Imperfect Cognitions

My name is Jonathan Phillips and   I earned my Ph.D. in Philosophy and Psychology at Yale in 2015. I am now a postdoc in the Moral Psychology Research Lab at Harvard. My research falls in the intersection of psychology, philosophy, and linguistics, and has focused on the psychological representation of modality, or the way our minds represent possibilities. One incredibly important aspect of human cognition is that we are able to think not only about what is, but also what could be. This ability to represent and reason about non-actual possibilities plays a critical role in many of the judgments that have long interested philosophers and psychologists: it is essential, for example, in how we determine the causes of past events, decide whether a person acted freely, or figure out whether someone is morally responsible. One interesting, though often overlooked, feature of these kinds of judgments is that humans seems to able to make them quickly and effortlessly. So, to the...

Experiences of Depression  by Matthew Ratcliffe In this post, Matthew Ratcliffe, Professor of Philosophy at  Durham University , presents his new book, Experiences of Depression. From 1st April 2015, Matthew will be Professor for Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Vienna , Austria. My new book, Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology (Oxford University Press, 2015), is part of a wider-ranging, longer-term research project on the phenomenology of feeling in psychiatric illness. The book is a philosophical exploration of what it is like to be depressed. I start from the observation that many people struggle to describe their experiences of depression. It is often remarked that depression is like being in a ‘different world’, an isolated, suffocating, alien realm that is difficult or impossible to convey to others. By drawing on work in phenomenology, philosophy of mind and several other disciplines, I offer a detailed account of what such experi...