Imperfect Cognitions

This week, we welcome Daniel Vespermann (Heidelberg University) and Sanna Karoliina Tirkkonen (University of Helsinki) to present their recent paper Existential injustice in phenomenological psychopathology in  Philosophical Psychology.   Sanna Karoliina Tirkkonen   In our paper “Existential injustice in phenomenological psychopathology”, we discuss a particular type of affective injustice. We start from the widely shared premise in phenomenological psychopathology that distressing alterations of background feelings play an important role in challenging mental health conditions. Background feelings are standing states that orient our evaluative perceptions of the world, shape emotional patterns, and regulate how we relate to others. In our paper, we refer to feelings of insecurity, self-blame, anxiety, estrangement, or inferiority as examples of distressing background feelings. Phenomenological approaches to psychopathology usually treat alterations of background feeling...

This week's post is by Alexander Edlich, and Alfred Archer and is based on their paper Rejecting Identities: Stigma and Hermeneutical Injustice . Alexander Edlich's work focuses on ethics, social philosophy, and moral responsibility. He is the author of The Scope of Moral Protest: Beyond Blame and Responsibility (Springer, 2025) and research papers in different areas of ethics and social philosophy. Alfred Archer is an Associate Professor of philosophy at Tilburg University. He is the co-author of Extravagance and Misery: The Emotional Regime of Market Societies (Oxford University Press 2024); Why It’s Ok to be a Sports fan (Routledge 2024) and Honouring and Admiring the Immoral: An Ethical Guide (Routledge 2021). He is currently writing a book on ethics and sportswashing for Routledge’s Ethics and Sport series.      Alexander Edlich                                     Alf...

Todays post is by Manuel Almagro (University of Valencia) and Carme Isern-Mas (University of the Balearic Islands), presenting their recent paper ' Blunting concepts: The double-edged effect of popularizing psychotherapy language ' (Philosophical Psychology). Manuel Almagro In the last week, a friend might have described a harmful and impactful past experience as “traumatic”, talked about their “OCD” after arranging their bookshelf by color, or called a weekend of binge-watching shows and ignoring work emails “self-care”. A colleague might have tried to justify their demand that their partner not hang out with friends under the pretext that these were their “boundaries”. A relative might have explained their feelings of exhaustion and detachment as symptoms of “burn-out”, or mentioned that their boss has recommended “mindfulness” to an overwhelmed worker so that they can better cope with time pressure atwork. Psychotherapy language is more and more present in our everyday talk....

This weeks post is by Kristina Šekrst, a researcher and engineer working at the crossroads of logic, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. She is sharing an introduction to her new book  The Illusion Engine: The Quest for Machine Consciousness (Springer Nature, 2025). Kristina Šekrst The Illusion Engine began with a simple question: how could machines ever think? It quickly met a less simple one: how could I, with a foot in both philosophy and software engineering, make either side intelligible to the other? Engineers glaze over at metaphysics; philosophers glaze over at code. Somewhere between the two, confusion turned into fascination. The book grew out of that mismatch, moving between deep technical dives – attention mechanisms, backpropagation, transformers – and philosophical puzzles about consciousness, intentionality, and meaning. It asks whether a machine that hallucinates might, in doing so, come closer to something like experience. This quest...

Today's post is by Helene Cæcilie Mørck, co-written with her fellow authors, in which they address their latest article, For a Choreography of Emotions: Spatiotemporal Phenomenology , published in Psychopathology on July 28, 2025.  Helene Cæcilie Mørck   Helene Cæcilie Mørck  I draw on my twenty years as a choreographer, as well as my lifelong lived experience with altered states related to schizophrenia. During several hospitalizations for psychosis, I found that my training and embodied knowledge as a dancer and choreographer provided me with methods to navigate the emotional chaos I was experiencing.  I developed an inner choreographic map, using my embodied knowledge to structure the emotional turmoil and altered states I experienced. In close collaboration with Giovanni and Veronica, we have been translating this knowledge and deconstructing the language of dance and choreography into practical tools that potentially could be used to test the Chore...

  This post is by Annalisa Coliva , Chancellor of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, and editor-in-chief of the Journal for the History of Analytic Philosophy . What does it mean to be a woman? Philosophers, feminists, and activists have debated this for decades, often clashing over whether “woman” should be defined biologically, socially, or politically. In recent work (Coliva 2024), I have argued that we should instead think of woman as a family resemblance concept—a flexible, open-ended framework that avoids the pitfalls of rigid definitions and better accounts for inclusivity, particularly for trans women. A family resemblance account rejects the idea that woman must be tied to strict, necessary, and sufficient conditions. Instead, it allows for overlapping similarities and “intermediate links.” Just as Wittgenstein described the concept of game—where tennis, solitaire, and playing with dolls share different but overlapping traits— woman can include diverse ca...