Imperfect Cognitions

In this post, I interview Bonny Astor on her experience on bringing philosophy to prisons and pubs. To learn more about her initiative to discuss thought experiments in pubs, check this website . Her meet up group  is here if you want to join! Bonny Astor Lisa Bortolotti: Do you want to tell us just a little bit about your background and how you got interested in philosophy. Bonny Astor: My academic background is in psychology. Then I did a course in the philosophy of psychology, and I got so interested in that and I had a lot of questions.  I don't really know much philosophy besides what I've taught myself. LB: But you brought philosophy to prison inmates. Do you want to tell us what you did? BA: Sure. I was co-facilitating a hearing voices support group in Pentonville Prison and I got a job with that team as an occupational therapy assistant. I was asked what kind of groups I would facilitate, and I wanted to create opportunities for people to talk about their e...

Today's post is by project  PERFECT Doctoral Researcher Valeria N. Motta 2018 is my second year as a doctoral researcher on project PERFECT . During my first year, I’ve been investigating loneliness and solitude. For that I did research on existing literature from different philosophical traditions and on the outcomes of empirical research. The existing literature on loneliness has focused on identifying its characteristics and has utilised different approaches. The idea behind finding common features (such as boredom or passivity) is that if we are able to identify them, a specific treatment can be developed in order to alleviate the problem. But documented in the literature I have also found an array of different ways of experiencing loneliness (such as those that emerge from failure to remember traumatic events, or which are masqueraded as connectedness via social media). These cases require a more fine grained approach. I have the privilege to get the support and mult...

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...

I’m really looking forward to this next phase of PERFECT. Lots of things are now developing which tie in really well with work that I have been doing with some of our network members, with our PhD students, and with my wider research. One important theme for me is ‘relatedness’, and I’ll focus on that aspect here, because it connects several areas. This Thursday, network member Dr Zoë Boden will say more in her post about the ISRF ‘Relationships and Mental Health’ project which we have been developing. Zoë and I are involved in a number of research projects exploring people’s experiences of relationships and mental health. Some of these are exploring individuals’ perspectives on their own relational networks (asking, ‘who talks to whom about what?’ and ‘who does what with whom?’) and others are focused on understanding a shared difficulty (such as psychosis) from the perspectives of several members of the same family or system. Through the ISRF network events, we’ve been s...