BAEcon Economics

How is the mind related to the body? What makes you a person? What is consciousness, and can it explained scientifically? In this course we will investigate such questions, giving students the opportunity to engage with ongoing philosophical debates about the nature of the mind. Although the topics covered will vary from year to year, they may include consciousness, mental representation, personhood, rationality, the formulation of physicalism, mind-brain identity theories, functionalism, artificial intelligence, dualism, idealism, and eliminative materialism.

The unit aims to:

• Introduce some central problems concerning the relation between mind, body and the larger physical world;
• Help students develop a philosophical approach to these problems, including the ability to explain, analyse and criticise arguments in the literature.

One two-hour lecture and one one-hour tutorial per week.

Students should be able to:

• Explain contemporary philosophical views about distinctive features of mental life;
• Explain some of the most influential responses to the mind-body problem from 20th Century philosophy.

Students should be able to:

• Appraise contemporary philosophical views about distinctive features of mental life;
• Compare and evaluate some of the most influential responses to the mind-body problem.

Students should be able to:

• Construct clearly written responses to questions on the philosophy of mind;
• Gather and synthesise material from various sources (e.g. online resources and library resources) in the preparation of assessments on the philosophy of mind.

Essay (1500 words) 50%

Exam (1 hour) 50%

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 time 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 Canvas; and obtaining feedback from your peers during tutorials.

• Nagel, Thomas. 1974. “What is it like to be a bat?” The Philosophical Review 83, 435-450.
• Gregory, Alex. 2017. “Might Desires be Beliefs about Normative Reasons?” In J. A. Deonna and F. Lauria (eds.), The Nature of Desire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 201-218.
• Menkiti, Ifeanyi. 1984. “Person and Community in African Traditional Thought.” In R. Wright (ed.), African Philosophy: An Introduction. 3rd Edition. New York: University of America Press, 171-181.
• Ney, Alyssa. 2008. “Physicalism as an Attitude.” Philosophical Studies 138, 1-15.
• Hanna, Patricia. 1985. “Causal Powers and Cognition.” Mind 94, 53-63.