Philosophy of Mental Disorder

Teaching staff: Dr Matteo Mameli
Module code: 7AAN2013
Credit level: 7
Credit value: 20
Semester:  Semester 2 (spring) 
Teaching pattern: one weekly one-hour lecture and one weekly one-hour seminar
Assessment:  coursework 
Formative assessment: 1 x 2,000–3,000-word essay. Summative assessment: 1 x 4,000-word essay.

Science and technology transform the world, including the social and political world. They also transform the ways in which human persons experience the world and the ways in which they can exercise their freedom. Are such transformations good or bad? How can we evaluate them? Can we learn anything from utopian and dystopian conceptions? Whose views should control the governance of science and technology? How can we avoid elitism, paternalism, the distortions of commercialization, and the tyranny of the ignorant? Should we welcome – and perhaps even promote at a collective level – the kind of “enhancements” that, for example, biomedical technologies and information technologies make available? Or should we see them as a threat to our own very humanity and to our most fundamental interests as moral beings? Are such enhancements instruments of social progress, personal liberation, perhaps even of collective salvation? Or are they instruments of oppression, injustice, dehumanization, and destruction?

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/philosophy/modules/level7/7aan2013.aspx

Teaching staff: Dr Maria Alvarez
Module code: 7AAN2062
Credit level: 7
Credit value: 20
Semester:  Semester 2 (spring) 
Teaching pattern: one weekly one-hour lecture and one weekly one-hour seminar
Assessment:  coursework 
Formative assessment: 1 x 2,000–3,000-word essay; Summative assessment: 1 x 4,000-word essay.

This module will be specifically concerned with topics in the Philosophy of Action. Possible topics may include the nature of actions and omissions in general, and more specifically of intentional actions and omissions; reasons for action, intentions, and the explanation of action; the mind-body problem or more generally the relationship between the physical and the mental; the nature of consciousness; the relevance of empirical results for the Philosophy of Mind

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/philosophy/modules/level7/7aan2062.aspx

Teaching staff: Dr Nick Shea
Module code: 7AAN2066
Credit level: 7
Credit value: 20
Semester:  Semester 1 (autumn) 
Teaching pattern: one weekly one-hour lecture and one weekly one-hour seminar
Assessment:  coursework 
Formative assessment: 1 x 2,000–3,000-word essay; Summative assessment: 1 x 4,000-word essay.

Philosophical issues about the nature of representational content have become pressing in recent years with the rise of cognitive neuroscience, which appears to go further and locates representations in concrete processes in the brain. This course will explain the foundational principles underlying these psychological sciences and examine the central philosophical questions they raise about what representations are and how information-processing explanations work.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/philosophy/modules/level7/7aan2066.aspx

Teaching staff: Dr Matteo Mameli
Module code: 7AAN2067
Credit level: 7
Credit value: 20
Semester:  Semester 2 (spring) 
Teaching pattern: one weekly one-hour lecture and one weekly one-hour seminar
Assessment:  coursework 
Formative assessment: 1 x 2,000–3,000-word essay; Summative assessment: 1 x 4,000-word essay.

This year’s course will focus on some of the questions listed below:What is the nature of subjectivity and of the freedom that characterizes it? How does one “constitute oneself as an ethical subject”? Is the self a “center of narrative gravity”? In what sense, if any, does the self have a narrative structure? How are self-conceptions, conceptions of the self and conceptions of types of people related to behaviours, experiences and relationships? How are they affected by cognitive and emotional constraints, by discursive practices, by institutions and cultural processes? What are, in this context, the possibilities for change and for action? What is the “specter of creeping exculpation” and how can we avoid it? What are the implications for psychology and for the human sciences in general?

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/philosophy/modules/level7/7aan2067.aspx

Module code: 7AANM109
Credit level: 7

tbc

Teaching staff: Professor Bill Brewer
Module code: 7AAN2061
Credit level: 7
Credit value: 20
Semester:  Semester 1 (autumn) 
Teaching pattern: one weekly one-hour lecture and one weekly one-hour seminar
Assessment:  coursework 

Formative assessment: Two x 1,500-2,000-word essays, due by end of semester or as otherwise instructed
Summative assessment: One x two-hour end of year examination

The primary focus of this module will be issues in the metaphysics of mind: what is the relation between the bearers of mental and physical properties; what is the relation between mental and physical properties themselves; are various mental properties categorical or dispositional; do they supervene upon what is ‘internal’ to the subject? There will also be discussion of the nature and explanation of consciousness, the normativity of the mental, and the rational explanation of behaviour.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/philosophy/modules/level7/7aan2061.aspx

Module code: 7AANM108
Credit level: 7

The focus of this module is the concept of mental disorder as it has developed in modern psychiatry. The anti-psychiatry critiques of the 1960s and subsequent postmodern developments including social constructionism will be reviewed, and their relation to current biological approaches to psychopathology examined. Topics include: Foucault's critique of the modern development of the concept of mental disorder; cross cultural studies; Szasz on the myth of mental illness; feminism and psychiatry; social constructionism; facts and values in DSM and ICD; and disorder in an evolutionary-theoretic perspective.