Imperfect Cognitions

  This post is by Annalisa Coliva , Chancellor of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, and editor-in-chief of the Journal for the History of Analytic Philosophy . What does it mean to be a woman? Philosophers, feminists, and activists have debated this for decades, often clashing over whether “woman” should be defined biologically, socially, or politically. In recent work (Coliva 2024), I have argued that we should instead think of woman as a family resemblance concept—a flexible, open-ended framework that avoids the pitfalls of rigid definitions and better accounts for inclusivity, particularly for trans women. A family resemblance account rejects the idea that woman must be tied to strict, necessary, and sufficient conditions. Instead, it allows for overlapping similarities and “intermediate links.” Just as Wittgenstein described the concept of game—where tennis, solitaire, and playing with dolls share different but overlapping traits— woman can include diverse ca...

This post is by Daria Cybulska (Poland/UK), who is the Director of Programmes and Evaluation at Wikimedia UK, leading programmes and advocacy for knowledge equity and information literacy. Daria is a trustee at Global Dialogue, a platform for human rights philanthropy, and in 2023/24 was awarded a Churchill Fellowship, investigating Central Asia’s online civil society and its resilience responses to a shrinking civic space. She was also a fellow at the AKO Storytelling Institute, based at the University Arts London.   Daria Cybulska Wikimedia UK demystifies and drives engagement in open knowledge, as the national charity for Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects . We have been delivering education activities for over ten years, with an explicit focus on the use of Wikimedia as a tool to develop information and media literacy skills . Our programme takes place online and in schools, universities, museums, libraries and community settings. Our research shows that learning t...

This post is by David Simonin, director of the project entitled "Homo Fabulator: the performativity of illusory representations" (HomoFab), and editor of a new book (in French) on the power of stories. The book is called Les Fables de l'Homme  (Human Fables) (Éditions Kimé 2025). Book cover for Human Fables (2025) What if our illusions shaped reality more reliably than the truth? In the age of fake news, post-truth and virtual realities, there is no doubt that false beliefs, fictions and illusions have a profound impact on our societies. What was long perceived as a deviation to be corrected now appears to be a constant feature of human thought and behaviour. This collective work offers a unique exploration of the power of fabulation: why do we need to tell ourselves stories, individually and collectively? What are the effects of these narratives and representations? Combining philosophy, literature, human and social sciences, the authors question the foundations of our ...

This post is by Orestis Palermos who is the author of Cyborg Rights: Extending Cognition, Ethics and the Law (Routledge 2025). Book cover of Cyborg Rights For most of human history, the privacy and integrity of the mind—its freedom from intrusion and manipulation—has been taken for granted. Dark practices such as torture, brainwashing, or aggressive propaganda have always existed. Yet in times of peace, they were rare, widely condemned, and—except in extreme cases like torture—often possible to resist. That presumption of freedom of thought is now slipping away.  Cyborg Rights (Routledge) argues that the sanctity of our mental lives could be under serious threat, due to our growing reliance on extension technologies: smartphones, laptops, AI, and brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Consider Neuralink’s wireless neural implant , which already allows people to control computers with their thoughts.  Or imagine the next step: smartphones controlled by BCIs, their outputs displaye...

This post is by Elly Vintiadis who recently guest-edited a special issue of Philosophical Psychology on psychedelic-assisted therapy and wrote a free access introduction to the special issue entitled The Promises and Perils of the Psychedlic Turn in Psychiatry . Elly Vintiadis Psychedelic substances have been part of human culture for centuries, used in ritual, healing and spiritual contexts to induce altered states of consciousness that could bring insight and change. In recent years, they have re-emerged in psychiatry in psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT), a therapeutic framework in which substances such as psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, ketamine, or ibogaine are administered in controlled conditions, accompanied by preparation, supervision and integration. Research into psychedelic therapies flourished in the mid-20th century but came to a halt in the early 1970s, driven by shifting social attitudes and the onset of the War on Drugs. With their classification as Schedule I substances under ...

This post is by Lorraine Besser. Lorraine is a philosopher, author, and professor at Middlebury College in Vermont. In this post, Lorraine addresses the topic of boredom. Lorraine Besser   Boredom. We’ve all experienced it and we all want to avoid it. But wait: isn’t it sometimes good to be bored? My answer is no , and that the very asking of this question reveals the ambiguous nature of the concept as it is used in ordinary discourse. This ambiguity is dangerous: because boredom is inherently bad, yet also quite natural for us to experience, it’s important to know how to alleviate it. Yet, we can’t begin to understand how to alleviate it unless we are clearer on what boredom is. Most often, when someone claims that boredom is sometimes good, what they mean is that it is sometimes good for our minds to be at rest, and for us to experience the peaceful, calming nature of a mind at rest. Without question, it is sometimes good for our minds to be at rest. A restful mind, however,...