Mental Phenomena

This is an elective PhD course; MA students can enroll upon the permission of the instructor. The course will presuppose general acquaintance with issues in philosophy of mind and metaphysics, but does not require any special background knowledge.

Description: One way to start to study the philosophy of mind is to draw up a map of the mind: among the states, events, properties of a person, which are those that we regard as mental? (Note that by ‘mental’ I don’t mean something opposed to the physical; I don’t make any assumptions about the issue of physicalism. The mental is opposed simply to the non-mental, or the merely physical.) The purpose of this course is to look into some theories of different mental features. In particular, we will look at the following:

Perceptual experiences and bodily sensations

Hallucinations

Dreams

Hypnotic experiences

Emotions Conscious thoughts

Standing states – beliefs and desires

Volitions