Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Michael Cholbi and Paolo Stellino. Michael Cholbi is Professor and Personal Chair in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and author of Suicide: The Philosophical Dimension and Grief: A Philosophical Guide . Paolo Stellino is a researcher at the NOVA University of Lisbon, and author of Philosophical Perspectives on Suicide: Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein . They have recently published The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Suicide   with Oxford University Press.  Michael Cholbi According to the World Health Organization (2023), suicide results in nearly eight hundred thousand deaths per year globally, nearly twice the number who die due to homicide. Global rates of suicide have declined in most parts of the world over the past generation, but there are some notable outliers where rates have increased. Some governments and health authorities have developed smartphone apps or partnered with social media platforms such as Facebook to...

This post is by Víctor Verdejo, one of the editors – together with José Luis Bermúdez and Matheus Valente – of the collection Sharing Thoughts: Philosophical Perspectives on Intersubjectivity and Communication , recently published with Oxford University Press. He is a philosopher of mind and language, Ramón y Cajal fellow at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and currently leads a number of research projects on communication, intersubjectivity and the self. More information can be found here . Cover of Sharing Thoughts Are you thinking what I am thinking? Well, it might be hard for you to know without further context, and in particular, without me telling you what that could be. But this way of talking certainly illustrates how natural and easy it is to consider the possibility of shared thoughts. We are all used to the idea that thoughts, ideas and experiences can be talked about, expressed and ultimately shared with our peers. And the force of this idea not only sits deeply with...

This weeks post is by Kristina Šekrst, a researcher and engineer working at the crossroads of logic, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. She is sharing an introduction to her new book  The Illusion Engine: The Quest for Machine Consciousness (Springer Nature, 2025). Kristina Šekrst The Illusion Engine began with a simple question: how could machines ever think? It quickly met a less simple one: how could I, with a foot in both philosophy and software engineering, make either side intelligible to the other? Engineers glaze over at metaphysics; philosophers glaze over at code. Somewhere between the two, confusion turned into fascination. The book grew out of that mismatch, moving between deep technical dives – attention mechanisms, backpropagation, transformers – and philosophical puzzles about consciousness, intentionality, and meaning. It asks whether a machine that hallucinates might, in doing so, come closer to something like experience. This quest...

This post is by David Simonin, director of the project entitled "Homo Fabulator: the performativity of illusory representations" (HomoFab), and editor of a new book (in French) on the power of stories. The book is called Les Fables de l'Homme  (Human Fables) (Éditions Kimé 2025). Book cover for Human Fables (2025) What if our illusions shaped reality more reliably than the truth? In the age of fake news, post-truth and virtual realities, there is no doubt that false beliefs, fictions and illusions have a profound impact on our societies. What was long perceived as a deviation to be corrected now appears to be a constant feature of human thought and behaviour. This collective work offers a unique exploration of the power of fabulation: why do we need to tell ourselves stories, individually and collectively? What are the effects of these narratives and representations? Combining philosophy, literature, human and social sciences, the authors question the foundations of our ...

This post is by Orestis Palermos who is the author of Cyborg Rights: Extending Cognition, Ethics and the Law (Routledge 2025). Book cover of Cyborg Rights For most of human history, the privacy and integrity of the mind—its freedom from intrusion and manipulation—has been taken for granted. Dark practices such as torture, brainwashing, or aggressive propaganda have always existed. Yet in times of peace, they were rare, widely condemned, and—except in extreme cases like torture—often possible to resist. That presumption of freedom of thought is now slipping away.  Cyborg Rights (Routledge) argues that the sanctity of our mental lives could be under serious threat, due to our growing reliance on extension technologies: smartphones, laptops, AI, and brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Consider Neuralink’s wireless neural implant , which already allows people to control computers with their thoughts.  Or imagine the next step: smartphones controlled by BCIs, their outputs displaye...

This post is by David Ludwig (Wageningen University, Netherlands) and Charbel N. El-Hani (Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil) whose open access book Transformative Transdisciplinarity. An Introduction to Community-Based Philosophy has recently been published by Oxford University Press. Specialization is inevitable in academia. Becoming an academic often means becoming a specialist in a narrowly defined research area that is carefully sheltered from too much outside influence. While this division of epistemic labor is central to disciplinary progress, it clashes with the reality of complex socio-ecological crises. Issues such as biodiversity loss, climate change, economic exploitation, or public health are not technical problems that can be solved by a specialist with narrowly defined expertise but require collaboration across disciplines, synthesizing insights from distinct fields such as biological and Earth sciences as well as economics and policy studies.  While interdiscipl...

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 Manuel Almagro  (University of Valencia). Here he presents his new book, The Rise of Polarization (Routledge 2025). Book cover When I was young, I used to think that doing things you don’t like or that don’t represent you was always wrong. I also believed that all politicians were cut from the same cloth. If asked, I could give reasons for those beliefs. But I hadn’t arrived at them by carefully considering arguments or evidence; they just felt perfectly natural and obviously true, given my experiences and environment at the time. Today, I wouldn’t hold such beliefs. Is that because I’ve been exposed to arguments against them? Not really. I’ve changed through living, talking, and sharing experiences with people who see things differently. Friction with others, especially those who care about us, is essential for reflecting on what’s right, how we should live, and what we should believe. The experiences I’ve gone through have made me more receptive to the pull of ce...

In this post, Joe Pierre, professor of psychology at UC San Francisco, discusses his recently published book, False: How Mistrust, Disinformation, and Motivated Reasoning Make Us Believe Things That Aren’t True (OUP, 2025) False As a psychiatrist, my clinical work as a psychiatrist through the years has focused on the treatment of people with psychotic disorders. But in my academic work, I’ve been drawn to the grey area between psychopathology and normality and especially the continuum of delusion-like beliefs and full-blown delusions that includes religious, ideological, and conspiracy theory beliefs. In psychiatry, false beliefs like cognitive distortions or delusions are typically chalked up to psychopathology. People have cognitive distortions because they have major depressive disorderand people are delusional because they have schizophrenia. And although research might tell us that delusional thinking can be attributed to anomalous subjective experiences or a “jumping to conclus...