Imperfect Cognitions

In this post I interview Dan Zahavi, Professor of Philosophy at University of Copenhagen . VM: In an interesting study published in Qualitative Health Research you used a phenomenological approach to understand the experiences of self, other, and the world in patients who had recently suffered a stroke and were experiencing hemispatial neglect. Could you say a bit more about the study, and expand on the idea that the findings show the importance of meaning and meaningmaking in the process of rehabilitation? DZ : In that study we investigated first person accounts of neglect soon after a stroke. Many stroke patients experience hemispatial neglect, that is, they no longer notice the left side of their body and the perceptual field.  We interviewed 12 patients, using an open-ended format. When interviewing the patients, we were guided by phenomenological accounts of embodied subjectivity, and sought to explore the way these impairments affected the patients’ experiences....

Today's post is by Liz Atkin (pictured below) who is an artist and advocate for Compulsive Skin Picking . To learn more about Liz and what she does, you can access her YouTube channel , listen to her being interviewed by Ted Meyer in 2015 , or read this detailed feature in Like-Minded . The post is illustrated with some of Liz's beautiful artworks. Anxiety is now sited as one of the most common of mental illnesses but some anxiety disorders, Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviours such as Compulsive Skin Picking (CSP or Dermatillomania) and Hair-pulling (Trichotillomania) are seldom recognised and treatment is very hard to access. They are much more common than initially thought and among the most poorly understood, misdiagnosed, and undertreated groups of disorders. BFRBs may affect as many as 1 out of 20 people. Compulsive Skin Picking is a complex physical and mental disorder that often develops in young childhood. It provides comfort, pleasure or emotional releas...

On 4th June I attended some talks at the  Valuing Health Conference  at University College London (see picture above), where the themes of Dan Hausman’s book,  Valuing Health  (Oxford University Press, 2015) were discussed. The event was organised by Jo Wolff and James Wilson. The intended audience was philosophers, economists, and also healthcare policy makers. The conference started with a brief overview of the arguments in the book, presented by Dan Hausman (University of Wisconsin) . There are two basic problems the book was meant to address: (1) we need to be able to compare health improvements brought by different policies; (2) we need to know what to do with the information (e.g., maximise health). Thus, the book provides answers to the following questions: How do we assign values to health states? How do we assess policies on the basis of those values? What role should people play in assigning values to policies? The discussion raises further questi...

This post is by Jon Robson, teaching associate at the University of Nottingham. He works on the epistemology of aesthetic, ethical, and religious judgements. There is a prominent doctrine in philosophical aesthetics according to which aesthetic judgements are only legitimate if based on first-hand experience of their objects. In order to properly judge that a painting is beautiful or a work of music graceful, we need to have seen or heard the relevant items for ourselves. Much of my recent work has focused on arguing that this doctrine is mistaken. In particular, I have aimed to show that there is nothing illegitimate about forming aesthetic judgements on the basis of testimony (see Robson forthcoming ). Here, though, I want to focus on a different source of aesthetic judgement: memory. Memory may initially seem to present no problems for the orthodox view. Those who accept the ‘first person requirement’ (FPR) will doubtless, like the rest of us, accept that we can (in t...