BAEcon Economics and Finance / Course details

How is the mind related to body? What is consciousness, and can it be captured within a scientific picture of the universe? What, if anything, makes you the same person as you were last night, or last week, or last year? In this course we will investigate such questions, giving students the opportunity to creatively engage in ongoing debates about the nature of the mind.

Pre-requisities: 20 PHIL credits at Level 1

20 PHIL credits at Level 1.

This course aims to…

-        … clarify key terms and concepts in the philosophy of mind;

-        … deepen your knowledge of key debates in the philosophy of mind;

-        … explore links between different areas of the philosophy of mind;

-        … address the role of empirical, scientific data in the philosophy of mind.

By the end of this course, students will be able to…

-        … display an understanding of a range of related issues in the philosophy of mind;

-        … formulate a philosophically informed opinion on such issues;

-        … build convincing arguments to defend those opinions;

-        … read, write, and discuss key issues in essays and under exam conditions.

There will be a mixture of lectures and tutorials.

Please note the information in scheduled activity hours are only a guidance and may change.

The School of Social Sciences (SoSS) is committed to providing timely and appropriate feedback to students on their academic progress and achievement, thereby enabling students to reflect on their progress and plan their academic and skills development effectively. Students are reminded that feedback is necessarily responsive: only when a student has done a certain amount of work and approaches us with it at the appropriate fora is it possible for us to feed back on the student's work. The main forms of feedback on this course are written feedback responses to assessed essays and exam answers.

We also draw your attention to the variety of generic forms of feedback available to you on this as on all SoSS courses. These include: meeting the lecturer/tutor during their office hours; e-mailing questions to the lecturer/tutor; asking questions from the lecturer (before and after lecture); presenting a question on the discussion board on Blackboard; and obtaining feedback from your peers during tutorials.

Crane, Tim. 2001. Elements of Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Heil, John. 2013. Philosophy of Mind: A Contemporary Introduction. 3rd Edition. New York: Routledge.

Kim, Jaegwon. 2018. Philosophy of Mind. 3rd Edition. New York: Routledge.

Lowe, E.J. 2000. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.