Imperfect Cognitions

Garrett Cullity  is Hughes Professor of Philosophy at the University of Adelaide, where he teaches and writes on topics in practical, theoretical and meta-ethics. He taught previously at the Universities of Oxford and St Andrews.  He is a co-editor (with Berys Gaut) of Ethics and Practical Reason (Clarendon Press, 1997) and the author of The Moral Demands of Affluence (Clarendon Press, 2004). In this blog post he talks about his new book Concern, Respect, and Cooperation . Three things often recognized as central to morality are concern for others’ welfare, respect for their self-expression, and cooperation in worthwhile collective activity. When philosophers have proposed theories of the substance of morality, they have typically looked to one of these three sources to provide a single, fundamental principle of morality – or they have tried to formulate a master-principle for morality that combines these three ideas in some way. In this book, I make the case for tr...

Today's post is by Jordi Fernández . He is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Adelaide . Jordi's research interests are mainly in philosophy of mind, epistemology and metaphysics. He is particularly interested in self-knowledge and memory.  He is the author of Transparent Minds (2013), a monograph on self-knowledge, and he is currently working on a monograph on memory. He is also interested in cognitive science and continental philosophy. Jordi's post is the second of a series on chapters from the New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory collection. (See here for the first in the series.) He discusses his chapter " The functional character of memory ". Consider the question of what is to remember something, as opposed to imagining it. This is a question that I have tackled in a recent article. I try not to appeal to the phenomenology of memories, or the content of memories, or the kind of knowledge that memories provide. The rea...

This post is by Kevin Aho . Professor Aho is chair of the Department of Communication and Philosophy at Florida Gulf Coast University. He is the author of Existentialism: An Introduction , Heidegger’s Neglect of the Body and co-author of Body Matters: A Phenomenology of Sickness, Illness, and Disease. The new edited collection Existential Medicine: Essays on Health and Illness gathers together a group of leading figures such as Havi Carel, Shaun Gallagher, Drew Leder, Matthew Ratcliffe, John Russon, Jenny Slatman, Robert Stolorow, Fredrik Svenaeus, and Kristin Zeiler who draw on the methods of existential and hermeneutic phenomenology to illuminate the lived-experience of illness. The primary aim of the collection is to challenge the detached and objectifying standpoint of mainstream medical science in order to deepen and broaden our understanding of health and illness and offer more sensitive and humane approaches to healthcare. To this end, the volume is not so concerned w...

Today's post is by Finlay Malcolm , a Research Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire. He is currently researching on the nature, value and epistemology of faith, the ethics of testimony, and non-realist approaches to religion. Imagine that you’re having lunch with a good friend. You’re discussing work and you tell her that you were recently given an award for excellent achievement – something you’re very proud of. She has no reason to disbelieve your testimony: she knows that you’re a good worker, and that you don’t make things up. Nevertheless, she doesn’t believe what you say. What’s more, she explicitly informs you that she doesn’t believe your testimony. Why won’t she believe what you’ve told her? Suppose that her reasons are that she thinks you’re making things up to make yourself sound better at your job than you actually are. That is, she thinks that you’re lying. But of course, she has no good reason to think that you’re lying. The fact that she doesn’t believe...

This post is by Helen Ryland. Helen Ryland is a Philosophy PhD student at the University of Birmingham and funded by Midlands3Cities (AHRC). A philosophy student and a law student walk into a room. This is essentially how the ‘Human Rights in the 21st Century: Developing Rights in a Developing World’ conference was born. After discussing our PhD projects at an induction event (and then again over several coffees), myself and Sarasvathi Arulampalam (Law, University of Birmingham) realised that we wanted to work on an interdisciplinary conference that would allow researchers from a variety of fields to get together and actually discuss the changes and challenges that human rights are currently facing, and how we might go about responding to these issues. With the blessing of Alice Storey (Law, Birmingham City University), we applied to take over the organisation of her previous Midlands3Cities (M3C)- funded ‘Human Rights Challenges in the 21st Century’ conference. Our new conferen...

Today's post is by Daniel D. Hutto and Anco Peeters. Daniel D. Hutto  (above right) is Senior Professor of Philosophical Psychology and Associate Dean of Law, Humanities and the Arts, at the  University of Wollongong.  and member of the Australian Research Council College of Experts. His recent research focuses primarily on issues in philosophy of mind, psychology and cognitive science. He is best known for promoting enactive and embodied cognition that is non-representational at root, and for his narrative practice hypothesis about folk psychology. Anco Peeters  (above left) is a doctoral student and tutor at the University of Wollongong. His doctoral project investigates the compatibility of functionalism and enactivism and compares these frameworks in terms of their explanatory power with respect to mind-technology interaction. Attempts to accommodate a range of empirical findings about memory have provoked daring new thinking about what lies at the roots ...

PLURAL-MENTE is a new Research Group on the Philosophy and Psychology of Subjectivity and Relationships funded by Marco Castiglioni with the collaboration of Mauro Antonelli and Mario Vergani. In this post they tell us about the aims of the group and give us some information about how to follow their activities. Objectives of the research group The research group “PLURAL-MENTE” promotes in-depth studies about the complex interactions between philosophy and psychology in their different disciplinary branches. It aims to advance philosophic reflection on the various theoretical and applied perspectives inherent in the psychological disciplines, while also examining their historical and cultural roots. The name “PLURAL-MENTE” explicitly recalls the epistemological and methodological pluralism required for the study of psychological phenomena, and promotes a critical engagement with the reductionist positions prevalent today. The subtitle recalls, on the one hand, the centrality of...

Today's post is provided by Professor Nancy Snow. My name is Nancy Snow and I am a Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Institute for the Study of Human Flourishing at the University of Oklahoma (see here for more information). My paper, “ Adaptive Misbeliefs, Value Trade-Offs, and Epistemic Consequentialism ,” was recently published in the volume Epistemic Consequentialism, edited by Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij and Jeffrey Dunn (Oxford University Press, 2018). As the book’s title suggests, the collection is about various aspects of epistemic consequentialism. This is a view in the theory of knowledge (epistemology), according to which the production of epistemic value is the end at which beliefs or belief-producing processes aim. Epistemic consequentialism parallels ethical consequentialism in structure. I.e., just as ethical consequentialism tells us we should maximize happiness or utility in our actions, so epistemic consequentialism tells us we should maximize...

In this post, I report from our applied epistemology panel at the Society for Applied Philosophy Annual Conference 2018, held in Utrecht from 29th June – 1st July. When you think about typically ‘applied’ sub-disciplines of philosophy, epistemology might not be the first area of study to cross your mind. But Boudewijn de Bruin and Lisa Warenski , two speakers from last year’s panel on Applied Epistemology in the Professions decided that an applied epistemology panel should be a fixture of the SAP annual conference, and together with Anneli Jefferson and myself, put together a proposal, looking at deepening understanding of the application of the concept of epistemic injustice to topics in both mental health and finance for this year. (Unfortunately Lisa couldn’t make it on the day, so I report on just the three talks, but do keep an eye out for her work in this area!) First Boudewijn explored epistemic injustice in consumer markets, starting from the observation that...