Philosophy of Psychology

This course will be concerned with specific questions about consciousness, perception, emotion, artificial intelligence, animal minds, as well as questions about the underlying mechanisms of the mind more broadly.

Questions include:

• Is the mind made up of task-specific modules?
• How much is perception influenced by cognition?
• Can A.I. ever become conscious?

Philosophy of psychology draws on a range of empirical results in psychology, and this course will introduce students to scientific evidence that has a bearing on these philosophical issues.

The unit aims to:

• Help students to engage with some of the central problems in philosophy of psychology;
• Enhance students' power of critical analysis, reasoning and independent thought, and their ability to bring those powers to bear on important philosophical issues;
• Familiarise students with some of the most interesting and provocative texts in contemporary work on philosophy of psychology.

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

Students should be able to:

• Identify, articulate and analyse of a range of central 20th and 21st century texts on a philosophy of psychology;
• Explain philosophical and scientific positions about the mind accurately. 

Students should be able to:

• Articulate and defend precise philosophical and scientific positions, and to anticipate and rebut objections to those positions;
• Identify and apply philosophical research methods consistently;
• interpret and criticise both primary and secondary texts.

Students should be able to:

• Use research tools to effectively select resources in the preparation of assessments in the philosophy of psychology;
• Clearly communicate ideas about the philosophy of psychology.

Essay (2000 words) 50%

Online Exam (6 hours) 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.

• Baars, B. J. (2019). On Consciousness: Science & Subjectivity — Updated Works on Global Workspace Theory. Nautilus Press.
• Bermúdez, J. L. (2005). Philosophy of Psychology: A Contemporary Introduction. New York: Routledge.
• Browning, H., & Birch, J. (2022). Animal sentience. Philosophy Compass, 17(5), e12822.
• Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (2000). Evolutionary psychology and the emotions. Handbook of Emotions, 2(2), 91-115.
• Eysenck, M. W., & Eysenck, C.