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...

In today's post Paul Noordhof discusses the possibility of imagining pain, summarising a paper, Explaining impossible and possible imaginings of pain , that appears open access in a forum dedicated to responses to Jennifer Radden's article, Imagined and Delusional Pain , in Rivista internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia. Noordhof's paper is an output of the AHRC Project  Deluded by Experience , led by  Ema Sullivan-Bissett  at the University of Birmingham.  Paul Noordhof One form of imagining has a content that is like our sensory experiences and bodily sensations. For example, if I’m asked how many windows the front of my mother’s house has, I might answer by imagining the house as if I am looking at it. Equally, we can imagine our hand being warmed by a close-by fire. In a recent paper, inspired and responding to a paper by Jennifer Radden entitled ‘Imagined and Delusional Pain’, I considered the question of whether it is possible to imagine a pain in the same wa...

This post is by Kevin Aho . Professor Aho is chair of the Department of Communication and Philosophy at Florida Gulf Coast University. He is the author of Existentialism: An Introduction , Heidegger’s Neglect of the Body and co-author of Body Matters: A Phenomenology of Sickness, Illness, and Disease. The new edited collection Existential Medicine: Essays on Health and Illness gathers together a group of leading figures such as Havi Carel, Shaun Gallagher, Drew Leder, Matthew Ratcliffe, John Russon, Jenny Slatman, Robert Stolorow, Fredrik Svenaeus, and Kristin Zeiler who draw on the methods of existential and hermeneutic phenomenology to illuminate the lived-experience of illness. The primary aim of the collection is to challenge the detached and objectifying standpoint of mainstream medical science in order to deepen and broaden our understanding of health and illness and offer more sensitive and humane approaches to healthcare. To this end, the volume is not so concerned w...

This post is by Amy Chandler , a sociologist currently holding a Chancellor’s Fellowship in Health, through Arts, Design and Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. In this blog she introduces her book, Self-Injury, Medicine and Society: Authentic Bodies , published by Palgrave Macmillan. Find out more about Amy's research . The book is the culmination of over 10 years research, and a much longer period of engagement and interest, in the practice of self-injury. In the book I focus on the different ways that people make sense of self-injury, through an analysis of accounts – or narratives – about the practice. Self-injury is commonly associated with mental ill-health, seen as ‘irrational’ or ‘impulsive’. As such, the ways in which self-injury is explained might be understood by some as an example of an ‘imperfect cognition’. People report injuring their bodies in order to make themselves feel better – how could this be possible? In the book, I explore the diverse...

Today's post is by Michael Tye on his book Tense Bees and Shell-Shocked Crabs: Are animals conscious ? . I’m a philosopher at the University of Texas at Austin. I encountered philosophy at Oxford and I’ve taught at Temple University, London University, and the University of St Andrews as well as at Texas. I’ve published widely on consciousness and I am associated with a view that has come to be known as representationalism .   The book described below, published by OUP in November 2016, remains neutral on the question as to the right view on the nature of consciousness. Do birds have feelings? What about fish – can fish feel pain? Do insects have experiences? Can a honeybee feel anxious? If trees aren't conscious but fish are, what's the objective difference that makes a difference? How do we decide which living creatures have experiences and which are zombies? Can there be a conscious robot? This book advances philosophically rigorous, empirically informed ans...

In this post, Matilde Aliffi (PhD student at the University of Birmingham) reports from the 7th International Summer School of Affective Science (ISSAS) held at Château de Bossey between the 7th and the 14th July 2016. This year ISSAS was entirely dedicated to investigating the role of emotions in fiction and virtual worlds. World leading experts in philosophy, psychology, educational science, neuroscience, affective computing and game design gave their lecture to an audience composed by an international and interdisciplinary community of about forty PhD students.   During the school, workshops were also held on thought experiments, data-analysis, programming and text-based emotion recognition. Participants were divided in eight teams and had the opportunity to design and present a collaborative and interdisciplinary research project tied to the topics of the school. Alongside the lectures, participants also enjoyed artistic events that complemented nicely the lectures wit...

On 4th–5th June, Arché at the University of St. Andrews held a workshop on  Sensing Strange Things , organized by  Patrick Greenough . In this post I summarise the seven papers given at the workshop.  Fiona Macpherson  (Glasgow) opened the workshop with her paper, co-authored with  Clare Batty  (Kentucky), ‘Redefining Illusion and Hallucination in Light of New Cases’. Fiona and Clare identified several new cases which put pressure on traditional accounts of illusion and hallucination. They suggested that such cases ought to be accounted for by theories of experience and perception. In light of these hitherto unidentified instances of illusion and hallucinations, Fiona and Clare offered new definitions of these notions.  Next was  Jennifer Corns  (Lancaster) giving a talk entitled ‘Hedonic Qualities, Independence, and Heterogeneity’. Jennifer defended a version of hedonic internalism, the claim that the hedonic is best acc...

On 4th March the twelfth Mind Network Meeting was held at Peterhouse College (pictured above), at the University of Cambridge. The meeting was organized by Chris Meyns and Tim Crane , with sponsorship from the New Directions Project (funded by the John Templeton Foundation). In this post I give an overview of the three talks given at the meeting. Opening the meeting was  Raamy Majeed  (Cambridge) (pictured above, left) and  Alex Grzankowski  (Texas Tech/Cambridge) (pictured above, right) each giving a short paper under the heading ‘The Theory-ladenness of Recalcitrant Emotions’. Raamy was interested in what makes cases of recalcitrant emotions recalcitrant, and Alex was interested in what makes such cases normatively problematic.  Raamy wanted to give a theory-neutral explanation of what is recalcitrant about recalcitrant emotions. He started by introducing the following case (call it the case of Fido): a subject knows that Fido the dog is harml...

On 10th November 2015 the Royal Society of Medicine hosted a very interesting conference, entitled "Mind, Body and Soul: An update on psychiatric, philosophical and legal aspects of care nearing the end of life". Here is a report of the sessions I attended on the day. In Session 1,  Matthew Hotopf (King's College London) talked about his experience of treating people with depression in palliative care. Anti-depressants are effective with respect to placebos. People with strong suicidal ideas are in a difficult situation as they cannot be easily moved to psychiatric wards due to the special care they need. The important factor is to be able to contain risk of death by suicide and self-harm. Hotopf concluded by saying that it is normal to have extreme emotions near the end of life, and this does not mean that one suffers from a mental disorder. Annabel Price , Consultant Psychiatrist at the Cambridge and Peterborough Foundation Mental Trust, pictured above, foc...