Philosophy is the study of the questions that lie behind all the other things we study in school. These are not just questions like ‘How do you know?’ or ‘How do you know that you know?’ but ones like ‘Is it even possible to know anything at all with certainty?’. Another example from philosophy of mind would be ‘What is the difference between a thought and the brain at the moment of the thought?’ Or to put it another way, if we hope that it will be sunny tomorrow does our hopefulness correspond to a particular state of our brain? If not, what kind of thing is a thought, what is a mind and what do our answers to these questions imply about the physical world?

In order to answer these questions, we need to look at what philosophers have said about them in the past. We spend time with Rene Descartes, David Hume and Immanuel Kant, among others, and get involved in a conversation that has been going on for centuries and is still growing and changing today.