Philosophy and Psychology MA (Hons)

Psychology is the scientific study of the mind and behaviour. Topics we cover include how babies learn, the way in which people's mental skills change as they grow older, various personalities, and how social group dynamics work.

You will also study different psychological disorders.

Psychology depends on concepts such as attention, memory, emotion, the self, cognition, disorder. These concepts all have philosophical histories, and those histories are still doing work in the laboratory. Learning to see them is what separates a Philosophy and Psychology graduate from a Psychology graduate.

You will begin with Descartes, who split mind from body, and read him beside phenomenology. Phenomenology is the tradition that set out to describe experience from the inside before explaining it from the outside. It shaped twentieth-century psychiatry. It is being read again by cognitive scientists working on embodiment, perception, and the extended mind, and by philosophers working on artificial intelligence.

You will consider questions such as:

• What is a mind, and could a machine have one?
• Does artificial intelligence work anything like human intelligence, or does the analogy mislead us? 
• Where does the line between mental health and mental illness come from, and who drew it?
• Can the self be measured, or only described?
• What does psychology assume about human nature before its experiments begin?
• Are Western frameworks for the mind the only ones we should be exploring? Can Buddhism and other traditions offer alternatives?

In addition to exploring these aspects of human nature, you will learn how to think critically and to solve problems. We will teach you to analyse data, write clearly and effectively, and be a confident communicator of science. You will learn how to plan, implement, and analyse your own research project.

Dundee's Philosophy course is unique in Scotland for its specialism in European philosophy. You will encounter philosophers such as Nietzsche, Husserl, Freud, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, Foucault, and Butler. These were thinkers for whom the mind is embodied, historical, social, and not fully transparent to itself.

Set alongside experimental methods, that tradition gives you a second set of tools. This is not a rival to the science, but a way of asking what the science is measuring and what it leaves out.

You will work on questions where the two disciplines are already overlapping. These include concepts like artificial intelligence and machine cognition, the classification of disorder, gender and sexuality, and the politics of mental health.

The degree is accredited by the British Psychological Society.

This will allow you to keep the professional route open to you while subjecting the discipline's own foundations to scrutiny. At Dundee you don't have to choose between explaining the mind and understanding it.