Interdisciplinary course on consciousness

This course is a first approach to one of the most enigmatic subjects of humanity, which remains as such despite having been the object of study for centuries. In fact, some thinkers propose that it is impossible to try to understand consciousness as an object, because to separate it from the subject that exercises it would mean eliminating its essential feature.

Up to the present day, consciousness has been studied by philosophy from very different approaches -Aristotelianism, Neoplatonism, dualism, empiricism, pragmatism, phenomenology or analytical philosophy, among others-, and in recent times there have been laudable attempts to explain it from physics, mathematics and neurobiology.

The main objective of this course is to understand the notion of consciousness and how these fields of knowledge approach it. A historical journey will be made to get to know the key authors who have shaped our understanding of consciousness, and how this subject is inseparable from the mind-body problem. We will also explain in detail the conceptual models that are used today to understand consciousness, mainly from analytical philosophy and phenomenology, and the authors of reference to know the current state of the question. In the second section, the empirical approach to the study of consciousness will be discussed. Firstly, a sceptical view will be offered on the possibility of naturalising consciousness and its approach from the experimental sciences.