Imperfect Cognitions

This post has been written by Dariusz Galasiński, who is  Professor  at the University of Wolverhampton and Visiting Professor  at the Uniwersytet SPWS in Warsaw.  He is a linguist interested in psychiatry and psychology and their discourses. He blogs  here .  In this post, he presents his new  book on discursive constructions of the suicide process. My book is founded on a contradiction. Suicide and masculinity do not and cannot sit together easily. Suicide is stigmatised, and people who killed themselves are often thought to be weak and cowardly. Masculinity is anything but this. Its dominant model constructs men as strong ‘masters of the universe’. My book explores a number of resulting paradoxes. 1. The first paradox has to do with constructions of suicide. Even though suicide is constructed as a rational gift, it is not spoken of directly. The positive gift is outside discourse. For as the notes construct men as 'defenders' of the ...

This post is by Jennifer Radden , Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Boston . Here, she discusses some of the ideas in and related to her paper “ Rethinking Disease in Psychiatry: Disease Models and the Medical Imaginary ” recently published in the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice. My philosophical research on the understanding, care and implications of mental disorder reflects an abiding interest in medical history. (Recent monographs with this focus include The Nature of Melancholy (2000), On Delusion (2011), and Melancholic Habits: Burton’s Anatomy for the Mind Sciences (2017).) The era during which asylum-keepers were gradually being replaced by newly professional and medically scientific alienists, using observations from the asylum to consolidate ideas about a class of distinctly mental diseases, offer us intriguing hints about how to understand mental disorder today.  Salient for my paper about the medical imagin...

Today's post is written by Helen de Cruz . Helen is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Oxford Brookes University , UK. Her publications are in empirically-informed Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Religion, Social Epistemology, and Metaphilosophy.  Helen's overarching research project is an investigation of how human engage in thinking about abstract domains such as Theology, Mathematics, and Science, what it means for limited, embodied beings like us to think about these topics, and what epistemic conclusions we can draw from this. Here, she introduces her new book " Religious Disagreement ". I find myself frequently in disagreement about religion with academic colleagues and friends and family. Given that I'm a philosopher of religion, this is not surprising. But my experiences are far from unique: religious disagreement is widespread even among quite homogeneous religious communities. There is disagreement both between and within religi...

Wesley Buckwalter is an incoming Presidential Fellow and permanent faculty member at the University of Manchester. In this post, he discusses his paper “ Mind-Brain Dichotomy, Mental Disorder, and Theory of Mind ” recently published in Erkenntnis. Stigmatization of mental illness is widespread . Misunderstanding, bias, and discrimination associated with mental health concerns pervade even our closest interpersonal relationships, continue despite educational background or medical training, and create major obstacles to treatment and recovery within our health care system. It is essential to understand this stigma and its origins to prevent these negative outcomes. As surprising at it may at first sound, some misconceptions about mental health are thought to stem from a centuries-old philosophical theory about the mind. According to this theory, often labeled the “dualist approach” to psychiatry, the mind is essentially distinct in kind from other physical systems. If it is ...

Today's post was written by clinical psychiatrist, Gianetta Rands. Women's Voices in Psychiatry was published in June 2018 by Oxford University Press. It is a collection of essays by women psychiatrists working, or who have worked, in the NHS. In addition, medical journalist Abi Rimmer writes on the history of women in British Medicine and Claire Murdoch, National Mental Health director at NHS England, reminisces about training as a registered mental nurse at Friern Hospital in the 1980s. This anthology has had a momentum of its own from the very start. I was just in the right place, at the right time. With encouragement from Baroness Elaine Murphy, psychiatrist, researcher, senior manager and cross bench peer, and support from several individuals and committees at Oxford University Press this book was on its way. In 2015, I retired from the NHS and presented an ‘exit seminar’ titled “Career Reflections of a 1970s Feminist” using my experiences of training a...

Şerife Tekin is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at San Antonio . Her research program in philosophy of science and mind aims to enhance psychiatric epistemology by developing methods for supplementing the existing scientific literature with a philosophical study of the first-person accounts of those with mental illness.  She draws on the scientific literature on mental illness, philosophical literature on the self, and the ethics literature on what contributes to human flourishing to facilitate the expansion of psychiatric knowledge that will ultimately yield to effective treatments of mental illness. Here she discusses her article, “Brain Mechanisms and the Disease Model of Addiction: Is it the Whole Story of the Addicted Self? A Philosophical-Skeptical Perspective,” which recently appeared in the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Science of Addiction . In my chapter in this anthology, which brings together cutting-edge work on the sc...

Today’s post was written by  Shannon Spaulding , Assistant Professor of  Philosophy at   Oklahoma State University . Her general philosophical interests are in the philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, and the philosophy of science.  The principal goal of her research is to construct a philosophically and empirically plausible account of social cognition. She also has research interests in imagination, pretense, and action theory. Here she introduces her new book,  “How We Understand Others: Philosophy and Social Cognition” . A question that has long interested me is how we understand others – that is, what are the cognitive processes that underlie successful social understanding and interaction – and what happens when we misunderstand others. In philosophy and the cognitive sciences, the orthodox view is that understanding and interacting with others is partly underwritten by mindreading, the capacity to make sense of intentional behavi...

Pablo López-Silva is a Reader in Philosophical Psychology at the Faculty of Medicine of the Universidad de Valparaíso in Chile . He is the leading researcher of the FONDECYT project ‘ The Agentive Architecture of Human Thought ’ granted by the National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICYT) of the Government of Chile.  His current research focuses on cognitive phenomenology, attributions of mental agency, and delusions. In this post, he summarizes his new paper titled ‘ Mapping the Psychotic Mind ’ recently published in the Psychiatric Quarterly. Thought insertion – TI henceforth – is regarded as one of the most complex symptoms of psychosis. People suffering from TI report that external human and non-human agents have inserted thoughts or ideas into their minds. Over the last years, the enigmatic nature of TI reports has become target of a number of phenomenological, empirical, and conceptual debates. In fact, TI has been used as a good excuse to de...