Spring, 2006

Here is a list of possible topics for the literature review. If you have another topic you would like to do instead, please clear it with me first. (For example, I haven't listed Leibniz or Berkeley, since we will discuss them only briefly.) Note that topics must be reasonably focused -- for example, "Descartes' Meditations" would not be a suitable topic!

(You might well want to refine some of these topics further.  For instance, if you wanted to focus this narrowly, instead of surveying treatments of Kant's views of space and time in general, you could survey the literature on one specific argument, e.g. the argument from incongruent counterparts.)

Descartes:

• the dreaming argument
• the evil demon argument
• the cogito
• causal argument for God's existence
• ontological argument
• the Cartesian Circle
• mind-body dualism

Spinoza:

• the argument that there is only one substance
• relation between mind and body
• freedom and/or free will

Leibniz:

• principle of sufficient reason
• monads
• Leibniz's theodicy

Locke:

• distinction between primary and secondary qualities
• substance as substratum
• theory of ideas (where they come from, relation between simple & complex, etc.)
• personal identity
• idea of power
• real and nominal essences

Hume:

• induction
• causation
• personal identity
• skepticism

Kant:

• space and time (forms of intuition)
• the Categories (especially substance and/or causation)
• the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories
• Second Analogy: how we can know every event has a cause
• synthetic a priori judgments
• personal identity (transcendental unity of apperception)
• appearances and things in themselves
• phenomena and noumena
• freedom (esp. Third Antinomy)
• God (Fourth Antinomy and/or Ideal of Pure Reason)
• critique of the ontological argument