Imperfect Cognitions

The Phenomenology and Mental Health Network organized a workshop last June 20th at the Collaborating Centre for Values-based Practice in Health and Social Care at St. Catherine’s College, University of Oxford. The theme was Phenomenology and Qualitative Health Research. The aim of the workshop was to explore different ways in which philosophical phenomenology is applied in qualitative research and address issues that arise from the increasingly collaborative nature of these fields. The organizers were Anthony Fernandez , Marcin Moskalewicz and Dan Zahavi . I was very glad to be included among the speakers and have the chance to present some of my work. This report includes a detailed summary of everyone’s talks. I thank everyone for sharing their notes to make this report. The first talk was Applied Phenomenology by Dan Zahavi, professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Subjectivity Research (University of Copenhaghen and University of Oxford) Zahavi a...

Today's post is by Clara Humpston. Clara is a Research Associate at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London. Not long ago I completed my PhD from Cardiff University and this paper was first written a couple of years ago when I was a PhD student there . My PhD research focused on the pathogenesis of psychotic symptoms and adopted a cognitive neuropsychiatric approach by incorporating behavioural and phenomenological investigations. In my second post for Imperfect Cognitions, I summarise my most recent theoretical paper on the paradoxical nature of self-awareness in schizophrenia, published in Philosophical Psychology . The primary manifestations of schizophrenia in my opinion, are basic self-disturbances leading to the adoption of a solipsistic lifeworld that provides fertile ground for the development of psychotic phenomena such as first-rank symptoms. First-rank symptoms are often disruptions of one’s ego-boundary: that is,...

This post is by  Anil Ananthaswamy , science journalist and author, and consultant for New Scientist magazine. He has previously worked as a staff writer and deputy news editor at New Scientist’s London offices. He teaches an annual science journalism workshop at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India, and has been a guest editor at the University of California Santa Cruz’s science writing program. In this post, Anil presents his new book, The Man Who Wasn't There. Many people have asked me why I wrote The Man Who Wasn’t There (which examines what neuropsychological conditions such as Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia tell us about the human sense of self), especially since neuroscience is far removed from the topic of my previous book, The Edge of Physics , which dealt with cosmology and astroparticle physics. Curiosity and a desire to write brought me to science journalism—and I went where they took me. The quest to understand the universe and ou...