Contemporary Issues in Philosophy of Mind & Cognition Lecture Note

The contemporary issues in philosophy of mind and cognition delve into several philosophical issues centered around the notion of consciousness. The mind and the cognition are inner realities of the conscious mental life. But sometime these concepts are theorized differently. For instance, the analysis of the concept of cognition has a physical connotation, rather than having strong connection with consciousness. In other words, cognition can be explained not necessarily with reference consciousness. On the other hand, the mind has a metaphysical connotation and often being stated at par with consciousness. The mind is necessarily consciousness.

In this course, we will be more dealing with the notion of mind and consciousness, sometimes taking them as synonyms, rather than talking about cognition. Only when we talk about functionalism and connection with reference to the philosophical study of Artificial Intelligence, we would deal with the notion of cognition. So the mind and cognition as two different concepts and have different meaning is indeed a recent phenomenon. We would not seriously get into this debate here, rather would like to deal with the notion of consciousness or the mind as a unitary mental phenomenon.

The concept of mind has been theorized in many ways, the issues here are concerned with different characterization of the mind. For instance, the mind has been traditionally conceived as a transcendental reality. To conceptualize its existence, we need to transcend the very mode in which we have knowledge about the external world. The objects in the external world exist independent of the mind.