Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Marko Jurjako, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of Rijeka, regarding the recent paper ‘ The insanity defence without mental illness? Some considerations ’ that he co-authored with Gerben Meynen, professor of Forensic Psychiatry (Utrecht University) and endowed professor of Ethics and Psychiatry (VU University Amsterdam) and Luca Malatesti, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rijeka. Marko and Luca’s work on this paper is an outcome of the project  Responding to antisocial personalities in a democratic society RAD , that is financed by the  Croatian Science Foundation . Luca Malatesti In the last decade there has been a resurgence of interest in the insanity defence. One of the apparent moral truisms is that a person should not be blamed for actions they are not responsible for. As an instantiation of this principle, the moral rationale for the insanity defence is to prevent unjustly punishing offenders who are not resp...

On 12th May 2015 in London I attended the " Psychiatry and Society " conference organised by the Psychiatry Section of the Royal Society of Medicine. Here I will summarise the talks I heard in session 1, emphasising those themes that are close to our blog readers' hearts. Session 1: Genetics and Neuroscience of Mind, Self and Behaviour Neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux  (pictured above) kicked off the conference with a presentation entitled: "What neuroscience can tell us about mind and behaviour?" He presented the brain as a very complex physico-chemical system about which we know a lot already but not everything. This is because the brain is the product of the integration of different types of evolution occurred in millions of years (evolution of species in terms of variability of genome, ontogenetic development in terms of variability of connections, evolution of thought in terms of variability of spontaneous activity and synaptic efficacies, and soc...