Imperfect Cognitions

 Today's post is by Alexandre Billon (Université de Lille) on his recent paper, " The Sense of Existence " ( Ergo 2023). Alexandre Billon Things we perceive typically seem to be real to us. Unlike Bigfoot or Pegasus, this sparrow flying above the building for example seems to be real to me and I indeed judge that it is real. The sense of reality is the kind of awareness or seeming that underlies such judgments of reality.  There has been a lot of work on the sense of reality lately in the philosophy of mind, in psychology, and even in aesthetics (think about the difference between an apple on a trompe l'oeil and a regular painting). The terminology is not quite settled, however: some talk of the sense of reality, others of the sense of presence, yet others of "real presence". Nor is the conceptual landscape: it is sometimes unclear whether all authors who talk about the sense of reality talk about the same thing. Although it is usually ignored, there is al

Today's post is by Chris Letheby (Western Australia/Adelaide) on his new book Philosophy of Psychedelics (OUP 2021). We are in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance. “Classic” psychedelic drugs such as LSD and psilocybin are the objects of renewed scientific interest. Despite the chequered reputation of these substances, recent clinical trials have shown that psychedelics can be administered safely in controlled conditions, and may have a role in the treatment of various psychological maladies. There is even talk of a “new paradigm” in psychiatric treatment.  But psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy (“psychedelic therapy”) has several unusual features that distinguish it from standard psychiatric treatments and raise intriguing questions. In my book Philosophy of Psychedelics (OUP 2021) I tackle some of these questions. The most striking feature of psychedelic therapy is that it involves the induction of a dramatically altered state of consciousness. Patients with anxiety, depr

In today's post Paul Noordhof presents his book, A Variety of Causes (OUP 2020). A Variety of Causes began life as an attempt to defend a counterfactual theory of causation that covered cases of indeterminism. Its basic tools were counterfactuals like ‘if e1 were not to occur, e2 would not occur’ (where e1 and e2 are token events) and appeals to probability in the consequent of the counterfactual (so p(e2) rather than e2) to characterise a notion of chance-raising. A successful defence requires a treatment of counterfactuals, identifying the conditions under which they are true and, for the enthusiast, that means I developed further Lewis’s similarity weighting for counterfactuals placing restrictions on the requirement for perfect match and clarifying the approximate match condition.  More complex counterfactuals were needed to deal with cases of ‘redundant’ causation, like the situation in which one cause pre-empts another candidate cause. The book defends a particular way of

Today's post is by Francesco Filippi (pictured below), an Italian director, screenwriter, and animator whose work can be found here . In this post he tells us about his new film, Red Hands, which addresses the theme of domestic violence. Can an animated film for teenagers have something to say to the readers of this very interesting blog which explores the boundaries of the human mind? Red Hands , an Italian 30' long film in stop-motion and 2D animation, had his premiere at the Rome Film Festival on October 20th, 2018. As you can see from the trailer  above, it's a story of domestic abuse. Ernesto, a 12 year-old boy, discovers that the magnificent red graffiti appeared on the walls of his street are made by Luna, a girl with a mysterious power. She can emit a blood-like liquid from her hands, but her power is a side-effect of her father's violence at home.

In this post Maksymilian Del Mar  (in the picture above) presents the recent book Legal Fictions in Theory and Practice   (Springer 2015),  co-edited with William Twining . Treating Menorca as if it is a suburb of London, or a ship as if it was a person, or pretending that persons who form contracts are made by rational agents with knowledge of the commitments they are making, or that states who take over other states find a land empty of life (as in the doctrine of terra nullius) – or, positing the existence of consent, malice, notice, fraud, intention, or causation when evidence clearly points to the opposite conclusion (or to no conclusion at all)… All these are example of legal fictions. They fly in the face of reality. And, in the literature on theories of law and legal reasoning, they are not very popular. In this new collection – Legal Fictions in Theory and Practice (Springer, 2015, co-edited by William Twining and Maks Del Mar) – 18 chapters explore another view: that n

Caroline Watt This post is by Caroline Watt , Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Edinburgh. Almost 30 years ago, I became a founder member of the Koestler Parapsychology Unit . Based in the Psychology department of Edinburgh University, the KPU studies paranormal beliefs and experiences. Our work includes testing for psychic ability under controlled conditions, and investigating the psychology of paranormal beliefs and experiences. For the last few years, I have been studying precognitive dreaming. The belief that one's dreams predict future events is one of the more commonly reported paranormal experiences and we have investigated psychological factors that have been proposed to lead to seemingly precognitive experiences. We have looked at the role of memory bias in these experiences: specifically, the selective recall of matches and mismatches between dreams and subsequent events. Our participants remembered more than twice as many dreams that matched events