Dr. Alexandria Boyle

This course is available on the BSc in Philosophy and Economics, BSc in Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, BSc in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, BSc in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (with a Year Abroad) and BSc in Politics and Philosophy. This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit and to General Course students.

Students must have completed The Big Questions: An Introduction to Philosophy (PH103).

You, me, and many other living creatures have a special set of properties in common: we have mental properties, like having thoughts, emotions and feelings. Not everything that exists has properties like this. Rocks don’t feel joy. Tables don’t make plans or promises. Chairs do not care about being sat on.

How should we understand and explain this difference between things with minds and things without? This is the central question of the metaphysics of mind. Increasingly, philosophers who engage with this question aim to give a naturalist account of the mind: one that fits into the picture of the world offered to us by the sciences. But many features of the mind – including, in particular, conscious experience – fit uneasily into this naturalistic world view.

In this course, we’ll discuss some central questions in the metaphysics of mind, such as:

• Is consciousness physical? Can it be explained scientifically?
• Does the mind extend beyond the brain and into the world? 
• Could we share mental properties with very different sorts of beings, like animals, aliens or artificial intelligences?
• Do our mental state concepts pick out anything real?

Along the way, we’ll also keep our eyes on the methodological questions that face philosophers working in this area, such as:

• What makes a philosophical theory of the mind a good one?
• What is involved in giving a naturalist account of the mind? Can it be done?
• Should we treat the mind primarily as a biological phenomenon?
• Do philosophers have anything to contribute to our understanding of the mind, or should we leave these questions to the scientists?

10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the AT.

Students will be expected to write one short formative essay. This will be an extended outline of the summative essay assignment.

Students will be expected to participate actively in their classes. They may be asked to give group presentations on assigned texts, or conduct small pieces of independent research, such as finding news articles relevant to the course material, to be discussed in class.

• E. Diaz-León (2008). We are living in a material world (and I am a material girl). Teorema 27 (3) 85-101
• Kathleen V. Wilkes (1984). Is consciousness important? British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 35 (3) 223-243
• Jennifer Corns (2016). Pain eliminativism: scientific and traditional. Synthese 193 (9) 2949-2971
• Isaac Wiegman (2016). Angry rats and scaredy cats: Lessons from competing cognitive homologies. Biological Theory 11 (4) 224-240

Coursework (20%, 750 words) and continuous assessment (10%) in the AT.
Essay (70%, 2000 words) in the period between AT and WT.

Assessment for this course will have three components.

The first (70%) will be a 1500-word summative essay, together with a 500 word reflective commentary explaining how you revised your essay in response to formative feedback and other learning activities (submitted at the beginning of WT).

The second (20%) will be a case study exercise (750 words, AT). You will be asked to apply the philosophical skills and theories learned throughout the course to a news article reporting on a recent development in cognitive science.

The third (10%) will be continuous assessment. For this component, you will be asked to complete short answer questions during your classes (AT).