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PHIL517 PHILOSOPHY OF COMMUNICATION I

Course Objectives

[IGNORE THE WEDNESDAY CLASS HOUR. The class meets Tuesdays 14:40 – 17:30 / B103 (sometimes B106)]

Description: Gilles Deleuze makes three interconnected claims about thinking: to think is to create, to think is to play, and the highest form of automated thinking is a problematizing and creative activity. With this mind, our course asks, what does it mean to communicate not just a thought but the creative activity of thinking itself? … that is, to move another to think divergently, creatively, and originally? To pursue this question, we will first examine Deleuze’s claims about creative automated thinking in their cinematic contexts and then further those investigations through philosophies of play, especially of video games. The topics we will cover are: automated thinking in Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz; 20th century philosophies of cybernetics; extended mind hypothesis; artificial intelligence; psychoanalytic and anti-psychoanalytic automatism; cinematic “spiritual automata;” and, in contemporary philosophical studies of play and games: serious games; procedural rhetoric; “the mechanic is the message;” disruptive design, and subversive play.

Format: The class is split between two presentation/discussion hours and a third writing hour (in room B106 or B103). Students will give short presentations on a text and together the class will coauthor a paper based on our readings and discussions.

Grading: 3 requirements:

• {1} Two Short Text Presentations. 60 points total. Students will give two short 15-20 minute presentations on a text and lead a 20 minute discussion. In addition to the oral presentation, the student must submit a written document following a template to better implement the material into the coauthored paper. (Note: if there are very many students enrolled, we may need to reduce it to one presentation).
• {2} Attendance. To ensure fair coauthorship, students are required to attend all but 3 sessions (taking into account all hours of a session). Anything short of this results in point penalties to the final grade: 2 points are subtracted for each missed presentation hour (beyond the 6 presentation hour allowance) and 4 points for each missed writing hours (beyond the 3 writing hour allowance).
• {3} Weekly Presentation Quotes and Paraphrase. 40 points (4 points each). Each week, all students submit online at least one quotation from the readings, with paraphrase and discussion of its potential usefulness for the coauthored paper (following a template). (As it is online, none can be missed, but they can be submitted late with a penalty). (Note: enrollment numbers or class cancellations might change the point distributions.)

Aims: This course’s seminar plus writing lab format provides professional training in philosophical research, presentation, and writing skills. It will walk students through all the steps of writing a philosophy article for publication and involve them directly in the process so to obtain real “hands on” experience in the craft. Students taking this class will become fully able to publish short articles in philosophy journals. The course will also advance the student’s knowledge of the various philosophical topics mentioned in the description.

Texts: Provided on odtuclass.

Originality: Plagiarism or any use at all of AI is strictly prohibited (this is required to meet the coauthoring aims of the course). All enrolled students must take an authorship survey to qualify them for coauthorship, part of which is an originality statement for the purposes of the journal submission.

Course Content

The course aims at: 1) Improving the student's understanding of the problems of communication stemming from the relationship between language, truth, rationality and intentionality of human action; 2) to increase his knowledge of the theory and use of argumentative discourse in philosophical and practical problems. To this end, this course will proportionally focus on traditional (ancient, medieval, modern) and contemporary approaches to philosophy of communication and their solutions to various communication problems.

Course Learning Outcomes

The student will obtain:

• Training in presentation skills, textual interpretation, cooperative thinking, and academic writing.
• Hands-on experience enabling them to deliver a talk at an international conference and to write a journal article.

Program Outcomes Matrix

0: No Contribution 1: Little Contribution 2: Partial Contribution 3: Full Contribution