Imperfect Cognitions

Today we welcome Steven Gubka, a postdoctoral associate at the Humanities Research Center at Rice University, to share his recent paper: " How Anger Helps Us Possess Reasons for Action " ( The Philosophical Quarterly ).   Steven Gubka   Recall the last time that you got angry at someone. Did it help or hinder your decision-making about how you should treat them? Seneca, a stoic philosopher of ancient Rome, argued that anger makes it more difficult to deliberate correctly about what to do. He wrote that “it causes whoever has come into its clutches to forget his duty: make a father angry, he’s an enemy; make a son angry, he’s a parricide. Anger makes a mother a stepmother, a fellow-citizen a foreign enemy, a king a tyrant” (2010: pg. 16).  Here Seneca claims that anger prevents us from appreciating moral reasons to avoid harming people, even those that we have special obligation to protect. This idea of tension between anger and reason remains commonplace, and as a result,...

This post is by Richard Hassall. Richard Hassall Diagnosis, as the identification of the disease afflicting the patient, is a central element in modern medicine. However, a diagnosis is more than just a statement defining a disease and aiming to guide treatment. It can also have other important social and other consequences for its recipient, beyond acting as a hypothesis for the purpose of treatment. Thus, sociologists of medicine have observed that diagnoses can function to define the sick role in social contexts and authorise medical social control in various ways (e.g. Jutel, 2017 ; McGann, 2011 ). In a paper forthcoming in Journal of Medicine and Philosophy , I argue that the act of delivering a medical diagnosis creates an institutional fact. I make use of Austin's (1962) speech act theory to argue that the statement of a diagnosis is both an illocutionary and a perlocutionary speech act. The announcement by the physician of a diagnosis is not simply a factual statement abou...

This post is by Konrad Banicki and Peter Zachar. Book cover Personality disorders are among the most contentious topics in clinical psychology and psychiatry. Thus, it is surprising to see how little attention has been paid to this domain within the philosophy of psychiatry. In our recently published book Conceptualizing Personality Disorder: Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychological Science, and Psychiatry (Cambridge University Press, 2025) we set out to potentially alter the scholarly landscape by encouraging philosophers to tackle the complicated issue of personality disorder. We also wanted to invite psychologists and psychiatrists to participate in the task of bringing more philosophy to personality disorders.   One of the contexts for this volume is a loss of confidence in the neo-Kraepelinian categorical model under whose guidance personality disorders gained renewed importance in psychiatry with the publication of the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical ...

This post is by Ruby Hake (University of Birmingham), one of the authors of 'Autism and Gender', a chapter in a volume forthcoming for Routledge,  Contemporary Philosophy of Autism . The chapter offers an in-depth discussion of essentialism and argues that critical phenomenology is well placed to prevent this issue going forward. Ruby Hake Essentialism has been a problem in autism and gender diversity research from the beginning. For example, the biological-essentialist theory of the extreme male theory of autism ( Baron-Cohen 2002 ; 2012 ) has been used to explain the prevalence of autistic trans men ( Murphy et al. 2020 ; Nobili et al. 2018 ; Kung 2020 ). The theory cannot explain the prevalence of autistic trans women, however, and ignores the experiences of non-binary autistic people.  It has also been common in medical literature to argue that “symptoms” of autism, such as ‘black and white thinking’, ‘obsessions’, ‘developmental rigidity’ etc. can cause gender dyspho...

Today's post is by Jodie Russell (University of Birmingham) who is addressing self-illness ambiguity. Jodie Russell In a recent paper titled “ Prescriptive ‘selves’ and self-illness ambiguity ” ( Synthese 2025), I explain the phenomenon of self-illness ambiguity and argue that individuals who experience these ambiguities might feel a particular form of social isolation. Self-illness ambiguities occur when people struggle to determine whether a thought, feeling, or behaviour is due to their illness (specifically, a mental disorder) or due to who they are as a person (i.e. stemming from their self). For example, someone with depression might find it difficult to tell whether their sadness after being let down by a friend is a symptom of their depression or a response rooted in their personal history of being let down by others. As Sadler (2004) describes, mental disorder can saturate or transform a person’s relationship to the world, and this transformation can be valuable in itsel...

This post is by Alejandro Vázquez del Mercado , Professor of Philosophy at UNAM (Mexico’s National Autonomous University), where he coordinates the Seminar of Cognitive Diversity.   Alejandro Vázquez del Mercado Bereavement deeply affects every aspect of life, but reflections on its epistemic impact are comparatively scarce in philosophy.  In my view, the best way to think about this is in terms of epistemic functionality, a core notion from the Epistemic Innocence framework that I’ve found extremely fruitful. When evaluating epistemic functioning, the focus is not on the degree of justification possessed by the beliefs of the bereaved, but on the person’s ability to regularly acquire epistemic goods, such as true beliefs, evidence, and understanding.  Bereavement studies provide an important starting point to understand how the death of someone close is epistemically disruptive. The ambivalence and dissonance pertaining to the fact that the deceased is no longer pr...