180031 KO MEi:CogSci Philosophy Discussion (2012S)

What is philosophy? What do philosophers do? And how do they do it? These are some of the questions which will be addressed in this course. The course is designed as a "topics-based" introduction to philosophy, i.e. instead of working through the history of philosophy, we will focus on special philosophical topics and discuss what historical and contemporary philosophers have to say about topics such as consciousness, cognition, mental causation and free will, artificial 'intelligence', epistemology and the scientific method, science ethics, etc.

Next to the content-oriented discussion of these core issues, we will also take a look at the toolbox of philosophy (i.e. the phenomenological method, descriptive methods, formal methods, logic, analysis, etc.).