Imperfect Cognitions

We celebrate Darwin Day (12th February) with a post by Matteo Mameli (King’s College London) on his new monograph,  Why Human Nature Matters: Between Biology and Politics  (Bloomsbury 2024). In the book, Mameli discusses Darwin’s views on mental faculties, human differences, and the transformative agency of organisms.  My monograph addresses classic and contemporary perspectives on human nature and makes a novel proposal, one that stresses the biological and political significance of human diversity and mutability. Darwin’s ideas on variation and niche construction play an important role in my argument, which also draws on insights from Marx, Engels, Gramsci, Sebastiano Timpanaro, Sylvia Wynter, and others. The cover image is a plate from one of Darwin’s books on barnacles. To discover why Darwin was so interested in barnacles, you will have to read the book! Below are some excerpts from the introductory chapter: Organisms inherit genetic material from their parents, but ...

As part of a University of Birmingham Women in Philosophy initiative to promote inclusion and diversity in access to philosophical research, I interviewed Anna Ichino (University of Milan) on the creation of the very first Philosophy Museum . Anna originally blogged about the Museum for us and for the Daily Nous in 2020 and she is offering here an exciting update on the uptake of the initiative and on her future plans to further develop the idea into something bigger and permanent.  Why do we need a Philosophy Museum? Can Philosophy be engaging and fun, as well as informative, for the wider public?  The first hall of the museum   Lisa Bortolotti (LB): How did you and your collaborators develop this idea of creating a philosophy museum? Anna Ichino (AI): The idea originally was of my colleague Paolo Spinicci who kept saying, there are in the world museums about almost everything. There are museums of art, science, cinema, sex, and toys. There are even a museum f...

On 15 th -16 th October 2015 the University of Leeds Minorities and Philosophy chapter hosted the MAP@Leeds Implicit Bias Conference . The conference included a large number of high quality talks covering a wide-range of issues relating to implicit bias. This report focuses on three of these talks.   In her talk, “ What do we want from a model of implicit bias?”, Jules Holroyd  (pictured above) noted that competing models of implicit cognition have emerged from different sources, with different priorities and conceptual frameworks. She set out a framework for assessing these competing models. She set out some desiderata for a model of implicit cognition, set out some test cases, and considered some recent models of implicit bias in light of the desiderata and cases. She showed that models provided by Levy, Schwitzgebel, Mandelbaum, Gendler and Machery each fail to meet the desiderata. In developing this argument she provided a clear articulation of what an accoun...

WASP 50th Jubilee Congress On November 13th-15th 2014, the World Association of Social Psychiatry held its 50th Jubilee Congress . The event was a joint conference with the Royal College of Psychiatrists , organised in Park Plaza Hotel in Central London. The Congress assembled a programme of wide scientific interest, marking the achievements of social psychiatry as a keystone to excellence in mental health care. It welcomed participants from 50 different countries and consisted of 60 lectures, seminars, workshops and talks as well as nearly 200 poster presentations. This report presents only a small selection of what was an enormously rich and interesting programme. In his opening speech, the WASP President Dinesh Bhugra addressed current challenges to psychiatric practices in the 21st century. Bhugra put a particular emphasis on mental health issues arising as a result of globalization and use of modern technology, including cyber-bullying, internet-based religious radi...