Imperfect Cognitions

This week's blogpost comes from Regina Fabry , a philosopher of mind and cognition and works as a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Discipline of Philosophy, School of Humanities at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her research currently focusses on self-narration, grief, human-technology interactions, and their intersections. In working on these topics, she brings together philosophical theorising on situated cognition and affectivity with feminist scholarship and research in literary and cultural studies, the empirical cognitive sciences, and AI. Regina Fabry Self-narration is an important part of our mental lives. The configuration and re-configuration of our personal past experiences – and our anticipated futures – in narrative form, many philosophers argue, can be conducive to self-knowledge and self-understanding . Furthermore, self-narratives are an important part of human sociality by facilitating collaborative modes of meaning-making . While self-narratives can take vari...

Today's blogpost is by María Berta López Ríos, Chris McCarroll, and Paloma Muñoz Gómez on their recently published paper Memory, Mourning, and the Chilean Constitution (RHV), published in a special issue of on memory and trauma . “I confess that I am in mourning”. So writes the novelist Ariel Dorfman. This is an interesting statement, however. For it is not the loss of a loved one that Dorfman grieves. The loss he is mourning is political. He is in mourning because of the result of a political referendum held in Chile in 2022. The grief Dorfman, and many others, experienced is a form of political grief. This may seem strange, but the phenomenon may be more common than we think. María Berta López Ríos We recently wrote a paper exploring this kind of experience of political grief, which arose out of our shared interest in the philosophy of emotions and the political situation in Chile. Our paper focuses on the expressions of mourning (like Dorfman’s) that followed the Chilean ref...