I have updated the course to provide an advanced version:
Originally I had omitted most of the most historical philosophical texts from the set readings, deferring instead to later commentarial texts with additional theses. This advanced version is very little changed in that respect with the exception of an addition from non-philosopher Rolf Landauer.
There are further additions to the set readings and additional readings by Allo and Sequoiah-Grayson. Some of Allo's papers are quite long, and so this has been taken into consideration.
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I have added an esoteric (in philosophical terms) but very relevant (in scientific or naturalistic metaphysical terms) paper by Rolf Landauer about physicalism about information and physicalism about information representation for the purposes of context and historical background. Landauer was not a philosopher and many philosophers regard his physicalism as naïve (and in important ways it is so). However I am inclined towards scientific or naturalistic metaphysics - and so is much of the informational turn in philosophy - and so Landauer's physicalist contribution is important.
I have also added Allo's development of Landauer's principle, and his important work with Mares about informational semantics.
Sequoiah-Grayson, like Restall, is a logician first and a philosopher 'next-first', but his paper Epistemic closure and commutative, nonassociative residuated structures is an excellent introduction to, and advanced development of, the concepts salient to the intersection between informational logic and informational epistemology: especially with regard to epistemic closure and its relation to information flow in deductive inference. I recommend pp113-117 only as required reading, with the remainder of section 2 of the paper left for those familiar with modal, deontic and multi-modal logics. That being said, a scholar trained in classical logic but with some reading in and exposure to non-classical logics should be able to follow Sequoiah-Grayson's exposition, which is clear and very well structured and explains most concepts more than adequately.
There are many other great philosophers of information whose work is not included because it is less salient to the aims of this course, or because it is too advanced or specialised in terms of either informational metaphysics, informational epistemology, or statistics for the intended audience. Moreover, the course is as big as permissible already.
There is one informational metaphysics omission in the current syllabus that is probably egregious:
Bueno, O. (2010). Structuralism and information. Metaphilosophy. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9973.2010.01641.x
Add as you see fit.
Naturally, the ethics module constitutes the least well-fitted and coheres relatively little with the other material, and so drop it if you wish to focus on other subdisciplines.
Rationale: This course is an advanced undergraduate course designed to make scholars already familiar with introductory philosophy of information competent to engage with more difficult and advanced problems and concepts in that subdiscipline in the context of the informational turn in philosophy.
Course Aims: To make the intermediate and advanced philosophy scholar competent and well-versed in the primary features and concepts of, and issues or controversies surrounding, the informational turn in philosophy broadly construed and as it applies to metaphysics, logic, cognitive science, the philosophy of biology and science, epistemology, and ethics.
You can also download the advanced syllabus here.
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