section_path: Fields and methods of inquiry/Philosophy
section_name: Philosophy
paragraph_text: Philosophy
  
  Philosophy of mind examines the nature of mental phenomena and their relation to the physical world. It seeks to understand the "mark of the mental", that is, the features that all mental states have in common. It further investigates the essence of different types of mental phenomena, such as beliefs, desires, emotions, intentionality, and consciousness while exploring how they are related to one another. Philosophy of mind also examines solutions to the mind–body problem, like dualism, idealism, and physicalism, and assesses arguments for and against them. Further topics are personal identity and free will.
  
  While philosophers of mind also include empirical considerations in their inquiry, they differ from fields like psychology and neuroscience by giving significantly more emphasis to non-empirical forms of inquiry. One such method is conceptual analysis, which aims to clarify the meaning of concepts, like mind and intention, by decomposing them to identify their semantic parts. Thought experiments are often used to evoke intuitions about abstract theories to assess their coherence and plausibility: philosophers imagine a situation relevant to a theory and employ counterfactual thinking to assess the possible consequences of this theory, as in Mary the color scientist, philosophical zombies, and brain in a vat -scenarios. Because of the subjective nature of the mind, the phenomenological method is also commonly used to analyze the structure of consciousness by describing experience from the first-person perspective.