Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Federico Burdman , based in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, who summarises his paper entitled "Recalcitrant Desires in Addiction", forthcoming in volume 8 of the Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility . Federico Burdman This piece of research is on the psychology of addiction. Being addicted to something —say, psychoactive drugs, including alcohol— is not just about enjoying drugs and using them frequently. It is also more than just wanting to use drugs very much. Plainly, not all forms of wanting something very much and doing it a lot amount to addiction. Consider the analogy: a student may be determined and highly motivated to graduate from school, spend long hours studying and training for that purpose, even neglect other activities on that account, and still not be ‘addicted’ to studying in any sensible sense. One key difference between addiction and other forms of behavior issuing from powerful motiva...

Today's post is by Lieke Asma at Munich School of Philosophy, on her recent paper “ The relationship between free will and consciousness ” ( Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences,  2022).  Lieke Asma Even though Benjamin Libet’s experiments on voluntary action have been criticized extensively by both neuroscientists and philosophers, his ground-breaking research did put one topic firmly on the agenda: what exactly is the relationship between free will and consciousness? Most philosophers agree that if all our conscious intentions would be epiphenomena, we would not decide for ourselves what to do. Self-determination, a crucial condition for free will, would be an illusion. Relatedly, many scholars have argued that Libet did not study those intentions relevant for free will proper .  Real choice is not about moving your wrist at a certain moment, but making plans for the future, for example to buy a house or to plan a trip. These intentions typically are the result of ...

On 5th and 6th January 2023, Alex Grzankowski hosted a hybrid two-day workshop at the University of Birkbeck entitled,  Happiness: Emotion, Mood, or Character Trait.    In the first talk, “Can we be delusional and happy?”, I (Lisa Bortolotti, University of Birmingham) focused on the relationship between being happy and having delusional beliefs. We tend to assume that living in a delusional world is bad epistemically because we lack contact with reality. And it is bad psychologically because believing the delusions can make us feel disconnected and excluded, and depending on the content of the delusion, also stressed and anxious. But things are more complicated than this: delusions can be a response to a crisis that bring about a paralysis of agency, and can help us overcome overwhelming negative emotions, so believing a delusion may lead to temporary happiness. However, the temporary happiness is a stepping stone towards a more permanent state of happiness where con...

In this blog post, Benjamin Young presents a new collection of papers entitled Theoretical Perspectives on Smell (Routledge 2023), edited with Andreas Keller. Our vision-centric daily lives and research agendas often place little emphasis on smells. Smell until recently was a largely neglected area of research within philosophy such that putting together a collection with this focus would have not been possible ten years ago.  Yet, since the start of the millennia the chemosciences and olfactory philosophy has seen a surge in research on a wide range of debates and central issues across philosophy. Theoretical Perspective on Smell is the first collection of its kind devoted exclusively to philosophical research on olfaction. The collection both address the attentional neglect of olfaction by philosophers and shows how studying smell provides a means of making lateral progress within entrenched philosophical debates within perception, consciousness studies, philosophy of mind, meta...