Imperfect Cognitions

Today we welcome Steven Gubka, a postdoctoral associate at the Humanities Research Center at Rice University, to share his recent paper: " How Anger Helps Us Possess Reasons for Action " ( The Philosophical Quarterly ).   Steven Gubka   Recall the last time that you got angry at someone. Did it help or hinder your decision-making about how you should treat them? Seneca, a stoic philosopher of ancient Rome, argued that anger makes it more difficult to deliberate correctly about what to do. He wrote that “it causes whoever has come into its clutches to forget his duty: make a father angry, he’s an enemy; make a son angry, he’s a parricide. Anger makes a mother a stepmother, a fellow-citizen a foreign enemy, a king a tyrant” (2010: pg. 16).  Here Seneca claims that anger prevents us from appreciating moral reasons to avoid harming people, even those that we have special obligation to protect. This idea of tension between anger and reason remains commonplace, and as a result,...

Emotions Brain Forum BrainCircle Italia and BrainCircle Lugano organised a series of events where women scientists presented their work on emotions in various cities from October 2021 to November 2022 (see full itinerary ). The initiative, conceived by Viviana Kasam, was inspired by the work of Nobel Prize winner Rita Levi Montalcini who promoted the work of scientists worldwide and was interested in supporting research on the brain.  Campus Biotech The last stop of the itinerary was Geneva, where on 25th November 2022 the Emotions Forum featured an interdisciplinary programme of talks on the relationship between emotions and cognition, and emotions and behaviour. The event was hosted by the Centre for the Study of Affective Sciences in the stunning Campus Biotech . Eva Illouz , Professor of Sociology in Paris and Jerusalem, discussed the role of emotions in democracy. Eva started from Adorno's idea that fascism is not alien to democracy but is like a worm in the apple: we don...

Today's post is by Natalie Ashton (University of Stirling). She is reporting on a workshop held at the University of Warwick on 19th of September as part of the AHRC-project Norms for the New Public Sphere . It was the first of a series of workshops planned to take place over the next two years. These workshops are designed to bring together academic philosophers with media scholars, professionals, and activists in order to investigate the opportunities and challenges that new social media pose for the public sphere. This first workshop focused on the epistemic norms that can foster a public sphere in which democracy can flourish. Alessandra Tanesini kicked the event off with a talk titled “Bellicose Debates: Arrogant and Liberatory Anger On and Off-line”. Her main claims were that anger can be divided into different kinds: status anger, which is typically arrogant , and liberatory anger, which she says can offer distinctive motivational, epistemic and communicative b...

To what extent should citizens be informed about the issues on which they vote for democracy to function? When ideology, biases and motivational processes drive political belief formation, should voters be considered irrational? These questions and more were the focus of the Ignorance and Irrationality in Politics Workshop organised by Michael Hannon , Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham, and held on 10th – 11th June at the University of Nottingham. In what follows, I summarise a few of the workshop talks. Zeynep Pamuk , Supernumerary Fellow in Politics at St. John’s, Oxford, discussed how decisions about which science projects to fund can both ameliorate and exacerbate ignorance. Zeynep explained how choices at the level of how to distribute funding and conduct research determine what we know and don’t know, through: (i) the selection of research questions: what’s seen as worthy of pursuit is somewhat determined by a researcher’s context, backgrou...

Aimee Wilson This post is part of our series of accounts by experts by experience. Roberta Payne wrote about schizophrenia and outsider art in December, and Ellen White about OCD in January. Today Aimee Wilson tells us about BPD. Hi! I am Aimee and I blog over on www.imnotdisordered.blogspot.co.uk . I’m currently in recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder, after a six year long battle with the illness and a two year admission in a specialist hospital. When Lisa emailed me asking if I would write a post about the positive aspects of the things that have been deemed symptoms of BPD, I was intrigued. I guess, naturally, I’d only ever moaned and ranted about these things especially when they are the things that cause me to be hospitalised or to self-harm and attempt suicide. So, to think of positives sounded like a good challenge. When I was diagnosed with BPD, the diagnostic criteria were to have at least five of nine possible symptoms, and it was widely agreed by prof...