Imperfect Cognitions

This week's post is by Benedetta Cogo from the University of Wollongong. Her interests lie in mental disorders and rationality and in narrative practices in mental health. Benedetta is the author of “ Making Room for Narrative Practices in Mental Health ” (published in Topoi), coauthored with Daniel Hutto. Benedetta Cogo This post is about rationality, persons, and mental disorders. Intuitively, these three terms seem to be interconnected, yet there is no obvious or innocent way to establish that persons are rational, that mental disorders are irrational, that mental disorders affect persons (and not, say, their brains). For example, let’s consider this question: are symptoms of mental disorders distorted forms of rationality – coherent and reason-responsive in their own, often very idiosyncratic, way? Or are they entirely unintelligible through the lens of rationality? I like to think that the answer is “both” – and hopefully, at the end of this post, you’ll see why.  So where do ...

Today's post is by Max F. Kramer , an  Assistant Professor of Bioethics at Geisinger College of Health Sciences, and Clinical Ethicist at Geisinger Health System. Kramer discussed the recent paper "Depressed, Not Disordered: Fittingness and Pathologies of Emotion", published in the Journal of Medicine & Philosophy .  Max F. Kramer A once-prevalent view in philosophy – and possibly still prevalent in public life – holds that reason and emotion are inherently opposed. An extension of this view would have us characterise mental illness as some imbalance between the two; typically, a pattern of excessive emotion or deficient reason. Although this perspective is misguided in certain important ways, it serves as a point of entry into the affective dimensions of psychopathology and especially the class of psychological phenomena categorised as affective disorders: mental illnesses characterised by some defect, impairment, or aberration in the functioning of one’s emotional a...

Today's post is by George Chapman, an academic psychiatrist-in-training currently based at the University of Oxford, and Robert Howard, Professor of Old Age Psychiatry at University College London and Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist at the North London NHS Foundation Trust.           George Chapman Robert Howard Delusions are classically described as ‘fixed’ false beliefs. This description was first articulated by Karl Jaspers and, while it is widely considered to be an overstatement or incomplete, it still forms the basis of definitions found in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM) and International Classification of Diseases (ICD). In recent years, there have been tremendous advances towards unravelling why and how delusions emerge . However, much less has been learned about why or how delusions are persistently sustained once formed. This discrepancy motivated our just-published narrative review, “ On the fixed nature of delusions”  which I briefly ...

Today's post is by Alessandro Fiorello, an adjunct philosophy professor at the University of Ottawa, where he also received his PhD in 2025. His main research interests are in free will, narrative views of personal identity, ethics, and related topics in the metaphysics of death and philosophy of religion. Alessandro Fiorello                                         All human beings have at least one thing in common: we are all going to die. Achievements in nutrition, public health, and medical science have increased human longevity. Many people believe that increasing our longevity indefinitely would be desirable. But what if being given indefinite extended longevity creates a kind of boredom with one’s life that cannot be solved by finding new things to do? In my recent essay, “Terminal Boredom, Longevity, and Narrative” I analyse a famous argument against the desirability of immortalit...

This post is by Maria Silvia Salvatori, a Master’s degree student in Philosophy, already holding a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophical Sciences from the University of Bologna, with a background in classical studies, editorial communication, and cognitive sciences. Currently working as a professional educator in primary education, with academic interests in philosophy of mind, delusions, and human cognition. Maria Silvia Salvatori Martha's clinical case, who is discussed by Sabine Spielrein at the Burghölzli clinic in the early twentieth century, is not merely the record of a psychiatric case, but an epistemological mirror. By analysing her delusion, crucial questions emerge: What is the difference between psychotic belief and ordinary belief?  Is there an inner logic in pathological language that can "translate" across cognitive sciences and biological science? Architectures of a Mind Martha N. is described by Spielrein in terms of incoherent affect and a confused, someti...

This week's post is by Joshua Sealy (Macquarie University) on his recent paper  Redefining disability and pathology as both developmental and relational: the ‘phenomenological congruence and flexibility’ approach to disability   in  Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.  Joshua Sealy A popular sentiment in the deaf community is that deafness is not a disability, it is a ‘difference’, with deaf cultures all over the world acting as sources of various values and habits associated with sight, touch, sign language, and solidarity. On the other hand, deafness is hearing impairment, a dysfunction of the deaf person’s ear and/or brain; a disability. Many assume an irreconcilable tension between the two positions. But growing up as a deaf person, I knew intuitively that both positions were true at the same time. The solution required addressing messy definitions of ability, disability, impairment, and pathology. Indeed, a deaf person can be ‘healthy’ despite their disabi...