Imperfect Cognitions

 This post is by Sally Latham. Fantastic Philosophy Teaching philosophy to children has been shown to have a positive impact not only on critical thinking and creativity, but also on emotional development, such as independence, self-assurance and self-assertion ( Rahar et al 2018 ).  Yet philosophy is not explicitly part of the National Curriculum for England, with the closest reference being that in English: "Pupils] must be assisted in making their thinking clear to themselves as well as to others and teachers should ensure that pupils build secure foundations by using discussion to probe and remedy their misconceptions. Pupils should also be taught to understand and use the conventions for discussion and debate." However, teachers are not always confident in bringing critical thinking into the classroom without formal training.  Labour have also now identified ‘improving communication skills (oracy)’ as one of their  targets in their mission statement  Breaki...

Fiona Woollard (University of Southampton) is a moral philosopher who has worked in areas that have been traditionally neglected by analytic philosophy, such as pregnancy and motherhood. See for instance, her recent piece for The Conversation .  In this interview, she shows us that philosophy can make a difference to how we think about maternal duties and choices in pregnancy and early motherhood. Fiona Woollard Lisa Bortolotti: To start with I'd like to ask you how you got interested in pregnancy and motherhood. Fiona Woollard : Thank you, Lisa. It feels to me that I was part of a fortunate group of women philosophers who felt able to be philosophers while still being women, without having to downplay the interests that we have as women. In the past it had been seen as possible to succeed as a woman in philosophy. But it was harder to get recognized as a philosopher if you were dealing with things that were thought to as women's issues.  And it felt as if there wa...

As part of a University of Birmingham Women in Philosophy initiative to promote inclusion and diversity in access to philosophical research, I interviewed Anna Ichino (University of Milan) on the creation of the very first Philosophy Museum . Anna originally blogged about the Museum for us and for the Daily Nous in 2020 and she is offering here an exciting update on the uptake of the initiative and on her future plans to further develop the idea into something bigger and permanent.  Why do we need a Philosophy Museum? Can Philosophy be engaging and fun, as well as informative, for the wider public?  The first hall of the museum   Lisa Bortolotti (LB): How did you and your collaborators develop this idea of creating a philosophy museum? Anna Ichino (AI): The idea originally was of my colleague Paolo Spinicci who kept saying, there are in the world museums about almost everything. There are museums of art, science, cinema, sex, and toys. There are even a museum f...

On 18th May 2022, the Philosophy Department at the University of Birmingham hosted a public engagement event organised by Francesco Antilici and sponsored by the Royal Institute of Philosophy on Loneliness and Mental Health. Ian Kidd The event featured three talks and a question and answer session with the audience. In this brief report, I summarise the main contributions of the speakers. What is the difference that makes a difference to loneliness? Michael Larkin (Psychology, Aston University) described how our conception of loneliness is moving away from concerns about an isolated self and is reconfiguring loneliness as a social problem that needs to be solved. Rather than focusing on a deficit that affects the lonely individual, we are now much more interested in loneliness as a disruptive social force—acknowledging the importance of social relationships for health and for wellbeing.  Data driving this new focus includes the proven link between social isolation and mortality: ...

This post is by Anna Ichino, University of Milan. Have you ever visited a Philosophy Museum? I bet not. Apparently, indeed, there aren’t any Philosophy Museums in the world. Or better: there aren’t any yet… But together with my colleagues at the Philosophy Department of the University of Milan we have decided that it is time to build the first one. In this post, I’ll tell you about this exciting project. What we had in mind was not an historically-minded museum collecting relics about the lives and works of important philosophers; but something more dynamic and interactive – built on the model of the best science museums – where philosophical problems and theories become intuitively accessible through a variety of games, activities, experiments, aesthetic experiences, and other such things. Easier to say than to do, no doubt. It’s an ambitious project, and to put it into action we had to proceed gradually. We started with a temporary exhibition, which took place in ...

Here is the second post in our series reflecting on the end of project PERFECT , this week from postdoc Sophie Stammers . Whilst we’ve all focused on something slightly different, PERFECT researchers were united in using philosophical and psychological tools to dismantle the assumptions that give rise to mental health stigma, and to change the narrative on what counts as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ cognition. A big focus of my work on the project has been the issue of confabulation. We confabulate when we give an account of an event or an action that is not grounded in evidence, but which is given sincerely. Originally, researchers were interested in confabulation as it arose in cases of mental distress or cognitive disfunction, but it turns out that confabulation arises commonly and frequently in all of us, from explanations of mundane consumer choices, to accounting for our moral and political beliefs. Maybe you’ll have been engaged in an explanation of an event, or an experience...

Hello! This is a post in a series where we are reflecting on the end of project PERFECT , offer an overview of our activities, and look at the future! So it's me first. Research Yesterday the project officially ended, after five intense and wonderful years. We did achieve the goals that we set for ourselves, investigating what we call the epistemic innocence of beliefs that are irrational and often false. Epistemic innocence is the capacity some beliefs have to support epistemic agency despite their obvious epistemic costs. In other words, it is good for us to have those beliefs in some respects, even if the beliefs themselves are not well-supported by, or responsive to, evidence. Our main focus was on those belief-like states that can be at the same time common in the non-clinical population and symptomatic of mental health issues: delusional beliefs, distorted memory beliefs, and confabulatory explanations. Indeed, we investigated these three cases in some d...

As announced , project PERFECT organised and co-hosted two public engagement events as part of the Arts and Science Festival at the University of Birmingham. Both celebrated the role of imagination and the importance of relationships in growing and healing. Here I report on how they went! Red Hands Film Screening A scene from Red Hands Director and screenwriter Francesco Filippi presented his short film in 2D and stop animation, Mani Rosse (Red Hands) , to an engaged and diverse audience at the Midlands Arts Centre on 18th June. The film has been honoured with awards at film festivals worldwide and sparked lots of interest. The screening was followed by a panel discussion featuring experts in youth mental health and experts with lived experience of domestic violence, one of the themes of the film. Panel discussion: Lucy Some of the audience's comments and questions were about how the film was made, what it was inspired by, and what some specific sce...