Università Roma Tre

This course will provide students with an introduction to some of the main topics in philosophy of mind. The course will be broken down into three parts. In the first part, we will look mostly at a few historical approaches to philosophy of mind. Starting with Descartes and a discussion of substance dualism, we will move on to Locke and Hume, and then behaviorism, identity theory, and the initial formulations of functionalism. In the second part, we will examine some contemporary approaches to the nature of mind, including current views on functionalism, Dennett’s intentional stance, Fodor’s language of thought, and eliminative materialism. With some of the standard approaches covered in the first two parts, we will turn in the third part to a more delimited issue: the problem of developing a naturalistic theory of self-consciousness, within which the themes of Freud’s criticism of the subject -- the themes of the unconscious, self-deception, and defense mechanisms -- can be read in a new light.

M. Di Francesco, M. Marraffa e A. Tomasetta, Introduzione alla filosofia della mente, Carocci, Roma 2017 (Capp. 1-3).
M. Marraffa e A. Paternoster, Sentirsi esistere. Inconscio, coscienza, autocoscienza, Laterza, Roma-Bari 2014 (Capp. 1-3).
M. Marraffa (a cura di), Identità e persona, Istituto italiano di studi germanici, Roma 2017 (solo i saggi di Piazza, Meini, Guerini & Marraffa).