Imperfect Cognitions

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...

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 ...

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...