Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science

Philosophy of mind is increasingly pursued in interdisciplinary mode. This is the approach adopted by all those in the Department who work in this area. We are interested in a range of topics including consciousness, the unity and disunity of consciousness, mental representation, psychological explanation, self-knowledge, self-control, and more. Members of the Department play a significant part in the organization of the University of Maryland Cognitive Science Colloquium, and some are members or associate members of the interdisciplinary program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science (NACS).  Faculty in this area: 

There is a regular weekly reading group organized by Peter Carruthers, reading a mix of philosophical and theoretical/empirical papers.

Recent graduate courses in the area: 

• Human Motives: Egoism, hedonism, and the science of affect (Carruthers, 2021)
• Philosophical Issues in a Chomskyan Linguistics (Rey, 2021, 2018)
• Representation and Metarepresentation (Carruthers, Fall 2019)
• Concepts (Rey, 2017)
• Animals and Consciousness (Carruthers, Fall 2017)
• Affect, Decision-Making, and Metacognition (Carruthers, 2016)
• Representation and Intentionality in Early Vision and Language (Rey, 2015)
• Self-Knowledge and Other-Knowledge (Carruthers, 2015)