Handbook

To view overview information, please select an offering from the drop-down menu above.

To view unit coordinator information, please select an offering from the drop-down menu above.

Nil.

Students who have successfully completed PHL230 Theories of the Mind may not enrol in this unit for credit.

To view other learning activity information, please select an offering from the drop-down menu above.

To view learning activity information, please select an offering from the drop-down menu above.

To view assessment information, please select an offering from the drop-down menu above.

Unit content:The Unit follows the positions developed by a number of individual thinkers on a series of recurring themes to do with the mind. These themes may be clustered as follows. How the mind is something which merits being considered (and that Philosophy has a unique role in this consideration) is established and explored in Topics 1–4. Here the purview for contemporary investigation of the problem of mind is set out through a close examination of what, since Descartes, has been known as the Cogito. Topics 5 & 6 follow Kant by considering how there might well be limitations to knowing what the mind is, and ask whether instead inquiry would be better served by seeking an understanding of what the mind does (or must be thought to do). Ahead of the concluding Topic, Topics 7–11 consolidate the earlier Topics’ investigation of the putative ‘nature’ and ‘functions’ of the mind and ask whether our own ‘individual’ minds suffice to think the thoughts that we nevertheless (though not always) find ourselves thinking – or which we may be yet to think.

Other notes:This is a University-Wide Breadth Unit. If this unit is taken as a Core or Specified Elective unit in a student’s major or minor, it cannot also be used to satisfy the University-Wide Breadth Unit requirement.