The one-credit courses, under 391 or 399 numbers, are all overload courses, not part of my teaching load, and have generally been on topics or issues I wanted to investigate and write about. I've offered one of these each semester, with a few exceptions, and for a couple of semesters have done more than one. The reading groups generally involve meeting for an hour and a half once per week to discuss a reading, with short papers (now emailed or posted to the group's website) and then a summary paper at the end. Bob Snyder and Benjamin Shaeffer have co-taught some of these, as noted. The three-credit courses under 390 or 485 numbers are the Philosophy Department Seminars, which rotate among the faculty. That is, we each get to teach these once every three to four and a half years. For those seminars, I generally survey the philosophy majors, presenting two or three alternatives I like, and then research, design, and teach the one for which they show the most interest.
            Course numbering during this time period changed. Two changes are relevant to reading this list. The one-credit reading groups were numbered 399 up til spring 2000, 391 afterwards. At that time the department also made it policy that three graded 391s could be used by philosophy majors as a substitute for one of the regular (three credit) electives. And the three-credit seminars were numbered 390 up til fall of 2005, 485 after. Because the seminars are rotated among faculty, my first seminar under the 485 number was spring 2008.

The following list of course titles is now roughly complete, but a few of the addresses for syllabi and materials are dead links. If you are particularly interested in a syllabus which does not yet have a live link, send me an e-mail at jwp2@humboldt.edu.

• Fall 2009 Reading Group: Wittgenstein and His Interpreters. Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker, over the course of decades, co-wrote a multi-volume commentary on much of Wittgenstein's work, and then Baker began to develop a more radical and difficult view of the main points he saw Wittgenstein making. In 2007, a group of essayists got together after Baker's death to articulate the main insights they thought they had learned from Baker. The results are captured in Wittgenstein and His Interpreters, ed. Guy Kahane, Edward Kanterian, and Oskari Kuusela, (Blackwell's, London: 2007. In general this group emphasizes a therapeutic and atheoretical approach, paranoid about importing begged questions and philosophical pictures which might mislead us about those examples of which we are trying to give a philosophical account. I wrote a review of the book of essays for the journal Teaching Philosophy. We will read that, David Stern's essay on the beetle in the box, Hacker's account of how Baker's views came to diverge from the earlier view the two of them shared, and other essays.


• Spring 2009 Reading Group: J.L. Austin's Ordinary Language Methods. One of Austin's oft-quoted aphorisms is, roughly, "Oversimplification is the occupational disease of philosophers--except when it is the occupation." We will contrast these two thinkers on how they think about the sources of philosophical problems, but they do teach one lesson alike, that before we get to the possible answers, before looking at the competing positions with their supporting arguments, we are well advised to back up and cast a cold eye on the question. Austin is a pioneer, and I think better than Wittgenstein, in setting up examples in which philosophical views ought to be seen or supported but are not, raising issues about the legitimacy of the philosophical views or the underlying issues. We look at excuses, at reality, at the meaning of a word, at performatives.


• Fall 2008 Reading Group: Constructions. In many parts of the academic world it is a commonplace to say that, e.g., gender or race or rights or cultures or knowledge or reality or science or language, is or are constructions. What is meant by this? What is being denied by these claims? How are constructivist claims different from saying that different people have different accounts of e.g. gender and we don't want to step on anyone's toes? What is the point of saying such things? To what extent are we justified in endorsing such claims?


• Spring 2008 Seminar: Selected Problems in Philosophy of Language. We emphasize central classic issues: What is language? (the standard answer from Augustine and Locke through Saussure, Katz, Ayer, Kripke, and Derrida is that language is a system of signs used for communication. Who do not believe this, and what are the objections?) What are names, and what are their relations to the thing named? What is truth? Is language conventional? What is the ontology of language? How do words relate to the world?


• Spring 2008 Reading Group: Plato vs. Platonism. Many scholars for some unaccountable reason think of Plato as a Platonist, even though he gives crucial and crushing arguments against that view. We will emphasize, rather than the expository question of what Plato really thought, the issue of whether his work justifies Platonism. That is, should we be Platonists?


• Fall 2007 Reading Group: Philosophical Pictures and Examples As Therapy. Rather than answering philosophical questions, Wittgenstein often recommends we question the questions. What were we thinking when we asked? To what extent might the problem be the result of what he calls a picture, an oversimplified model or sketch of how things must be? How can we investigate the underlying picture if we suspect one has been guiding our thinking? His advice in such investigations often includes working with examples from nonphilosophical contexts. Following this advice has implications for how we will think of arguments and how we will conceive of philosophy.


• Spring 2007 Reading Group: Methods: Meno's Paradox . We may be tempted to think that giving a philosophical account (especially, perhaps, a definition) might help us understand something better, but if we do not understand that thing going in, our work to give an account may mislead us. Co-taught with Benjamin Shaeffer.


• Fall 2006 Reading Group: Wittgenstein's Conception of Philosophy, co-taught with Professor Shaeffer. Wittgenstein's main accomplishment is not his answers to philosophical problems but rather new methods and a new conception of what it is to do philosophy. We articulate our own views of that method and that conception and the travails they have caused us. We also use readings, including K.T. Fann's book with the same title as this course.


• Spring 2006 Reading Group: Abstraction. How can we appraise philosophical abstractions? Many abstractions seem incontestably and obviously true, but turn out on investigation to be, well, let's use a polite term, problematic. We use insights regarding methods derived from Wittgenstein, though we will not do much exposition of Wittgenstein. Instead the emphasis will be on work with a collection of abstract truisms the group puts together, a collection we are tempted to endorse. We will compare those abstractions with nonphilosophical examples in which we might expect confirmation and then investigate any resulting cognitive dissonance (that is, investigate if we get puzzling or counterintuitive results).


• Fall 2005 Reading Group: Attacks Against Philosophy. Examination of postmodernism's critiques against arguments as covertly ideological, feminist criticisms of logic and science that they decontextualize in a sexist way, poetic and mystical claims that philosophy overintellectualizes or murders to dissect, and some pragmatists' (most conspicuously Richard Rorty) claims that philosophy is toothless in combat against injustice.


• Spring 2005 Seminar: (the one credit overload reading group got washed away this semester by the department's regular three-credit seminar) Philosophy vs. Literature.
  English Major: "Anything philosophy can do, literature can do better."
  Philosophy Major: "Oh, yeah? What's your argument?"


• Fall 2004 reading group: Selected Issues in Native American Philosophy. Native American philosophy is not one discipline, and almost all characterizations of Native American philosophical views are corrupted by romanticized projections of whites. We read some work by Iroquois League thinkers and then contemporary work by Indian poets and fiction writers. Then we concentrate on Navajo thinkers, including material out of their oral traditions as well as contemporary writers. We include some work by whites each of whom have spent at least twenty years living among the Navajo, some of them working to pry their white lenses off their accounts.


• Summer 2004, a three credit course relevant to this series: Critical Thinking and Educational Reform. The history of educational reform is exceeded in dreariness only by the history of housing reform, and critical thinking theorists too often lack the abilities of which they speak. We surveyed and critiqued main approaches to critical thinking. Members of the class issued a white paper calling for added requirements in General Education--two courses at the senior level, each requiring substantial writing critically analyzing an urgent problem of social or environmental responsibility. That document might be regarded as a test of commitment to critical thinking and a test of commitment to educational reform. The White Paper is online.


• Spring 2004: (on sabbatical, with a New Mexico and Arizona project centering on Navajo healing rituals, sand paintings, and Navajo philosophy. I have been working to support a claim that the Navajo are able to correct some mistakes in Anglo philosophy.)


• Fall 2003 Reading Group: Derrida vs. Searle re: Context. We work with an exchange between these two most of which is gathered in the book Limited Inc. At first this threatens to become a steel cage match, with escalating ill tempers and accusations of sloppiness and misunderstandings. The issue is partly about who understands John L. Austin's ordinary language philosophy best, and partly about the extent to which understanding (texts and conversations and language) is dependent on context. We can learn a lot about how not to engage in debate and about the politics of analytic vs. continental philosophy, but there are also crucial insights into how to appraise accounts of language (though they go by at well over the speed limit).


• Fall 2003 Course for Native American Studies and English: Native American Literature. There's a lot of backstory here, but the course and syllabus stand on their own as an introduction to Native American Literature. I was asked to step in to teach this course after NAS lost two faculty and the prof in English who was teaching a related course decided to take parental leave. I had already been approved for a sabbatical for the following spring on related topics (see above). My interests here go back to my own undergraduate major in English and my years of graduate work in literature. I'm convinced that some Native American thinkers can correct mistakes in Anglo and European philosophical traditions, and I find their literary works to be more effective at this than contemporary philosophical works. I've continued to research and write about (not to mention testifying in court) these matters since this course, and would teach it differently now. I've presented on some of this at the Navajo Studies Conference.


• Spring 2003 Reading Group: Dead Link?? YesLanguage As Signs and Wittgenstein's Methods. This reading group read, debated, and helped edit a 70,000 word book mss on language as signs.


• Fall 2002 Reading Group: On Certainty. This reading group was co-taught with Prof. Benjamin Shaeffer, on Wittgenstein's last work, published posthumously. Note the seminar below during the same semester.


• Fall 2002 Seminar: The Meaning of Life. We went through classic readings, then some contemporary work along with Eastern approaches which are left out of the available anthologies. We also read some literary works (poetry, short stories, with some armwaving at film), and challenges to, and defenses of, the philosophical question. A better reader on the topic than those now in print would be easy to compile.


• Spring 2002 Reading Group: Derrida re: Language and Searle's Objections(link is to F03). A better version of this reading group, with a tighter focus, harder work, and more results, was a year and a half later in Fall 2003, linked above.


• Fall 2001 Reading Group: Russell's The Problems of Philosophy(dead link). I use this little 1911 book, as many others do, in Intro courses, but concentrate on only the chapters on knowledge and perception. Students asked to take on the whole. On re-examination, the book does not come off well. Among other things, we appraised John Perry's more contemporary Introduction and Russell' later reaffirmations of his views.
  
  
• Fall 2001 (same semester as the above) Reading Group: Pinker's How the Mind Works, (which we trashed). This group was instigated by John Taylor.


• Spring 2001 Reading Group: Methods–Grice and Searle vs. Wittgenstein. John Searle and Paul Grice have very similar objections to Wittgenstein's ordinary language methods. Theirs are the most serious objections, and are perhaps the only objections which should be taken seriously. On investigation, the objections reveal themselves as so circular as to make it puzzling that they are endorsed by other philosophers, so we explored those issues along with exploring the assumption or claim that philosophy is like science in having the goal of revealing hitherto hidden truths.


• Spring 2001 Reading Group: C. G. Jung, Current Issues, cross listed with Religious Studies and co-taught with Madeline McMurray and Shaunna Howell. I don't often get to think about Jungian issues, though I have been interested in and have read Jung for decades. I have too often had the experience of dealing with Jung's True Believers, about whom Jung famously remarked, "Thank God I am Jung and not a Jungian!" Dr. McMurray is much more hard-headed, Shaunna Howell kept directing our attention to where the stakes are most enormous and profound, and this group was a delightful and fierce discussion.


• Fall 2000 Reading Group: Examples and Intuitions. We began by looking for philosophers citing intuitions as though they are evidence. Turns out they are all over the place for the last few centuries. We then appraised those moves. Turns out they are very bad moves. Intuitions can as easily express mistaken projections of erroneous pictures as they can provide data or evidence. We tried to find some basis for citing intuitions other than that the speaker has run out of arguments, but were unsuccessful. We raised the issue of whether something similar is at work when people start insisting that a relation or a value is intrinsic--are they only saying that they know it's true though they can't figure out why? If so, there might be a problem.


• Spring 2000 Reading Group: Methods, Issues re: Richard Rorty. This was preparation for a visit to campus by Rorty that semester, working mostly with his book Philosophy and Social Hope. In his longish autobiographical essay "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids" Rorty confirms with his own case that philosophers can become pragmatists because they suffer defeat by philosophical problems such as skepticism. At the same time, Rorty provides a bracing call for philosophers to be engaged in battles against injustice.


• Fall 1999 Seminar: Wittgenstein. Kurt Vonnegut tells an incident from his brief career teaching college classes in a preface to a volume of Ann Sexton's poetry. He was to teach Joyce's The Dubliners, and says, "I was game. I'd read the book. But when I stood in front of the class and opened my mouth nothing came out." Wittgenstein can have a similar effect. There's so much and it's so profound and for such high stakes. Where can we possibly begin?


• Fall 1999 Reading Group: Philosophical Methods. We read philosophers endorsing and opposing Wittgenstein and Austin's use of ordinary language examples as ways to detect philosophical mistakes. We then went through some examples of work using those methods to see whether objections to them have merit. Several later reading groups return to these issues, but usually with a narrower focus.
  This reading group helped confirm that the objections to ordinary language methods can be winnowed down to only two or three serious arguments. Those include Searle's assertion fallacy talk, Grice's similar work on conversational implicature, and the claim based on an unexamined analogy with science that philosophy can provide results in the form of new, hitherto unarticulated, insights.


• Spring 1999 Reading Group: Dichotomies: Pro or Con? The title is not entirely a joke. Dichotomies have gotten a lot of bad press, and the discussions often bristle with profundity. Various attacks against dichotomies are surveyed. Alternatives are explored. Vertigo results. Attempts to achieve a nondichotomous consciousness peter out if pursued at an abstract level. (Philosopher A: "Let's achieve a nondichotomous consciousness!" B: "Ummm, what's that?" A: "Well, dummy, it's clearly consciousness which is not dichotomous--ooooh, wait.") Ordinary language methods point toward a different kind of resolution, one involving concrete nonphilosophical examples in which dichotomies get little or no traction. In some of those examples, that is, the law of the excluded middle, that you are either pregnant or not pregnant, may not apply even though when abstractly conceived one might expect it to apply.


• Fall 1998 Reading Group: I had to cancel the offering for this semester, planned to be on Wittgenstein's On Certainty. The syllabus I drafted is online.The course was offered later, co-taught (and better for it) with Prof. Shaeffer.


• Spring 1998 Reading Group: Philosophy of Language: Intentionality and Attacks on Semantics. Semantics is the academic discipline which studies linguistic meaning. A recent school of thought within semantics takes intentions and intentionality (these are two things, not the same thing) to be crucial in understanding meaning. Another recent issue is whether splitting off meaning from whatever else is going on in language (for example, uttering words or sentences) might lead us into error, impossibilities, or nonsense. Those who endorse intention-based semantics often think they are incorporating insights from Wittgenstein about the uses of words (and sentences). This reading group, then, involves poking around inside an extensive labyrinth. Included in the linked page are some of the syllabus-like documents from earlier reading groups dealing with intentionality and intention-based semantics which help set the stage for this semester. The next three on this list, then, keep referring back to this item.


• Fall 1997 Reading Group: Philosophy of Language: Issues re: Intentionality, at http://www.humboldt.edu/~jwp2/399s98syl.htm. See above, Spring 98. This syllabus is incorporated into that semester's syllabus. This turned into a multiple-semester reading group.


• Spring 1997 Reading Group: Philosophy of Language Methods: Current Issues re: Semantics and Intentionality (continues and incorporates materials from Fall 1996; syllabus incorporates both semesters).


• Fall 1996 Reading Group: Phil. Language: Classic Readings on Meaning and Intention-Based Semantics, (continued work on these topics the next semester--see link immediately above).


• Spring 1996 Reading Group: Wittgenstein. The reading group was a more successful attempt--better organized, harder-working, with fiercer warnings at the beginning--than the Fall 1994 reading group. This semester I also organized a weekend course bringing in Prof. Don S. Levi of the University of Oregon on Problems of Multiple Personality and Recovered Memory. The issues included the then hot question about whether multiple personality disorder was really caused by horrific, extreme childhood sexual abuse or whether the stories of remembering those abuses might have been the result of therapists' suggestions. Ian Hacking was writing about the philosophical issues. We also worked with Judith Herman's account (including her history) of the relations between trauma and mental illnesses. That account has strong implications for whether therapy as a tool for recovery demonstrates limits on medications-based treatments.


• Spring 1996 Seminar: Madness. Though the literature on this topic still owes a great deal to Foucault's Madness and Civilization, (which we read) this course is not limited to those issues, of the construction of insanity and the political power plays surrounding self defining others by robbing them of their voices. We explore how science, families, artists (including literary artists), and tribal societies give differing accounts for people whom we label as mad. We take up such issues as the circularities in diagnostic criteria, the limits of the anti-psychiatry movement, Navajo sandpainting rituals as counterexamples to Foucault, claimed relations between madness and artistic genius, and attempts at broad synthetic views such as Jung's. This seminar includes some materials put together as part of a University of Oregon Humanities Center Course Award in 1992.


• Fall 1995 Reading Group: On Certainty, co-taught with Prof. Bob Snyder. This reading group discusses, with the necessary background, Wittgenstein's radical approach to skepticism in his last, posthumously-published work. Wittgenstein may be working toward the insight that issues of knowledge and certainty may apply only in certain kinds of examples, and that philosophers' pictures mislead them into thinking the issues can be applied in other cases, such as holding up one's hand and asking whether one knows that that is one's hand.


• Spring 1995 Reading Group: Foucault. This group worked mostly with Madness and Civilization, some interviews, and The Order of Things.


• Fall 1994 Reading Group: Wittgenstein. This was an unsuccessful attempt to find a shallow end of the pool, and introduce students to the Philosophical Investigations. This semester was helpful in clarifying the accomplishment of K. T. Fann's Wittgenstein's Conception of Philosophy. Bouwsma's essay on the Blue Book and John Cook's essay on privacy also were helpful for students.


• Spring 1994 Reading Group: Identity and Human Nature.

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