Course guide for the winter term 2026/27

12:00 am – 12:00 am

This course is taught en bloc. For dates and times, please see the entry on eCampus. Academic freedom is a fundamental right protected by German law that safeguards the freedom of research and teaching at universities and scientific institutions and forms the foundation of an open and democratic society. On the other hand, scientific inquiry is embedded in and can be influenced by cultural, political, economic, and historical contexts and background knowledge. In this seminar, we will explore the tension between the aims of evidence-based scientific inquiry and politicized societal processes. How does science interact with society, and how are our current democratic structures influenced by these tensions? In three block seminars, we will use literature presenting opposing views on topics such as the use of AI in science and society, agnotology, epistemic bubbles, bad beliefs, forbidden knowledge, nudging, scientific imperialism and colonialism, (effective) Altruism, and epistocracy, and examine their role in benefiting humanity in order to develop our own cogent arguments. The block seminars will be at Wasserstr. 221, 4th floor on Saturday, November 14th, Saturday, January 16th, and Saturday February 6th. We will coordinate the distribution of students’ presentations online between October 14th-21st for students who have enrolled in the course.

12:00 am – 12:00 am

This course is taught en bloc. For dates and times, please see the entry on eCampus. This course introduces students to the complex interplay between science, technology, and gender, with special attention to intersections with sexuality, race, and ethnicity. We analyze the concepts of “sex” and “gender” by critically investigating the nature/nurture debates about sex differences. The course further encourages students to think more broadly about gender in science and technology in discussions over bias, values, and scientific objectivity. Throughout the course, we survey different critical approaches to biomedicine, behavior, and mechanisms of power. We will study role models from the past to the present, examine how these perspectives have influenced our contemporary strategies, and what problems still remain. The guiding orientation of the seminar is inclusive thinking, with the aim of learning about reoccurring patterns that contradict the humanist promise of a fair share of decision-makers and those who bear the consequences. The course is divided into three block seminar and a fourth workshop block in February, which will be open to the interested public and invited speakers. 1) In three sessions each: 15:15 – 17:45 (incl. 15min break) on November 20th, January 8th, and February 22nd in Wasserstr. 221, 4th floor, students will engage with foundational texts with the main topics of the course and conceptualize their presentations. 2) The workshop: February, 25-26, 10:00-18:00, Wasserstr. 221, 4th floor. In the second part, we will have a two-day workshop on Contemporary Trends in Feminist Philosophy of Science, where students and international experts will present their work. The workshop will take place on February 25-26 (Thursday and Friday, after the end of the teaching period). Taken together, the seminar blocks and the workshop will provide students with an opportunity to connect their learning to contemporary discussions and research beyond the student environment with contemporary researchers from Germany, UK, and the US.

12:00 am – 12:00 am

This course is taught en bloc. For dates and times, please see the entry on eCampus. This intensive seminar will explore central issues at the intersection of the philosophy of science, epistemology, and artificial intelligence. We will consider questions such as: What epistemic grounds, if any, do we have for trusting the outputs of a system whose internal workings are inaccessible to us? What epistemic status should we accord to claims and explanations generated by AI systems? Can AI transform the nature of scientific inquiry and the kinds of knowledge it produces? The first three days of the seminar will take the form of lectures and discussion sessions designed to bring students up to speed on the state of the art in both AI technology and the most prominent philosophical positions. The final two days will take the form of a workshop, “AI and Epistemology,” featuring talks on cutting-edge research.

12:00 am – 12:00 am

This course is taught en bloc. For dates and times, please see the entry on eCampus. In this Blockseminar we shall delve into the philosophy of Reneè Descartes’ meditations. With the philosophical tool of methodological doubt Descartes rules out the possibility that an evil genius is constantly deceiving us since there is something that we cannot be deceived about, namely that one is thinking. However, contemporary cognitive science is ripe with examples that an omnipotent deceiver is not needed as we are often the ones who deceive ourselves. We shall start by discussing and understanding Descartes’ ideas in the meditations leading to the famous Cogito argument. Then, we shall move from the mediatations to debates of related issues in contemporary Philosophy of Mind and cognitive science, focussing especially on topics connected with the reliability of conscious experience and self-deception. Ungraded: For this blockseminar all students are required to actively participate either by presenting the session’s material or by taking notes and writing protocols of the sessions. Graded: To receive a grading for this Blockseminar, on top of active participation students are required to write an original essay (Hausarbeit): the length depends on the study program (Bachelor/ Master and type of Master). In exceptional cases there will be the possibility to have an oral examination if there are significant issues with the writing of the essay. Preparatory Meeting Online which is obligatory: Monday 19th of October 2026 from 18:00 to 19:00 Link: https://ruhr-uni-bochum.zoom-x.de/j/3013146887?pwd=qIm2koVASAuB7Ieod9SpadF0HFZIxm.1 Seminar dates: from Tuesday the 16th to Friday the 19th of February 2027

12:00 am – 11:59 am

This course is taught en bloc. For dates and times, please see the entry on eCampus. In this Blockseminar we shall critically examine the latest work of Ludwig Wittgenstein focussing especially on his last text On Certainty and related material. In this work Wittgenstein articulates the idea that knowledge is ultimately founded on the certainty of special propositions that he calls hinges. Such propositions are hereditary within a community of linguistic agents and enjoy significant stability within their specific social, geographical and historical context. However, hinges are not necessarily permanent and immutable, they can and do shift over time making certainty an evolving concept. We shall discuss how this Wittgensteinian idea fares with respect to the contemporary fast changing and globalised world and what the consequences are for his foundationalism. Ungraded: For this Blockseminar all students are required to actively participate either by presenting the session’s material or by taking notes and writing protocols of the sessions. Graded: To receive a grading for this Blockseminar, on top of active participation students are required to write an original essay (Hausarbeit): the length depends on the study program (Bacheler/ Master and type of Master). In exceptional cases there will be the possibility to have an oral examination if there are significant issues with the writing of the essay. Preparatory Meeting Online which is obligatory: Tuesday 20th October form 18:00-19:00 Link: https://ruhr-uni-bochum.zoom-x.de/j/3013146887?pwd=qIm2koVASAuB7Ieod9SpadF0HFZIxm.1 Seminar dates: from Tuesday the 23rd to Friday the 26th of February 2027

12:00 am – 12:00 am

This course is taught en bloc. For dates and times, please see the entry on eCampus. Illusionism holds that phenomenal consciousness (i.e. the felt redness of red, the ache of a headache) doesn’t exist, and that our overwhelming conviction that it does is itself an introspective illusion generated by the brain. On this view, the task for a science of the mind isn’t to explain phenomenality but to explain why we so stubbornly misrepresent ourselves as having it. This course will examine the case for illusionism and the objections it invites. We’ll ask what it would take for such an illusion to be possible, why illusionism strikes nearly everyone as absurd, whether its defenders can explain that very resistance, and what follows if they’re right. Core Readings: Keith Frankish “Illusism as a Theory of Consciousness” (Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2016) François Kammerer, House of Mirrors: The Illusion of Phenomenal Consciousness (Oxford University Press, 2026) open access, free to read and download as a PDF

12:00 am – 12:00 am

This course is taught en bloc. For dates and times, please see the entry on eCampus. tba

12:00 am – 12:00 am

This course is taught en bloc. For dates and times, please see the entry on eCampus. Blockseminar (spring intensive, dates to be confirmed), Modules: WM IIa, WM IIIa, MA Cog Sci, MA Psych Folk psychology is not only a device for predicting what other people will do. It is also, and perhaps primarily, a device for making people predictable in the first place. On the mindshaping view, our practices of ascribing beliefs, desires and character do regulative work: they shape the minds they purport to describe, drawing children into the shapes our inherited models expect of them. This intensive course takes that idea and puts it to a new use, asking what happens when one of the parties doing the shaping is a machine. Companion systems are the obvious test case. Since at least 2017, applications such as Replika, and more recently Character.AI and its many successors, have offered users artificial others that converse, remember, sympathise and adapt. Users form attachments to them that are demonstrably real in their effects, and the systems in turn are trained, tuned and increasingly given published characters by the companies that operate them. What we have, then, is a shaping relation running in both directions and neither of them well understood. The companion shapes the user, through availability, agreeableness and the steady modelling of a certain kind of interlocutor. The user shapes the companion, through interaction, correction and the projection of a persona onto a system that has none of its own. And behind both stands a provider whose commercial interests condition the whole arrangement. The seminar works through five clusters of questions. First, the mechanics: what these systems actually are, and what the mindshaping literature gives us that a purely representational account of folk psychology does not. Second, the nature of human-AI companionship, and whether the concepts we use for friendship, intimacy and grief transfer at all. Third, the moral status of artificial others, and whether the question of what we owe them can be separated from the question of what our treatment of them does to us. Fourth, the responsibilities of developers, including the recent practice of publishing explicit accounts of a system’s intended character. Fifth, the consequences for our relationships with each other, which is where the mindshaping frame earns its keep: if our expectations of persons are calibrated by our interactions, then a population habituated to endlessly accommodating interlocutors may be a population whose expectations of other people have quietly shifted. The course runs as an intensive block seminar over one week. Teaching is discussion-led and reading-based, with substantial case material, and draws on draft chapters from the lecturer’s forthcoming book Brave New Minds: GenAI as Cognitive Ecology alongside current research papers. No technical background is assumed. Introductory Reading Zawidzki, T. W. (2013). Mindshaping: A New Framework for Understanding Human Social Cognition. MIT Press. Preface and Chapter 1. Krueger, J., & Osler, L. (2022). Communing with the Dead Online: Chatbots, Grief, and Continuing Bonds. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 29(9-10), 222-252. https://doi.org/10.53765/20512201.29.9.222 Turkle, S. (2011). Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books. Part Two. Case material (short, please read before the first session): ABC News on Replika users and their AI companions (2023): https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-03-01/replika-users-fell-in-love-with-their-ai-chatbot-companion/102028196 New York Times on the Character.AI lawsuit (2024): https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/technology/characterai-lawsuit-teen-suicide.html Note that Character.AI and Google agreed a settlement in these and related cases in January 2026; the settlement will be read alongside the original reporting. Optional background: Vallor, S. (2016). Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting. Oxford University Press.

12:00 am – 12:00 am

This course is taught en bloc. For dates and times, please see the entry on eCampus. Mental imagery refers to the generation and experience of perceptual representations in the absence of corresponding external stimuli, for example, visualizing an apple. A long history of positions in philosophy and psychology has assumed that mental imagery abilities are of great importance, if not necessary, for general cognitive functioning. However, the rapidly growing literature on aphantasia, namely the marked reduction or complete absence of mental imagery in at least one sensory modality, calls into question the importance attributed to imagery. Not only are people with aphantasia (currently estimated to make up roughly 4 percent of the general population) not gravely cognitively impaired, but they are also able to solve tasks that were previously used to test for imagery abilities. How is this possible? And how, given that mental imagery is a private experience, can we be sure that people with aphantasia truly have deficient imagery? In this block seminar, primarily conceptualized for philosophy and cognitive science students, we will address these and many other ongoing puzzles about mental imagery and aphantasia by employing an interdisciplinary approach. Together we will: · Review historical debates and discuss seminal work in the philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience of mental imagery. · Dive into recent empirical findings and ongoing philosophical discussions about aphantasia. · Discuss the broader implications that aphantasia research has for debates about consciousness and mental representation. · Delineate future directions and potential pitfalls in investigating what has become one of the hottest topics in cognitive science and popular discourse.

9:30 am – 4:00 pm

Block seminar February 15-February 18; 9:30-16; Room: TBA • WM IIIa 1 – Epistemology, Action, and Methods in Philosophy and Science • VM IIIa 1 – Epistemology, Action, and Methods in Philosophy and Science This seminar introduces central questions in social and feminist epistemology. We will examine how social interactions, power structures, and epistemic communities shape the production and justification of knowledge, in particular in science.

12:00 am – 11:59 am

This course is taught en bloc. For dates and times, please see the entry on eCampus. In this Blockseminar we shall critically examine the latest work of Ludwig Wittgenstein focussing especially on his last text On Certainty and related material. In this work Wittgenstein articulates the idea that knowledge is ultimately founded on the certainty of special propositions that he calls hinges. Such propositions are hereditary within a community of linguistic agents and enjoy significant stability within their specific social, geographical and historical context. However, hinges are not necessarily permanent and immutable, they can and do shift over time making certainty an evolving concept. We shall discuss how this Wittgensteinian idea fares with respect to the contemporary fast changing and globalised world and what the consequences are for his foundationalism. Ungraded: For this Blockseminar all students are required to actively participate either by presenting the session’s material or by taking notes and writing protocols of the sessions. Graded: To receive a grading for this Blockseminar, on top of active participation students are required to write an original essay (Hausarbeit): the length depends on the study program (Bacheler/ Master and type of Master). In exceptional cases there will be the possibility to have an oral examination if there are significant issues with the writing of the essay. Preparatory Meeting Online which is obligatory: Tuesday 20th October form 18:00-19:00 Link: https://ruhr-uni-bochum.zoom-x.de/j/3013146887?pwd=qIm2koVASAuB7Ieod9SpadF0HFZIxm.1 Seminar dates: from Tuesday the 23rd to Friday the 26th of February 2027

9:30 am – 4:00 pm

Block seminar February 15-February 18; 9:30-16; Room: TBA • WM IIIa 1 – Epistemology, Action, and Methods in Philosophy and Science • VM IIIa 1 – Epistemology, Action, and Methods in Philosophy and Science This seminar introduces central questions in social and feminist epistemology. We will examine how social interactions, power structures, and epistemic communities shape the production and justification of knowledge, in particular in science.