https://studiegids.vu.nl/en/courses/2025-2026/W_MA_NSNPSThe course provides a systematic introduction concerning different approaches to integrate subjective knowledge into neuroscientific research, including relevant key concepts and central lines of argumentation. The course will more specifically give in-depth philosophical insight into:neurophilosophical approaches to subjectivityneurophenomenological approaches to neuroscientific researchalternative approaches aiming to overcome the divide between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ perspectivescurrent debates on the role of first, second, and third-person expertise in scientific, clinical, and social contexts.After the course, you should be able to:explain and identify key issues and ideas in philosophical debates on the naturalization of phenomenology;explain and identify key methods in the first-person, second-person, and third-person study of phenomenology;apply your knowledge on key issues, ideas, and methods to individual case studies in neurophenomenologyanalyze and critically reflect on the prospects and limitations of the discussed frameworks and methodologies;develop your own view on debates on neurophilosophy, phenomenology, and subjectivity and construct arguments in support of such view.This course pays attention to an intriguing problem in philosophy of neuroscience, i.e., the question of how to account in neuroscientific terms for the ‘subjectivity’ of our mental states. Subjectivity refers in this context to how it is like for me (and not for someone else) to perceive, feel, remember, imagine, or think about something. For example, my pain is my pain and not the pain of someone else, and someone else can only imagine how it is for me to have pain, because I am the only one who really ‘owns’ the pain. This issue has famously become known as the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness. The hard problem is based on the thesis that the subjective quality of mental states cannot be reduced to, explained, or studied by ‘objective’ neuroscientific facts or mechanisms. The aim of this course is to provide students with in-depth knowledge concerning the philosophical challenges emerging in the attempt to integrate subjectivity into neuroscientific research paradigms. In the first part of the course, we will address the hard problem of consciousness in more detail and discuss attempts to overcome it, focusing on the (im)possibility to naturalize phenomenal experience. We will discuss neurophilosophical approaches to subjectivity as well as neurophenomenological approaches to neuroscience. Furthermore, enactive and existential views come into focus that try to overcome the classical divide between ‘subjective’ vs. ‘objective’ approaches to mental functioning. In the second part of the course, we will focus stronger on different methods of how to study subjective experience and relate the results of first-person, second-person, and third-person approaches.Interactive lecturesThe learning objectives will be assessed in the following ways: Formative Assessment: Peer group discussion of case studies Summative Assessment: (i) Case Study (40%): Objectives 1-3 (ii) Term Paper (60%): Objectives 1-2 + 4-5Course manual and literature will be published a few weeks ahead of the beginning of the course on Canvas.Target audience of the course are students in the Master 'Philosophy of Neuroscience' and those with equal qualifications, see https://vuweb.vu.nl/en/education/master/philosophy-of-neuroscience/admis Other applications are at the discretion of the Admission Board of Faculty of Humanities. Please get in contact with the course coordinator for further information.