Mind, Body, Self from Antiquity to the Present

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 6
• Convenors: Dr Sarah Marks, Dr Sarah Patterson
• Tutors: Dr Sarah Marks, Dr Sarah Patterson, Dr Sophia Connell, Professor Catharine Edwards, Dr Hilary Sapire, Dr Alex Grzankowski, Dr Grace Halden (tbc), Professor Sue Wiseman (tbc)
• Assessment: a 1500-word commentary (20%), group presentation (30%) and 2500-word essay (50%)

Most of us would agree that we experience having a mind, body and a sense of self. Yet there is still little consensus about the nature of mind, what exactly constitutes ‘the self’ (if indeed there is one), and how these relate to our bodies and senses. Contemporary technologies of medicine, psychology and artificial intelligence have offered new data, but so far haven’t resolved these conundrums.

This co-taught module, with contributions from historians, philosophers and classicists, charts how concepts have emerged, morphed, been discarded or retained from Ancient Greece and Rome right up to the present, via Europe and the Americas, the Islamic world and Africa. We ask how ideas move and transform across cultures and languages; how theories that endured for centuries, such as the four humours, gave way to radically different concepts with the advent of germ theory; how dreams inspired ideas of the unconscious; and how age-old therapeutic concepts from the Stoics were revived in the 1960s for a post-modern generation. We place these ideas and debates in the context of their time and geography, while examining the legacies they have for the contemporary world.

Indicative syllabus

• Mind, body and self across time
• Plato and Aristotle’s concepts of the soul
• Seneca, stoicism, mind and body
• The four humours: Galen, Ibn Sina and medieval concepts
• Early Modern minds
• Descartes and the corporeal world
• Mind, body and self from the birth of the asylum to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy
• Twentieth-century bodies and minds and post-humanism
• African ideas of mind and body
• Artificial intelligence

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

• engage in constructive scholarly discussion and debate in a seminar setting
• demonstrate communication and presentation skills
• demonstrate skills for research
• understand and discuss key concepts in the history and philosophy of mind, body and self
• understand approaches from the philosophy of mind, history of philosophy and intellectual history
• understand conceptual change over time from antiquity to the present
• demonstrate source analysis skills (textual and visual)
• demonstrate critical reading skills in relation to secondary literature.