

Prerequisite(s): Students should have some background knowledge in philosophy of language or philosophy of mind. This course satisfies the M&E requirement.

📜 Course Description

This class will be on theories of concepts and their application to topics such as conceptual engineering or different phenomena in the philosophy of language and mind. We will discuss the desiderata a theory of concepts should fulfill. After a review of the more classical proposals, we'll pay special attention to how the most recent proposals fare with respect to the desiderata. We will also explore more recent advances in the study of category representation, such as psychological essentialism and causal model theory, and examine whether they can circumvent problems faced by other models. Finally, we will look into recent research in conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics, and explore questions of how our concepts ought to look like, and what some of the challenges of the implementation of such projects are.

👩🏼‍🏫 Zoom etiquette

Please treat it as a matter of seminar etiquette to keep your camera on during our live Zoom sessions, unless you have a poor connection or there is a distraction on your end or you have some other good reason. Although the classes will be recorded, they'll only be stored at the UIUC cloud. The Zoom video also generally only records those who are speaking.
Do not share any synchronous or asynchronous content of this class outside the classroom. This is not permitted in any form.
The “digital divide” is accentuated by online teaching approaches. For many reasons, a considerable fraction of students do not have the technology hardware, expertise and/or access that instructors may take for granted.Campus has programs to help bridge the digital divide. LAS has the “ATLAS Share” program, to assists students obtain adequate computers and/or internet connectivity. It is described here: https://atlas.illinois.edu/student-information/atlas-share
My plan is to turn on subtitles during the Zoom session. If I don't do that, I'd appreciate if someone could remind me!

🏆 Course Requirements

Generally: Do the readings, attend the seminar, and participate in discussions.

Discussion Notes. For each seminar, draft a one page (500 words maximum) reflection piece that (i) develops at least one important criticism of a paper; (ii) isolates a point or idea in the paper as important, astute, worth developing; and (iii) presents a question you want greater clarity on or that has been bypassed within the dialectic. Send it to me before midnight the night before the seminar. These pieces will not be formally graded, but will be distributed to others taking the course. You may skip two submissions for any reason. But you must turn in one prior to each of the other seminars to receive a grade in the course.

Here's an example of a reflection piece for a paper.

Presentation. Give a presentation on a paper I'll assign. (~25 min)

Short Final Paper. Meet with me to discuss and confirm your paper topic by April 15. Submit a final paper of about 3000 words by May 12. Since one of the course goals is that you have a paper that you can submit and present at a philosophy conference, indicate in the email what conference/workshop you could send this paper to (if you wanted to—of course, I don't force you to submit anywhere!).

You can use the short paper as the basis for a long paper if you were so inclined and use it, for example, as the first step towards your preliminary exam.