Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Manuel Almagro  (University of Valencia). Here he presents his new book, The Rise of Polarization (Routledge 2025). Book cover When I was young, I used to think that doing things you don’t like or that don’t represent you was always wrong. I also believed that all politicians were cut from the same cloth. If asked, I could give reasons for those beliefs. But I hadn’t arrived at them by carefully considering arguments or evidence; they just felt perfectly natural and obviously true, given my experiences and environment at the time. Today, I wouldn’t hold such beliefs. Is that because I’ve been exposed to arguments against them? Not really. I’ve changed through living, talking, and sharing experiences with people who see things differently. Friction with others, especially those who care about us, is essential for reflecting on what’s right, how we should live, and what we should believe. The experiences I’ve gone through have made me more receptive to the pull of ce...

Perri Sriwannawit recently defended her PhD thesis in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. This blog post is an adapted version of the discussion on romantic love in her PhD thesis. Perri Sriwannawit Harry Frankfurt (2004, p. 80) argues that love happens outside of our immediate control; we cannot control who we love or stop loving them on a whim. However, Frankfurt still suggests that love is free in an important sense. In this article, I will propose that love is only somewhat involuntary in the sense that he suggests, and that his notion of freedom is not the only way to explain freedom in love. In Frankfurt’s (1971) earlier work , he argues that freedom of the will is grounded in the alignment of first-order desire (the desire that motivates us to act) and second-order volition (what we truly endorse as our desire). Frankfurt’s conception of freedom is not to do with whether we have voluntary control, but more to do with whether our volitional structure is aligned as such. ...

The first ever academic event in Chile completely devoted to the philosophy of psychiatry took place on the 16th April in Valparaíso. The I Workshop in Philosophy of Psychiatry was led by Professor Pablo López-Silva and organized by the Universidad de Valparaíso School of Psychology and the Valparaíso Institute of Complex Systems.  Poster of the event The event gathered an interdisciplinary audience of 60 people around the work of 8 local and international researchers in the field. The Keynote Speech was given by Dr Renato Matoso, Director of the Department of Philosophy at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In his talk, "Psychotic, Psychedelic, and Religious Experiences: What Can We Learn from Their Joint Study?", Matoso discussed a number of phenomenological and mechanistic similarities found in psychotic, psychedelic, and religious experiences. Matoso proposed to understand these three types of experiences as a continuum where differences can be ...

This post is by Lina Lissia. Lina's research focuses on formal epistemology, philosophy of action, clinical psychology, and psychoanalysis. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cagliari within the PRIN PNRR project Metaphor and Epistemic Injustice in Mental Illness: The Case of Schizophrenia . In addition to her academic work, she practices as a psychoanalyst in Paris. Lina Lissia Miranda Fricker introduced the concept of hermeneutical injustice , a type of epistemic injustice in which individuals or groups lack the conceptual tools to articulate their experiences. This absence of language prevents recognition and understanding, leaving certain realities invisible. In recent years, this phenomenon has become especially evident in the world of dating, where a surge of neologisms— ghosting , breadcrumbing , orbiting , zombieing , and many more—has emerged as an attempt to give shape to experiences that were previously unrecognized. The rising of dating neol...

In this post, Joe Pierre, professor of psychology at UC San Francisco, discusses his recently published book, False: How Mistrust, Disinformation, and Motivated Reasoning Make Us Believe Things That Aren’t True (OUP, 2025) False As a psychiatrist, my clinical work as a psychiatrist through the years has focused on the treatment of people with psychotic disorders. But in my academic work, I’ve been drawn to the grey area between psychopathology and normality and especially the continuum of delusion-like beliefs and full-blown delusions that includes religious, ideological, and conspiracy theory beliefs. In psychiatry, false beliefs like cognitive distortions or delusions are typically chalked up to psychopathology. People have cognitive distortions because they have major depressive disorderand people are delusional because they have schizophrenia. And although research might tell us that delusional thinking can be attributed to anomalous subjective experiences or a “jumping to conclus...

Today's post is by Simon Barker (University of Tartu) on his recent paper, "Epistemic health, epistemic self-trust, and bipolar disorder: a case study " ( Synthese 2025). Simon Barker Four years ago, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder (and later, ADHD). My mind soon after returned to the point when my PhD studies were violently derailed by what I now see as a mix of depression and mania. Then, it took an extended break and inordinate support from my partner, supervisors, and other staff in the Sheffield philosophy department to get me over the line. Now, from my post-diagnosis vantage, I saw that those struggles fit a pattern. My bipolar disorder (and ADHD) and intellectual life have always fluctuated together – as if the same thing. My depressions comes with intellectual disinterest, crashing confidence, and an inability to think; my manias with an urgent flame of intellectual grandiosity yet thoughts racing too fast to make sense of. This entangled mental health an...