Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Maria Cristina Contrino. Maria Cristina Contrino What is the role of narratives for our personal identity, for who we are in everyday life? What kinds of narratives shape our actions, interactions and relations? What is the role of ‘wrong’, erroneous narratives?  In my paper  I review three narratives accounts that highlight the importance of narratives for personal identity and argue for the practical notion of personal identity ( Schechtman 1996 ); the variety of psychological and bodily characteristics that shape a person ( Schroeder 2022 ); and the role of affectivity and bodily interactions in supporting our narratives and maintaining our identity ( Lindemann 2014 ).  Yet, these approaches do not do justice to the roles of certain narratives that are not fully rational and involve errors: a narrative view needs to account for the practical significance in one’s life of erroneous narratives, such as impostor’s narratives, delusions and confabulati...

This post is by Anna Ichino, University of Milan. Have you ever visited a Philosophy Museum? I bet not. Apparently, indeed, there aren’t any Philosophy Museums in the world. Or better: there aren’t any yet… But together with my colleagues at the Philosophy Department of the University of Milan we have decided that it is time to build the first one. In this post, I’ll tell you about this exciting project. What we had in mind was not an historically-minded museum collecting relics about the lives and works of important philosophers; but something more dynamic and interactive – built on the model of the best science museums – where philosophical problems and theories become intuitively accessible through a variety of games, activities, experiments, aesthetic experiences, and other such things. Easier to say than to do, no doubt. It’s an ambitious project, and to put it into action we had to proceed gradually. We started with a temporary exhibition, which took place in ...

Today’s post is by Valerie Gray Hardcastle , Professor of Philosophy, Psychology and Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Cincinatti. I study the nature and structure of interdisciplinary theories in the cognitive sciences and have focused primarily on developing a philosophical framework for understanding consciousness that is responsive to neuroscientific, psychiatric and psychological data. Currently, I am investigating the neuroscience of violence and its implications for both our understanding of human nature and the criminal justice system. I am also trying to figure out whether notions of embodied cognition help or hinder theorizing about consciousness. (I think that the answer will be neither.) Most recently, I have received research fellowships from the Medical Humanities Program at the University of Texas-Medical Branch ; the Centre for Mind, Brain and Cognitive Evolution at theUniversity of Bochum ; and the Institute for Philosophy/S...