Mind and Behaviour

FC Section: First Year

Emotions, Responsibility, and Morality

Anger can sometimes be counterproductive. Can such anger be morally valuable nonetheless? Blaming seems detrimental in some clinical contexts. How can clinical service providers hold users morally responsible for wrongdoing without blaming them? We sometimes judge actions as morally right or wrong. But what makes an action morally right or wrong?  This course will introduce you to such questions about emotions, responsibility, and morality from a philosophical perspective. 

Sample readings:

Rachels, ‘The Challenge of Cultural Relativism.’

Selections from Mill, Utilitarianism

Singer, ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’

Pickard, ‘Responsibility without Blame’

Srinivasan, ‘The Aptness of Anger’

Code: FC-0503-2 | Semester: Monsoon 2026

FC Section: First Year

This course will introduce you to questions of mind and behaviour and their relationship to the brain and body, and will encourage you to think critically and scientifically through your own ideas around these relationships. In this course we will try to understand ourselves, the people and animals around us, and all the ways in which our interactions produce learning. Every conversation, every memory, even your reading of this course outline, structurally and functionally changes your brain, but not everything that the brain processes seems to make it to the realm of conscious perception. We will think about various seemingly intangible aspects of the mind and try to imagine how to make sense of them.

We will take a look at complex and interesting phenomena such as motivation, emotion, language, consciousness and attention. We will explore the specific question of how we learn, how we absorb and retain new material, the ways in which our brains tend to conflate correlation and causation, how we make decisions, and what critical thinking means. We will think through inter-individual behavioural differences and what kinds of evidence we require to draw conclusions about group behaviour. We will focus on the limitations of what we collectively understand and the ways in which we might imagine advancing our collective knowledge about the mind and behaviour.

Code: FC-0503-3 | Monsoon 2026

FC Section: First Year

What kind of creature are you? A human being, no doubt. But what kind of creature is that? How should such a creature live? We will critically explore influential models of human nature in the Indic and Western philosophical traditions and their profound implications both for how we ought to live and our place in the social world. Readings include selections from the Upanishads, Vasistha’s Yoga, Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Freud, Mill, Railton, Santideva, Korsgaard, Foot, O’Neill, Frye, Haidt, Milgram, Hobbes, Rawls, Bilgrami and others.   

Note well: this is a fast-paced and demanding course for students who take pride in producing their own work rather than relying on AI. If you haven’t read a single novel or a book over the summer, this course probably isn’t for you.

Code: FC-0503-4 | Monsoon 2026

FC Section: First Year

Is the essential nature of the human mind its capacity to reason, to feel, to grasp certain aspects of the world? Are our minds and ways of thinking fundamentally different from those of animals or various forms of artificial intelligence? By exploring a range of answers to these and other challenging questions, this course examines 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 mind is identical with physical or brain processes or instead is something else over and above the physical world. We will explore the question of whether our minds enable us to make truly free choices or rather only to channel the influential forces in our environment. Finally, we will seek to understand some distinctive modes of thinking, such as the experience of awe. 

Code: FC-0503-5| Monsoon 2026

FC Section: Senior Year

Vision/Philosophy/Purpose

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 of 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

In the first part, students will be introduced to terminology and vocabulary in psychology and neuroscience. They will also be introduced to the organisation of the brain and different cognitive processes.

The second part of the course will discuss different cognitive abilities like reading, number processing, emotion processing, attention, etc., from a psychological and neurobiological perspective.

The third part of the course will discuss neurodiversity – how some of these cognitive processes vary across the human condition and thus render each human unique. 

Code: FC-0503-6| Monsoon 2026

FC Section: Senior Year

Is the essential nature of the human mind its capacity to reason, to feel, to grasp certain aspects of the world? Are our minds and ways of thinking fundamentally different from those of animals or various forms of artificial intelligence? By exploring a range of answers to these and other challenging questions, this course examines 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 mind is identical with physical or brain processes or instead is something else over and above the physical world. We will explore the question of whether our minds enable us to make truly free choices or rather only to channel the influential forces in our environment. Finally, we will seek to understand some distinctive modes of thinking, such as the experience of awe.