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Philosophical debates about the idea of human nature and the influential models of human nature in Indic and Western traditions form the core component of this course. Fundamental questions the course looks at include what is mind and how it is distinct from the brain, and can we identify a single human essence. These are some of the foundational issues explored in Mind and Behaviour from the perspective of both philosophy, psychology and science.
Code: FC-0503-1 | Semester: Spring 2025
Emotions, Responsibility, and Morality
We sometimes judge actions as morally right or wrong. But what makes an action morally right or wrong? Blame seems detrimental in some clinical contexts. In such contexts, how can clinical service providers hold users responsible for wrongdoing without blaming them? Anger is often an understandable emotional response to injustice. What is the value of such anger? This course will engage with such philosophical questions about moral judgments, responsibility, and the emotions.
Code: FC-0503-2 | Semester: Spring 2025
Emotions, Responsibility, and Morality
We sometimes judge actions as morally right or wrong. But what makes an action morally right or wrong? Blame seems detrimental in some clinical contexts. In such contexts, how can clinical service providers hold users responsible for wrongdoing without blaming them? Anger is often an understandable emotional response to injustice. What is the value of such anger? This course will engage with such philosophical questions about moral judgments, responsibility, and the emotions.
FC-0503-3 | Monsoon 2025
EMOTIONS, EXPRESSIONS AND ACTIONS
Human animals live through thinking (including perceiving, remembering, imagining), feeling and doing. Traditionally, in Western thought, thinking was called “minding,” doing was called “behaving”, while the emotions that they feel and express to each other were supposed to form a bridge between mind and behaviour.
In this course, we shall study—by careful reading, reasoned discussion, and structured writing—some basic human emotions (e.g. anger, fear, disgust, love, envy, wonder, boredom and fun) and their social and bodily expressions. Starting from modern classics such as William James’ psychology of emotions and Charles Darwin’s research on expressions of emotion in animals and humans, the course will end with contemporary analytic philosophy of actions. We shall use contemporary texts such as The Subtlety of Emotions by Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, and The Blackwells Companion to Philosophy of Action, and some articles from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and extracts from A Neurophenomenology of Awe and Wonder: Towards a Non-Reductionist Cognitive Science.
The philosophical, social, aesthetic and political problems regarding our knowledge of other people’s feelings, empathy, enjoying and interpreting dance and theatre will also come up for discussion, depending upon the interest ‘expressed’ by the class.
FC-0503-4 | Monsoon 2025
Is the essential nature of the mind its capacity to reason, to behave in certain ways, to feel, to grasp certain aspects of the world? This course explores the nature of the human mind and what it can tell us about ourselves and our place in the world. We will consider whether the operations of human minds are fundamentally different from those of animals and from various forms of artificial intelligence, whether the mind is identical with physical or brain processes or instead is something else over and above the material world, whether our minds enable us to make choices that are truly free or rather only to channel the influential forces in our environment, and what the nature of our minds implies about how we should live and treat each other.
FC-0503-5 | Monsoon 2025
Faculty: Nandini Chatterjee Singh
This foundation course seeks to address overarching questions about the human brain, mind, and behavior which form the core of human experience. The brain is the biological foundation for mental processes, the mind creates the internal experience of these processes, and together they are manifested in behaviour in the form observable actions and responses. Using theoretical frameworks, cool psychological experiments, and state of the art brain imaging methods, this course will unravel how human beings acquire language, learn to read, develop number sense, experience emotion, feel music, pay attention and exhibit kindness, from a psychological and neurobiological perspective. The course will raise significant questions about cognitive processes, brain organisation and processing, psychological constructs and human diversity. Students will be encouraged to find answers using approaches that blend both the sciences and the arts.
The course will be structured into three parts as described below
FC-0503-6 | Monsoon 2025
Faculty: Merve Rumeysa Tapinc
This course explores how we should understand the human mind, human nature, our responsibility for one another within social and political contexts. We will discuss whether a pleasurable life or a radically moral life can be considered good, and whether a meaningful life is necessarily a happy one. In the first unit, we will examine the question of how we should live and what it means to lead a good life. We will also consider our relationship to death and how the meaning of life might change if we were immortal. In the second unit, we will focus on our responsibility for one another and explore whether a truly altruistic or moral life constitutes a good life. In the third unit, we will turn to recent discussions on social injustice and artificial intelligence. Understanding how machines think will shed light on our own understanding of the human mind.
aarthy.vaidyanathan@ashoka.edu.in