Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Wouter Kusters , a philosopher, linguist and independent writer, teacher and consultant living in the Netherlands. In 2014 his comprehensive and transgressive book Philosophy of Madness was published in the Netherlands, and later this month the English translation will appear at MIT Press . Here you find an excerpt from the Preface to the English Edition (there is also a video presentation you can watch). Wouter Kusters Madness as I discuss it in this book is the imperfect translation of the Dutch waanzin , with which I focus on the range of experiences of all those who are deemed in medical jargon to be psychotic, as I myself was twice. Its first thematic line is a philosophical examination of the experience of being psychotic. I examine what happens in the various phases of the psychotic experience. What happens to the experience of time and space? What happens to reality? How are other persons perceived, and what happens to thought? It was this highlighting,...

Today's post is by Elly Vintiadis . She introduces her new book, Philosophy by Women: 22 Philosophers Reflect on Philosophy and Its Value (Routledge, 2020) . A couple of summers ago I was reading something (I don’t remember what) and it struck me that most people have no idea what philosophy is and that they only think of old white guys when they think about philosophers. So I decided that I would put together a book of essays on the nature and value of philosophy written exclusively by women in the field of philosophy. I wanted it to be a book about philosophy so that readers can get a better idea of what it is we do and why it is important, while at the same time, without making a fuss about it (I didn’t even want the word “women” in the title), registering in peoples’ minds that there are women doing philosophy and doing it well. At a time when the usefulness of philosophy, and the humanities in general, is being questioned and when the voices of women are being increasingly he...

Today's post is by Melissa M. Shew and Kimberly K. Garchar . They present their new book, Philosophy for Girls: An Invitation to the Life of Thought  (OUP 2020). Despite social and institutional improvements, women and girls are routinely discouraged from full participation in intellectual and civic life. Kamala Harris’s recent refrain of “I’m speaking, I’m speaking” in a debate against Vice President Mike Pence evidences the ongoing challenge that women face in having their voices--and therefore their ideas--truly heard. This disrespect of women’s intellectual expertise occurs in nearly all aspects of our lives, so academic philosophy is no different. The chronic erasure of women’s voices in content, meager representation in philosophy syllabi, persistence of all-male panels in philosophy, and dominance in faculty meetings evidence the gender disparity in education. Melissa M. Shew This gap is harmful not just to women who are unable to fulfill their philosophical potential as a ...

Today's blog is by Emily Thomas, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Durham University, and Honorary Fellow at ACU’s Dianoia Institute of Philosophy. She is the author of Absolute Time: Rifts in Early Modern British Metaphysics (OUP, 2018) and The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad (OUP, 2020). She tweets @emilytwrites. The Meaning of Travel  has been reviewed in  The Spectator,  and  Literary Review . Emily has written about the connections between travel and philosophy in  The Conversation , and about the philosophy of walking for  OUP's blog . She has been interviewed about the book on  BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week , and  BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking . You might think travel and philosophy don’t have much in common. Travel involves flights, bad sandwiches, train tickets. Philosophy is all about books and bearded Greeks. The Meaning of Travel argues that, despite appearances, they have a lot in common. Travel and philosoph...

In this post, I summarise a paper I recently wrote with Kathy Puddifoot (University of Durham), which appears open access in an excellent new book, entitled 'Why Philosophy?' and edited by Diego Bubbio and Jeff Malpas. Kathy Puddifoot Philosophical research impacts on our understanding of the world. We argue that empirically informed philosophy can help us both reduce and control the effects of implicit bias on our behaviour, and challenge the stigma associated with the diagnosis of psychiatric disorders. In both cases, knowledge of philosophy and practice of philosophy make a significant contribution to the development of a fairer society. Implicit bias Implicit biases are responses to members of social groups (e.g., races, religions, gender, ability groups), associating members with traits in virtue of their social group membership. Biases may occur unintentionally, seemingly without the believer being aware of their occurrence, and are difficult to control. Th...

This post is by Diego Bubbio (Western Sydney University) presenting a new book, Why Philosophy , co-edited with Jeff Malpas. The book also features a chapter by Kathy Puddifoot and myself on the themes of project PERFECT. We will blog about that next Tuesday! Nowadays, very few people seem to care about philosophy. Why should we devote resources, and especially financial resources, to research in philosophy? Even more fundamentally – do we really need philosophy? In short – why philosophy? The present collection of popular essays aims at answering this question – or better, at providing a series of answers. The essays of the book address, each from a different angle, the question of why philosophy matters. As we aim at engaging the intelligent but non-specialist reader, the essays are written in a ‘popular’ (jargon-free) rather than in ‘scholarly’ style. All the contributors have been carefully selected not only because of their excellent academic profiles, but also, and even...

Today's post is written by Richard Gipps and Michael Lacewing, editors of the new ' Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis’ Richard Gipps is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Oxford, UK. He’s also a philosopher and an associate of the Philosophy Faculty of the University of Oxford. He has co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry (OUP 2015), and is currently writing a book on the intelligibility of psychotic thought. His blog can be found at clinicalphilosophy.blogspot.com . Michael Lacewing is a former Vice-Principal Academic and Reader in Philosophy at Heythrop College, London, an Honorary Reader in Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology at University College, London, and a teacher of philosophy and theology at Christ's Hospital School, Sussex. He edited, with Louise Braddock, The Academic Face of Psychoanalysis (Routledge 2007), and has published widely in philosophy of psychoanalysis, metaethics ...

In this post I am pleased to interview Beatrice de Gelder (pictured above), Professor of Social and Affective Neuroscience at Maastricht University in The Netherlands. Her main areas of expertise are visual and audio-visual affective processes related to the perception of faces and bodies as well as auditory affective signals. She has extensive experience in designing and executing behavioral, functional and anatomical imaging studies, both in healthy and diseased populations, and has participated in funded research involving populations from diverse cultural backgrounds. Her current research focuses on face and body recognition and, recently, the neuroscience of art. She is currently serving as Editor in Chief of Frontiers in Emotion Science and Associate Editor for Frontiers in Psychopathology. In 2012, she was awarded an advanced European Research Council (ERC) scientific grant for the study of cultural differences in emotional body expression. In addition to Maastricht Univers...

The Sixth Biennial Conference of the European Philosophy of Science Association (EPSA17) was recently held at the University of Exeter, Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology & Egenis, the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences . The conference featured many contributed papers and symposia covering all subfields of the philosophy of science and brought together philosophers of science from Europe and overseas. The line-up of speakers was stellar indeed. Just to name a few, Sonja Amadae , Philip Kitcher , and Margaret Morrison gave keynote talks, and Helen Beebee offered a Women’s Caucus Lecture. Project PERFECT also attended the meeting.  Andrea Polonioli talked about cognitive biases in the search and assessment of scholarly literature and the possible value of using systematic reviews to limit the impact of such biases.

This post is by James Andow (pictured above), a Lecturer in Moral Philosophy at the University of Reading. James’s research interests are in philosophical methodology, in particular, on intuitions and experimental philosophy. In this post he summarises his paper ‘ How Distinctive Is Philosophers' Intuition Talk ?’ There’s a bomb on the funicular railway. It is about to go off. It’s a tragic disaster in the making. There are two carriages connected by a rope. In the carriage nearest the pier, headed down the cliff, there is a party of schoolchildren with buckets and spades. In the carriage nearest the bandstand, headed up the cliff, there is a bomb planted by ecoterrorists. The carriages are currently alongside each other. If the carriages are stopped, …  Philosophers use intuitions. They use them a lot. This much is beyond question. If you have ever studied any philosophy or talked about philosophy with a philosopher you will doubtless have noted the tendency ...

In this post Reinier Schuur (University of Birmingham) reports from the Loebel Lectures in Psychiatry and Philosophy held on the 3rd, 4th, and 5th of November 2015. The lectures were delivered by Professor Steven E. Hyman , former director of the NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health), and currently at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric research, at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.  Steven Hyman gave his lectures on ‘The theoretical challenge of modern psychiatry: no easy cure’, which dealt with the future of psychiatry and the potential ‘collision’ between patient’s lived experience and our neurobiological understanding of mental disorders. A small conference was also held on the 5th of November on Hyman’s lectures, where several philosophers of psychiatry spoke, such as Derek Bolton , Tim Thornton , Jonathan Glover , and Julian Savulescu . The title of the first lecture by Hyman was ‘The problem of modern psychiatry: the collision of neurobiological m...

The 17th International Conference on Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology – International Network for Philosophy and Psychiatry INPP 2015 – with the topic ‘Why do humans become mentally ill? Anthropological, biological and cultural vulnerabilities of mental illness' - was held in Frutillar, Chile, on October 29th, 30th and 31th, 2015. The Conference has been organised by the Centro de Estudios de Fenomenología y Psiquiatría, Universidad Diego Portales , Santiago, Chile, in coordination with the International Network for Philosophy and Psychiatry, INPP, to promote and share cross-disciplinary research from the field of Philosophy and Mental Health.  All the lectures and seminars were housed in Teatro del Lago  (picture above) located on the lake in Chilean Patagonia, with an inspiring natural setting and stunning architecture. The programme consisted of 23 plenary conferences, 54 oral presentations, 6 panel discussions, and more than 30 posters of researchers c...

This week we feature a report on a conference on the dialogue between philosophy and psychoanalysis. The author, Marthe Kerkwijk , is a graduate student at Heythrop College, University of London. Senate House, London On Friday 17th and Saturday 18th of October, Heythrop College, London , the Institute of Philosophy and the Institute of Psychoanalysis co-organised a conference on the dialogue between philosophy and psychoanalysis. Philosophers' critical evaluations of the methodologies of psychoanalysis are well known, but in the last few decades philosophy and psychoanalysis have mutually influenced each other in more constructive ways. The conference brought together prominent scholars whose work navigates the intersection between philosophy and psychoanalysis in order to reinforce fruitful dialogue between both disciplines. Jonathan Lear , professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and psychoanalyst, delivered the keynote address. The conference took place in...