Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Carlota Serrahima on her recent paper, " The experience of dysmenorrhea " ( Synthese,   2023). She is a postdoctoral fellow within the ERC funded project " Rethinking Conscious Agency ", based at the Universitat de Barcelona. Carlota Serrahima My main research topic is the philosophy of bodily awareness, and Manolo Martínez has worked on the philosophy of pain. We were both surprised that, in the literature our work overlaps on, menstrual pain — technically, “dysmenorrhea” — is rarely mentioned. For one of us, dysmenorrhea is the pain most often experienced, and we suspected that this was so for many people. Indeed, according to conservative estimates almost half of menstruators experience dysmenorrhea. That’s probably close to a billion people. Our paper highlights an important tension: various assumptions operative in the philosophical literature about pain are actually doubtful, or maybe even false, of dysmenorrhea. In the paper we critici...

Helena De Preester is assistant professor and researcher at University College Ghent, as well as a visiting research professor at the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences at the University of Ghent. Her research focuses on the connection between the human mind, embodiment, technology, and wider society.  Manos Tsakiris is professor of Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he leads the lab of Action & Body and the INtheSELF ERC-funded project . His research focuses on the link between body and self and how we become aware of ourselves and others. In this blog post they introduce their new co-edited, interdisciplinary volume on interoception. Interoception is the body-to-brain axis of signals originating from the internal body and visceral organs (such as gastrointestinal, respiratory, hormonal and circulatory systems), and plays a unique role in ensuring homeostasis. Interoception therefore refers to the sensing of the state of the inner bod...

This post is by José Luis Bermúdez , who is Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University. His books include The Paradox of Self-Consciousness (MIT Press, 1998), Thinking without Words (OUP, 2003), Rationality and Decision Theory (OUP, 2009), and Understanding “I”: Language and Thought (OUP, 2017). His current projects include the third edition of his textbook Cognitive Science: An Introduction to the Science of the Mind (CUP); and The Power of Frames: New Tools for Rational Thought (to be published by CUP), supported by a fellowship by the American Association of Learned Societies for the 2018-2019 academic year and a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend for 2018. In this post he presents his new book: The Bodily Self . The Bodily Self contains a selection of essays on self-consciousness and bodily awareness written over the two decades since The Paradox of Self-Consciousness came out in 1998. All of the papers have been revised, some extensivel...