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 this post, I interview Bonny Astor on her experience on bringing philosophy to prisons and pubs. To learn more about her initiative to discuss thought experiments in pubs, check this website . Her meet up group  is here if you want to join! Bonny Astor Lisa Bortolotti: Do you want to tell us just a little bit about your background and how you got interested in philosophy. Bonny Astor: My academic background is in psychology. Then I did a course in the philosophy of psychology, and I got so interested in that and I had a lot of questions.  I don't really know much philosophy besides what I've taught myself. LB: But you brought philosophy to prison inmates. Do you want to tell us what you did? BA: Sure. I was co-facilitating a hearing voices support group in Pentonville Prison and I got a job with that team as an occupational therapy assistant. I was asked what kind of groups I would facilitate, and I wanted to create opportunities for people to talk about their e...

As part of a University of Birmingham Women in Philosophy initiative to promote inclusion and diversity in access to philosophical research, I interviewed Anna Ichino (University of Milan) on the creation of the very first Philosophy Museum . Anna originally blogged about the Museum for us and for the Daily Nous in 2020 and she is offering here an exciting update on the uptake of the initiative and on her future plans to further develop the idea into something bigger and permanent.  Why do we need a Philosophy Museum? Can Philosophy be engaging and fun, as well as informative, for the wider public?  The first hall of the museum   Lisa Bortolotti (LB): How did you and your collaborators develop this idea of creating a philosophy museum? Anna Ichino (AI): The idea originally was of my colleague Paolo Spinicci who kept saying, there are in the world museums about almost everything. There are museums of art, science, cinema, sex, and toys. There are even a museum f...

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...

This is the second of two posts reporting on the  Women in Philosophy workshop  which was held on the 22nd and 23rd June at the University of York. This post will summarise the talks given on the second day of the workshop, you can read about the talks given on the first in a previous  post . Jules Holroyd (Nottingham), pictured above, opened the second day with a talk on Applying for Grants. Jules is currently the Principle Investigator of the Bias and Blame Project , for which she and her team received funding from the Leverhulme Trust. In her talk she gave very helpful information and advice on the grant application process. Laura Frances Callahan (Oxford), pictured above, was the first mentee speaker of the day with her paper 'Evil: Only Sometimes Evidence against God'. Laura discussed a forthcoming paper by Matthew A. Benton, John Hawthorne, and Yoaav Isaacs which claimed that since the absence of evil would be evidence for the existence of God, the pr...

On 22nd and 23rd June,  I , together with  Helen Bradley  and  Suki Finn , organised a  Mentoring and Networking Workshop  for graduate and early career women in philosophy, which took place at the University of York. The aim of the workshop was to bring together women in philosophy from a various areas of philosophy in order to offer support and encouragement, and to develop a community of women in philosophy. The workshop had eight graduate or early career mentees, and seven senior women in philosophy who acted as mentors. Jennifer Saul  (Sheffield), pictured above, opened the workshop with her talk 'Women in Philosophy: How the Profession is Improving'. Jennifer talked about the low number of women in philosophy, and the factors which might be responsible. She also talked about how things have improved for women in the profession, and what can be done to further improve them. Mary Edwards (Cork), pictured above, was the first me...

In my last post I suggested some reasons for thinking that beliefs based on implicit biases (BBIB) were at least sometimes, epistemically innocent. In this post I will outline some implications of their being so.  I am interested in two kinds of  implication, if beliefs based  on implicit bias are epistemically innocent, we might think that this tell us something about: (1) Responsibility for implicit bias.  (2) How we ought to take the implicit bias. With respect to (1), I do not think BBIB being epistemically innocent brings anything new to the debate. It is the No Relevant Alternatives Condition that we ought to focus on here. If BBIB meet the No Relevant Alternatives Condition, this does not speak against the responsibility or no responsibility views. For example, Jennifer Saul argues that a ‘person should not be blamed for an implicit bias of which they are completely unaware that results solely from the fact that they live in a sexist culture’...

On 29th-29th March the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP) held a conference on Feminism in/and Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Invited speakers were Rae Langton (Cambridge), Michèle Le Doeuff (CNRS, Paris), and Jennifer Saul (Sheffield). Papers were also given by Elselijn Kingma (Southampton), Karen Margrethe Nielsen (Oxford), Paula Boddington (Oxford), Ema Sullivan-Bissett (Birmingham), Stella Sandford (Kingston), Aislinn O’Donnell (Mary Immaculate College, Limerick), Sandrine Berges (Bilkent), Alex Davies (Tartu), and Melissa Zinkin (Binghamton SUNY). Langton opened the conference with her paper 'Accommodating Authority in Philosophical Language Games'. She was interested in different kinds of authority and how these interact. She noted that some speech acts will 'misfire' if the speaker does not have sufficient authority, and discussed language games: where a scorecard tracks play, norms govern appropriate play, and where 'rules of a...

In this post I will suggest some reasons for thinking that at least some beliefs based on implicit bias are epistemically innocent. An implicit bias is a bias ‘of which we are not aware […] and can clash with our professed beliefs about members of social groups’, and which can ‘affect our judgments and decisions’ ( Crouch 2012 : 7). Empirical work has shown that such biases are held by ‘most people’, even those people who avow egalitarian positions, or are members of the targeted group ( Steinpreis et al. 1999 ).  As Lisa and I have said in previous posts , we understand the epistemic innocence of a cognition as that cognition's meeting two conditions. Here are the conditions a belief based on implicit bias would have to meet in order to be epistemically innocent: 1. Epistemic Benefit : The belief delivers some significant epistemic benefit to an agent at a time (e.g., it contributes to the acquisition, retention or good use of true beliefs of importance to that agent). 2...

Helen Beebee I am a professor of philosophy at the University of Manchester. My research is mostly in the area of metaphysics, but I am also co-chair of the British Philosophical Association/Society for Women in Philosophy (UK) committee for women in philosophy, and I have recently been spending quite a lot of time thinking about unconscious bias and the role it might play in the underrepresentation of women in philosophy. Women are unquestionably underrepresented in philosophy. In the UK, women make up about half of all philosophy undergraduates, but only about 30% of PhD candidates and 20% of professors – a figure nearly as low as in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). The numbers are similar in the USA, Australia and elsewhere. There are doubtless many and varied reasons for this, but – in a discipline in which, like STEM disciplines, the dominant stereotype is male – implicit bias surely plays a major role.