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What is Transdisciplinary Philosophy?

This post is by David Ludwig (Wageningen University, Netherlands) and Charbel N. El-Hani (Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil) whose open access book Transformative Transdisciplinarity. An Introduction to Community-Based Philosophy has recently been published by Oxford University Press. Specialization is inevitable in academia. Becoming an academic often means becoming a specialist in a narrowly defined research area that is carefully sheltered from too much outside influence. While this division of epistemic labor is central to disciplinary progress, it clashes with the reality of complex socio-ecological crises. Issues such as biodiversity loss, climate change, economic exploitation, or public health are not technical problems that can be solved by a specialist with narrowly defined expertise but require collaboration across disciplines, synthesizing insights from distinct fields such as biological and Earth sciences as well as economics and policy studies.  While interdiscipl...
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The Blind Gamer

This post is by Kamyab Ghorbanpour, Michał Klincewicz, Paris Mavromoustakos Blom and Pieter Spronck who recently published a paper entitled: " The Blind Gamer: Examining Ethical Agency Through Choice Blindness in Game Design " in Entertainment Computing . Kamyab Ghorbanpour When you ask someone why they chose to read a particular book, they will usually give you a story. It might be about how they came across it in a bookstore, how it was highly recommended by their friends, or how it resembled a book they had previously enjoyed. Regardless, they will provide a story, a story believed both by you and by themselves. But what if that story is untrue? What if they weren’t actually aware of why they chose that book? What if they were confabulating without even realizing it? Choice blindness shows that this is not an unlikely scenario. Research has demonstrated that people can make decisions without being fully aware of them—or, for lack of a better term, they think they know why ...
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The Buddhist Theory of No-self and the Mechanisms of Mindfulness

This week's blogpost is from Browyn Finnigan, associate professor at Australian National University, on her recent publication  Self-related processing removal or revision? The Buddhist theory of no-self and the mechanisms of mindfulness  in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.  Browyn Finnigan There is strong evidence that mindfulness helps reduce stress, anxiety, and depression. But scientists are less certain about the mechanisms behind these effects. Inspired by the Buddhist idea of anattā, or no-self, some suggest that mindfulness works by attenuating or reducing all senses of self. Proponents argue that mindfulness fosters disidentification from one’s experience and reduces rumination, which plays a significant role in anxiety and depression. They infer that the benefits of mindfulness arise from decreasing rumination through a reduction in all kinds of ‘self-related processing’ (SRP). Drawing on the research of Britton and Lindahl, I argue that there is little...
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A Critical Perspective on Research on Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare

This week's blogpost is from Kasper Møller Nielsen, Julie Nordgaard, and Mads Gram Henriksen on their recent publication  Fundamental issues in epistemic injustice in healthcare  ( Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy , 2025).  Kasper Møller Nielsen, Julie Nordgaard, and Mads Gram Henriksen In this blogpost, we sketch some key points from our recent article “Fundamental issues in epistemic injustice in healthcare” ( Nielsen et al., 2025 ), calling for more conceptual clarity, methodological rigor, and empirically balanced claims in this research field. In the article, we focus on Miranda Fricker’s ( 2007 , p. 28) concept of testimonial injustice, which she defines as a person receiving “a credibility deficit owing to identity prejudice in the hearer”. In our context, testimonial injustice is a form of transactional injustice, i.e., an injustice occurring in patient-clinician relations.  We report, to our own surprise and dismay, that core claims about epistemic ...
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Does Anger Help Us Appreciate Moral Reasons?

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,...
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The Institutional Status of Medical and Psychiatric Diagnoses

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...
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Conceptualising Personality Disorder

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 ...
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