Philosophy of Thought Course

Lesson 1 • Reading and Interpreting Philosophical Texts

Teaches active reading strategies for dense argumentative prose. Students practice extracting claims, premises, and conclusions from primary sources.

Lesson 2 • Metaphysical Basics: Mind and Reality

Surveys fundamental metaphysical questions about existence, identity, and the nature of mind. Establishes the ontological backdrop for philosophy of thought.

Lesson 3 • Philosophical Argumentation Skills

Develops the ability to construct, evaluate, and refute philosophical arguments. Students practice validity, soundness, and charitable interpretation.

Lesson 4 • Core Concepts in Epistemology

Introduces knowledge, belief, justification, and truth as foundational epistemological concepts. Prepares students for later analysis of thought and rationality.

Lesson 1 • Inductive and Abductive Reasoning

Analyzes non-deductive inference patterns used in science and everyday thought. Students assess strength, reliability, and limits of inductive reasoning.

Lesson 2 • Fallacies and Cognitive Biases

Catalogs formal and informal fallacies alongside systematic cognitive biases. Students learn to detect flawed reasoning in philosophical and everyday contexts.

Lesson 3 • Propositional Logic Fundamentals

Introduces connectives, truth tables, and logical form. Students translate natural-language arguments into formal notation for evaluation.

Lesson 4 • Modal Logic and Possible Worlds

Introduces necessity, possibility, and possible-worlds semantics. Equips students to analyze modal claims central to philosophy of mind and metaphysics.

Lesson 1 • Intentionality: Aboutness of Thought

Investigates how mental states are directed at objects and states of affairs. Students analyze intentionality as the mark of the mental.

Lesson 2 • Thought and Language Relationships

Examines whether thought depends on language or is independent of it. Students evaluate evidence from linguistics, cognitive science, and philosophy.

Lesson 3 • Mental Representation Theories

Surveys major accounts of how the mind represents the world, including imagistic and symbolic views. Prepares students for debates on intentionality.

Lesson 4 • Propositional Attitudes and Mental States

Analyzes beliefs, desires, intentions, and hopes as propositional attitudes. Connects mental state taxonomy to everyday psychological explanation.

Lesson 1 • Theories of Consciousness

Surveys physicalist, dualist, and panpsychist accounts of consciousness. Students compare explanatory power and internal coherence of each theory.

Lesson 2 • Unconscious Thought and Its Role

Analyzes philosophical and empirical accounts of unconscious mental processing. Students assess how unconscious thought shapes conscious reasoning.

Lesson 3 • Phenomenology and First-Person Methods

Introduces phenomenological method as a tool for studying conscious experience from the inside. Students practice first-person description and analysis.

Lesson 4 • The Hard Problem of Consciousness

Distinguishes the hard problem from easy problems of consciousness. Students analyze why subjective experience resists functional explanation.

Lesson 1 • Translation, Interpretation, and Radical Meaning

Examines Quine's indeterminacy thesis and Davidson's interpretive charity. Students assess limits of translation and their implications for shared thought.

Lesson 2 • Context, Indexicals, and Thought

Investigates how context-sensitive expressions link language to thought and situation. Students analyze indexicals and demonstratives in philosophical argument.

Lesson 3 • Theories of Meaning and Reference

Surveys descriptivist, causal, and use theories of meaning. Students evaluate how words connect to the world and to mental content.

Lesson 4 • Speech Acts and Communicative Thought

Examines how utterances perform actions beyond conveying information. Students analyze assertion, promise, and implicature as thought-expressing acts.

Lesson 1 • Social and Collective Rationality

Extends rationality analysis to group belief, testimony, and collective decision. Students examine how social context shapes individual rational thought.

Lesson 2 • Bayesian Reasoning and Probability

Introduces Bayesian updating as a model of rational belief revision. Students apply Bayes's theorem to philosophical and practical reasoning problems.

Lesson 3 • Decision Theory and Rational Choice

Surveys expected utility theory and its philosophical foundations. Students evaluate rational choice under uncertainty and risk.

Lesson 4 • Bounded Rationality and Heuristics

Analyzes how cognitive limits shape actual reasoning and decision-making. Students assess when heuristics succeed and when they systematically fail.

Lesson 1 • Eliminativism and Folk Psychology Debate

Examines whether neuroscience will replace or vindicate folk psychological concepts. Students assess eliminativist arguments and their consequences for thought.

Lesson 2 • Connectionism and Neural Networks

Surveys connectionist models as alternatives to symbolic computation. Students assess how distributed processing challenges classical cognitive architecture.

Lesson 3 • Computational Theory of Mind

Examines the hypothesis that cognition is computation over symbolic representations. Students evaluate classical AI assumptions and their philosophical implications.

Lesson 4 • Predictive Processing and Active Inference

Introduces the brain as a prediction machine minimizing prediction error. Students evaluate predictive processing as a unified theory of mind.

Lesson 1 • Synthesis: Constructing a Philosophy of Thought

Guides students in integrating course themes into a coherent personal philosophical position. Students produce a defended, original account of the nature of thought.

Lesson 2 • Thought Experiments as Philosophical Method

Analyzes the epistemic role of thought experiments in generating philosophical knowledge. Students design and critically evaluate original thought experiments.

Lesson 3 • Implicit Bias and Epistemic Responsibility

Investigates how implicit biases affect thought, judgment, and epistemic practice. Students assess individual and institutional responsibilities for biased cognition.

Lesson 4 • Artificial Intelligence and Machine Thought

Assesses whether artificial systems can genuinely think, understand, or be conscious. Students apply philosophy-of-mind frameworks to AI systems.