PH223      Half Unit
Mind and Metaphysics

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

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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 Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

Students will be expected to write one short formative essay as preparation for the summative exam.

Students will be expected to participate actively in their classes. 

• 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

Exam (90%), duration: 90 Minutes, reading time: 10 minutes in the Spring exam period

Course participation (10%)

1. A summative essay-based e-exam, where students are expected to write about a single question relative to the course mateirals. (90%)

2. Class participation. (10%).