Imperfect Cognitions

This is the second of two posts reporting on the  Women in Philosophy workshop  which was held on the 22nd and 23rd June at the University of York. This post will summarise the talks given on the second day of the workshop, you can read about the talks given on the first in a previous  post . Jules Holroyd (Nottingham), pictured above, opened the second day with a talk on Applying for Grants. Jules is currently the Principle Investigator of the Bias and Blame Project , for which she and her team received funding from the Leverhulme Trust. In her talk she gave very helpful information and advice on the grant application process. Laura Frances Callahan (Oxford), pictured above, was the first mentee speaker of the day with her paper 'Evil: Only Sometimes Evidence against God'. Laura discussed a forthcoming paper by Matthew A. Benton, John Hawthorne, and Yoaav Isaacs which claimed that since the absence of evil would be evidence for the existence of God, the pr...

Helen De Cruz In today's post Helen De Cruz reports from The Philosophy and Psychology of Afterlife Beliefs workshop which took place on 10 March 2015 at the VU University Amsterdam. Most religions affirm an explicit belief in an afterlife, that is to say, that biological death is not the end of a human being’s existence. Recent research in the cognitive science of religion indicates that the cross-culturally widespread belief in a life after death is cognitively natural for humans: it arises spontaneously, without explicit instruction, and sometimes even in the absence of any cultural input. By contrast, the belief that everything (including a person’s beliefs and desires) ends at death is cognitively effortful and emerges later in development than the belief that at least some processes, such as psychological processes, continue.