Università Roma Tre

Over the past few years, philosophy of science has become increasingly "local," shifting its focus from the general characteristics of scientific practice to the theories, methods and problems of scientific disciplines. The philosophies of psychology, neuroscience and cognitive science arise from this greater delimitation.
The mind that psychologists and neuroscientists are concerned with today is the child of the cognitivist revolution and is therefore defined as a set of information-processing processes carried out in the brains of complex organisms. What makes the cognitivist investigation of the mind peculiar is its being suspended between two worlds: on the one hand, the ordinary image of ourselves as persons, that is, as subjects of conscious experiences, intentional states and deliberate action; on the other hand, the subpersonal sphere of brain events, the subject of neuroscience. This course aims to introduce the reader to the cognitivist study of the mind, but always against the background of the philosophical effort to shed light on the relationships that link these different ways in which we describe ourselves.

A. Kind, Philosophy of Mind: The Basics. Routledge, London 2020.
W. Bechtel and Linus Ta-Lun Huang, Philosophy of Neuroscience, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2022.