Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by  Juliette Vazard on her recent paper " Losing the light at the end of the tunnel: Depression, future thinking, and hope " ( Mind & Language 2023). Juliette Vazard is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto and she works at the intersection of philosophy of mind (particularly emotion), epistemology, and cognitive science. Juliette Vazard Patients with clinical depression show a significant decrease in their ability to entertain thoughts of future positive events that could happen as part of their lives (MacLeod et al., 1996; Bjärehed et al., 2010; Thimm et al., 2013; Anderson & Evans, 2015; Szőllősi et al., 2015). Understanding the mechanisms which sustain this change in prospective cognition is of major clinical import, since developing a perspective on the future is key in the recovery of these patients (Cooper, Darmody, & Dolan, 2003).  Although the connection between lack of hope and depression is well established in the l...

Today's post is by Michael Larkin and William Day (both at the University of Aston). They are reporting on the Phenomenology of Health and Relationships conference, which was sponsored by project PERFECT and held at the University of Aston on 22-23 May 2019. We're both participants in the Phenomenology of Health and Relationships group at Aston University. In planning our inaugural  conference , the group initially considered a narrower focus on Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). There is a regular (more-or-less annual) IPA Conference, and we had agreed to host it. Eventually we settled on a broader theme (Creativity and Affect). IPA is one approach which many of us use in our work, but it is not the only one, and methods are not the sole focus of our meetings. When we meet as a group, we do discuss creative innovations in methodology, but we also read phenomenology, and explore studies which offer experiential insights on health and relationships. We hop...

The Phenomenology and Mental Health Network organized a workshop last June 20th at the Collaborating Centre for Values-based Practice in Health and Social Care at St. Catherine’s College, University of Oxford. The theme was Phenomenology and Qualitative Health Research. The aim of the workshop was to explore different ways in which philosophical phenomenology is applied in qualitative research and address issues that arise from the increasingly collaborative nature of these fields. The organizers were Anthony Fernandez , Marcin Moskalewicz and Dan Zahavi . I was very glad to be included among the speakers and have the chance to present some of my work. This report includes a detailed summary of everyone’s talks. I thank everyone for sharing their notes to make this report. The first talk was Applied Phenomenology by Dan Zahavi, professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Subjectivity Research (University of Copenhaghen and University of Oxford) Zahavi a...

The Royal College of Psychiatrists hosted its  Faculty of Neuropsychiatry Annual Conference on 13-14 September 2018 in London. I was fortunate to attend the first day and I am going to report on some of the interesting talks I listened to. In the first session speakers focused on neuroscience for psychiatrists, and Paul Johns, author of Clinical Neuroscience , addressed the functional anatomy of the human amygdala. The amygdala is constantly looking out for dangers and helps us evaluate the emotional significance of events. It facilitates social interactions as it enables us to read other people's minds. Further, the amygdala is involved in learning and episodic memory for important events. It is responsible for an implicit emotional memory of negative events to help us avoid adverse stimuli. The amygdala is for assessing environmental cues to determine the adequate response to threats. So patients without the amygdala are fearless but it is possible to experimentall...

This book is edited by Birgitt Röttger-Rössler ,  Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology and Director of the Collaborative Research Centre 1171 “Affective Societies: Dynamics of social coexistence in mobile worlds”at Freie Universität Berlin and Jan Slaby , Professor of Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin. This post is by Jan Slaby. Affect epitomizes a dimension of meaning within human sociality that is not a matter of established discourse, of stable identities, institutions, cultural norms or categories, but rather something that is lived, from moment to moment, at a level of sensuous bodily reality beyond codification, consolidation or capture. Affect unfolds dynamically and relationally between actors, artifacts and within spatial arrangements of various sorts. It incessantly transgresses individual perspectives and frames of reference, including that of the autonomous subject of the liberalist tradition. As Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, Deleuze and othe...

This post is by Rick Furtak .  Rick Anthony Furtak is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Colorado College, where he has taught for over twelve years. In addition to the philosophy of emotions, his other main area of focus is existential thought. He is also a poet and translator who is interested in the literary aspects of philosophy and the philosophical significance of literature. In this post, he talks about his new book Knowing Emotions . This book investigates the question of how our emotions can enable us to know.  It claims that human emotions are not just feelings of physiological disturbance: rather, they are experiences in which we apprehend significant matters of concern.  When Pascal noted that the heart has its own reasons, he indicated that our dispassionate rational faculty alone cannot grasp what is revealed in our affective experience.  Knowing Emotions seeks to explain why human emotions are indeed capable of making us aware of significant ...

I am Neil Levy, Professor of Philosophy at Macquarie University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics . These days I work mainly in philosophy of psychology and mind and applied ethics. Find out more about my work here . This is a precis of " Am I Racist? Implicit Bias and the Ascription of Racism ," recently published in Philosophical Quarterly . Implicit bias has recently received a great deal of high quality attention from philosophers. Papers have probed their nature, how their effects can be countered and their implications for ethics and for epistemology. In moral philosophy, the question that has dominated has been whether agents are responsible for actions partially caused by them.  But little space has been given to the question of how we are to characterize agents who harbor them. The agent who is explicitly sexist is a misogynist. But what about the agent who is only implicitly sexist? I explore t...

This post is by Alex Miller Tate (University of Birmingham), reporting from an event taking place in London at the Institute of Philosophy on 26th May 2017, entitled " The Distributed Cognitive Ecologies of Collaborative Embodied Skill " . Philosophers, psychologists, and others share an interest in how human beings act in the world. In particular, scholars are fascinated by how humans develop and then intelligently deploy complex suites of skills and abilities, successfully engaging with an equally complex and rapidly changing environment. Even more impressively, humans often coordinate their actions with others – synchronising with and complementing the actions of their peers in collaborative endeavours as varied as football games and musical performances. This workshop, organised by John Sutton of Macquarie University , was focused around the investigation of this fascinating topic, with particular emphasis on ways in which our complex, structured, material an...

On June 9th, the University of Birmingham hosted a workshop, " Cognition, Affect, and Motivation: Conceptual and Empirical Issues ", sponsored by Project PERFECT and the Mind Association . The conference brought together academics and students from philosophy and related disciplines, as well as members of the public, who were interested in issues relating to the interaction between cognition, affective responses and motivation. It aimed to foster interdisciplinary discussion around philosophical questions about the relation between these three drivers of human behaviour. Maura Tumulty ’s talk focussed on how we can take control over our mental states, especially those with strong affective content. Many of our mental states are controlled by our judgements. However, Tumulty discussed states that are in tension with our sincerely endorsed judgements.  Say, for example, that a person is predisposed to be attracted to smoking although she sincerely endorses...

This post is by Alex Miller Tate (pictured below), PhD student at the University of Birmingham. His work investigates the nature of mental illness and emotion, using insights from research into Situated Cognition. His thesis examines the role that situated theories of cognition and emotion can play in explaining and describing various symptoms common in major depression. Anhedonia is a core symptom of many Psychiatric conditions, most commonly presenting in patients diagnosed with a depressive disorder or schizophrenia ( Oyebode, 2014 ). It is most commonly defined as an absent or diminished ability to experience pleasure from participating in previously enjoyable activities ( Treadway & Zald, 2011: 538 ). As an example, somebody who used to enjoy playing football and listening to David Bowie, but no longer enjoys either of these things, may be said to be exhibiting Anhedonia. One popular theory of Anhedonia, call it sustainability theory, argues that it is characteris...

The AISB Convention is an annual conference covering the range of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, organised by the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour. The convention is structured as a number of co-located symposia on a wide variety of topics, together with a number of plenary talks and events. This year’s convention took place on 4-6 April at the University of Sheffield and included a most interesting symposium on new approaches to depression. Below I briefly summarise the content of the symposium talks.   Joel Parthemore (University of Skövde, Sweden, pictured above) opened the symposium with his talk ‘Depression viewed from an enactive perspective: It’s the context, stupid.’ He pointed at some most commonly spread myths about depression, which contribute to the popular misunderstanding of the illness and may lead to stigmatization. These include a belief that depression always involves anhedonia or a belief that c...

Philosophers of mind and cognition gathered for the 11th meeting of the Mind Network in Warwick on Tuesday 29th September 2015. Talks were given by Anya Farrennikova, Olle Blomberg and Giovanna Colombetti. Farrennikova began the meeting with a discussion of unexpected perception and absence. She argued that the novelty of unexpected perception means that it is suboptimal. It is, for example, slow, less likely to be accurate than other perception, disrupts ongoing tasks, and involves increased uncertainty. Farrennikova outlined strategies that can be used to optimize perception of the unexpected: increased sampling and expecting to be surprised. She compared unexpected perception to perception of absence, arguing that both are suboptimal but that the strategies that can be used to optimise perception of the unexpected are unlikely to be successfully utilised to optimise perception of absences. Why is this? Because absences are difficult to predict, and certainly difficult to pre...

This post is by Pablo López-Silva , a PhD student in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Manchester. Pablo (pictured above) works on philosophical problems raised by schizophrenia, and is supervised by Joel Smith and Tim Bayne . Here Pablo summarises his recent paper ' Schizophrenia and the Place of Egodystonic States in the Aetiology of Thought Insertion ', published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology.  Paradigmatic cases of thought insertion involve the delusional belief with the content [someone/something is placing a thought with the content […] into my mind/head] (Mellor 1970 ; Mullins and Spence 2003 ). Despite the diagnostic relevance of this phenomenon, the debates about its aetiology are far from resolved. In this context, two projects can be distinguished. On the one hand, the motivational project characterizes thought insertion as resulting from the mind’s attempt to deal with highly stressing psychological conflicts. On the other hand, the ...