Frequently Asked Questions - Specific Courses
You can see a sample online syllabus for this course.
The Junior Seminar in Cognitive Science was taught most recently in Spring 2020. We strongly encourage all Junior majors to take this seminar. It will be an excellent opportunity to study the foundations of your field, and also to gain experience interacting with each other in a close-knit seminar setting. (And for once, you will have first priority in terms of getting into the seminar!) The contents of the seminar will be set largely by your interests. A sample syllabus from the Spring 2020 course can be found here.
This is a course designed to explore the ways in which contemporary cognitive science can bear on the traditional questions of philosophy. So, for example, the course might look at Nietzsche’s account of morality in light of contemporary work in moral cognition, or it might look Plato’s discussion of parts of the soul in light of recent research on “dual processing”. There will be a lot of serious cognitive science, but there will also be a fair amount of serious philosophical rumination.
This can depend on who is teaching Introduction to Psychology, since it is offered every semester, and is taught by many different faculty. Depending on who is teaching the course, the overlap can vary between roughly 5% and 20%. However, even those topics that are covered in both courses are typically treated with very different perspectives and specific material. More generally, the 80+% of non-overlapping material in these courses reflects differences in their respective fields. On one hand, cognitive science incorporates perspectives drawn from only some areas of psychology, and also includes tools and ideas drawn from computer science, linguistics, neuroscience, and beyond. In contrast, psychology incorporates perspectives drawn from only a small part of cognitive science, but also includes material related to clinical psychology, social and personality psychology, health psychology, etc. Many majors end up taking both of these courses, however, since Introduction to Cognitive Science is required for the major, while Introduction to Psychology is required in principle as a pre-requisite for many other psychology courses.