Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth (CTY)

What is a mind? Are minds physical or non-physical entities? Are minds entities in the first place? Are mental states (like pain) states of the brain? Could an artificial intelligence think or feel pain? Are all of the facts about conscious experience ultimately the facts about an ideal neuroscience? 

In this course, students are introduced to the philosophical study of the mind while paying special attention to  recent developments in neuroscience and cognitive science. 

This course presupposes familiarity with logical validity, soundness, and other core notions covered in Introduction to Philosophy.

 Philosophers take logic to be the study of good reasoning. Mathematicians take logic to be the study of the structural properties of formal languages. Computer scientists take logic to be the study of programs and algorithms.

In this course, we'll learn about logic from all of these perspectives, making a special effort to trace the interesting relationships between them along the way. 

This course also serves as a brief introduction to some genuinely philosophical themes. We'll use the logical tools detailed above in order to evaluate arguments concerning the existence of the divine, the nature of morality, and the nature of the mind. 

 Does God exist? What should I do in my life? What kind of thing am I? What exists, most generally?  Students will learn the basic conceptual tools used by contemporary, analytic philosophers in order to tackle these questions.

A heavy emphasis is placed on developing the skill of extracting arguments from a written text and evaluating these arguments for good-making features like validity and soundness. 

This course covers the content of an introductory course in philosophy at the college level, exposing students to the learning environment of professional academia.