Imperfect Cognitions

Caitrin Donovan  and  Reinier Schuur  report from the 2015 University of Sydney Winter School. The programme was entitled "Cross-cultural psychological differences and their philosophical implications" and seminars were led by  Stephen Stich  (Rutgers) and  Dominic Murphy  (University of Sydney). From the 19th till the 23rd of October the unit for History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney held its second winter school programme, this year on the topic of “Cross-cultural psychological differences and their philosophical implications”. Intuitions have been long been the bread and butter of various philosophical projects, which use them to evaluate semantic, epistemic, ethical and ontological theories and concepts. This can be seen in ‘Gettier cases’ in epistemology where accounts of knowledge are tested against intuitions on what counts as knowledge, and in ‘trolley cases’ in ethics where what is morally justified action i...

As part of our posts written by people with lived experience of mental health issues, Amy writes about anxiety. Amy has a blog , and you can follow her on Twitter . For the past three years I have experienced severe and anxiety and depression, resulting in numerous counselling sessions and medication. It’s a long journey of recovery, but I feel I am finally getting to the other side. I feel it important to battle the stigma surrounding mental health and thus why I have created my own mental health blog, Relief from Anxiety , and why I am writing about it in this blog post. Anxiety symptoms can be varied from person to person, including loss of appetite, shortness of breath, palpitations, dizziness, and irrational thoughts. Generally, these kind of actions and thoughts occur during a panic attack, when the flight or fight system kicks in, which originates from our caveman days. It helps to either run or fight the situation. Each panic attack is different from others, and there are...