psychology and philosophy
... Why the philosophy of psychology is distinctive Many areas of philosophy can be described as the philosophy of something else — e. ... the philosophy of science, the philosophy of economics, the philosophy of mathematics. All of these branches of philosophy explore the high-level conceptual and empirical issues which emerge in the practice of these target disciplines but which cannot be tackled using the techniques and resources of those disciplines alone. What makes the philosophy of psychology distinctive is that the domain of investigation of the subject being studied forms part of the domain of investigation of philosophy. The philosophy of mind is a core part of philosophy — and psychology is, of course, the study of the mind. So, there are three different areas of investigation which we need to distinguish: i) the psychological study of the mind ii) the philosophy of mind iii) the philosophy of psychology 2. What counts as psychology? It is natural to think that psychology is the scientific study of mind, behaviour and the nature of cognition and action. But university psychology departments usually cover only a sub-set of the subject-matters and disciplines which count as psychological in this broad sense. ... In this course we will not be considering social psychology or cognitive psychology.