Imperfect Cognitions

In this post I interview Fiona Woollard (University of Southampton) about her work in the philosophy of early motherhood. LB: How did you become interested in the philosophy of pregnancy and early motherhood? Can you describe your research interests in this area? FW: I’ve been interested in the ethics of abortion since I was an undergraduate. In fact, it was probably my interest in this issue that lead me to a career in philosophy. But once I became pregnant myself, I felt a strange kind of dissatisfaction with most of the existing literature on abortion. With a few notable exceptions – for example, the wonderful work of Margaret Little – the philosophical literature on abortion failed to engage at all with the messy reality of pregnancy: the blood and guts, the stretch marks and vomiting. Imagine that you were a little green alien from alpha centauri trying to learn about human reproduction from the most popular papers on abortion by analytical philosophers. What kind...

Thomas Ames (pictured above) is a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Missouri-St. Louis  and has interests in epistemology, agency, and disorders of selfhood. In this post, he summarizes some of his current research into what role irrational emotions may play when making rational decisions, and what that may mean for the future of artificial intelligence. Quite a bit has been written on the role of emotion on the decision-making process. Using cases of traumatic brain injuries that have led to defects in both emotion and rational decision-making, several theories with a neurological framework have been proposed about why that may be. One such prominent theory, somatic marker hypothesis ( 1 , 2 ), introduced by Antonio Damasio (University of Southern California), posits that emotions play an integral neurological role in decision-making. This is because it was found that in cases of specific brain lesions which affect patients’ emotions, their abilit...

Today's post is by Candice Shelby on her new book Addiction: A Philosophical Perspective . Candice Shelby is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado Denver. She has published in the history of philosophy, philosophy of psychology, metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of addiction. She regularly speaks around the U.S. and Europe on the complex problem of addiction, and has recently completed a month teaching on the topic in Beijing, China. In my new book I argue that most analyses of addiction get off on the wrong foot from the start, by assuming a simple linear cause-and-effect understanding the world. Very little about human beings can be understood in such a straightforward way, and certainly nothing having to do with mind or experience. Like other human phenomena, including mind itself, I believe that addiction is an emergent property of a complex dynamic system. It is better understood as a process than as a disease, a moral proble...

My name is Alexandre Billon . I am an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Lille III . My research specialty is philosophical psychopathology, that is, the use of psychopathology to solve perennial philosophical riddles . In a  paper  recently published in the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, I argue that in order to be happier, people with desires like us must behave irrationally. This might seem plainly paradoxical: being happier is, other things being equal, being better off. Behaving irrationally is not doing what is best for me. How can I be made better off by not doing what is better for me? Before debunking this paradox let me briefly present my argument. Many philosophers, thinkers and even religions have claimed that unfulfilled desires diminish our level of happiness. This, I believe is not quite right. There are two kinds of interesting counterexamples.

This post is by Natalia Garcez, Brazilian graphic designer currently based in Vienna. If you want to know more about her work, check out her research  and the project she discusses in the post. Contemporary European kindergartens were born in the first half of the 19th century. Pedagogues such as Fröbel and Montessori helped to create a model of education which motivates children to develop all their abilities, giving equal opportunities to every kid to learn what fits better their personal talents and personality. Though the traditional European methodologies are the closest from a model of education which promotes equity among boys and girls, many early childhood educational spaces still do not guarantee a process of raising children free of stereotypes and gendered roles. One example was observed in a kindergarten located in the east of Germany. The place is deeply inspired in Montessorian methodologies, offering children the most varied spaces which all children have...

Today's post is by  Bill (KWM) Fulford  and Tim Thornton . Bill is Fellow of St Catherine’s College, Oxford, and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Mental Health, University of Warwick.    Tim is Professor of Philosophy and Mental Health at the University of Central Lancashire. Bill Fulford Tim Thornton What is delusion? Few questions have so vexed philosophers in recent philosophy of psychiatry. An invitation to contribute to Thomas Schramme and Steven Edward’s Handbook of the Philosophy of Medicine (Springer, 2016) gave us a welcome opportunity to review progress. The philosopher Naomi Eilan characterized the challenge of delusion as solving simultaneously for understanding and for utter strangeness. Karl Jaspers, the great philosopher-psychiatrist of the early twentieth century and founder of modern descriptive psychopathology, would have approved. He famously thought delusions just too strange to be within the reach of empathic understand...

In this post, David Papineau , Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London and the City University of New York, introduces his new book “ Knowing the Score .” I have always been a great sports enthusiast. I’ve played many different sports as an energetic amateur, and I follow even more in the newspapers and on television. But, even so, until recently I was never moved to subject sport to philosophical scrutiny. I was happy to leave that to the official philosophers of sport, and to carry on an ordinary fan myself. In the year of the London Olympics, however, I agreed to contribute to a lecture series on philosophy and sport. When I accepted the invitation, I had in mind that I would have a go at one of the stock topics in the philosophy of sport. But nothing seemed very exciting. So, rather than stick to the official curriculum, I decided to write about something that interested me. If it didn’t count as philosophy of sport, that would be too bad. The topic ...

The following post is by Astrid Kause  (pictured above), who recently completed her PhD at the University of Konstanz, in South of Germany. She continues her research  at the University of Leeds (UK), investigating  how individuals grasp and behave in face of uncertain phenomena like climate change. In this post, she discusses from a psychological perspective why this uncertain and complex problem does not require a complex solution – but how simple prescriptive decision strategies might help us to behave better in face of climate change . Climate change is considered one of the most challenging problems humanity has to solve in the 21st century ( van der Linden, 2015 ). What makes it so particularly difficult to grasp climate change? After all, we experience changes in extreme weather like rainfall, learn about climate change consequences like rising sea levels, hear scientists and politicians call for action against climate change or rather sceptic voices downplayi...

This post is by Adam Harris  (University College London) who recently published a paper entitled: " Understanding the coherence of the severity effect and optimism phenomena: Lessons from attention ". The paper appeared in a special issue on the nature and consequences of optimism, guest-edited by Anneli Jefferson, Lisa Bortolotti, and Bojana Kuzmanovic. In this post, Adam (pictured below) offers a precis of his paper. Popular belief maintains that humans are prone to an almost universal optimistic bias, including a tendency to overestimate the likelihood of good outcomes and underestimate the likelihood of bad outcomes. Related research findings include (all references are in the paper [AH1] ): Wishful thinking . For example, estimates of the likelihood of a sports team winning being higher from that team’s supporters than neutral individuals; Unrealistic comparative optimism . People think they are less likely to experience negative events, such as cancer, than...

In this post, I report from the 20th Annual Meeting of the AEP and WPA Psychopathology Sessions. The symposioum took place at the Hospital Corentin Celton in Paris on the 9th and 10th of December 2016. Researchers in psychopathology and philosophers gathered to present their findings and reflections on the psychopathology of the lived body and its exposure. On the first day, Luis Madeira talked about abnormal bodily phenomena (ABP) and how these symptoms are experienced in patients with affective disorders, psychosis, and particularly schizophrenia. These features are subjective and at the same time experienced as out of control. In patients diagnosed with manic depression, the body is represented as a nebulous existence, a quasi-inefable constellation of feelings, feelings of inner burden and paralysis which is caused by a lack of motivation, with patients often wondering: “It is in me but, what should I do?” When the diagnosis is schizophrenia, reports show an increa...