Imperfect Cognitions

This is a post by Vaughan Bell and gives a summary of a new pre-printed paper called ‘ De-Rationalising Delusions ’ co-authored with Nichola Raihani and Sam Wilkinson .  Vaughan is an Associate Professor in Clinical Psychology at University College London, and also works in the Psychological Interventions Clinic for outpatients with Psychosis (PICuP), in South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. Nichola Raihani is a Professor in Evolution and Behaviour at University College London, and Sam Wilkinson is a Lecturer in Philosophy at Exeter University.   Historically, delusions have been understood as pathological beliefs that are characterised by their irrationality. Someone who believes, for example, that a camera has been implanted in their tooth and is taking pictures of their mind, would seem, on face value, to have problems in reasoning rationally about the world. This has motivated researchers to look for problems in domain-general reasoning to e...

This post is by Katja May, PhD candidate at the University of Kent. Emotional Politics – The Role of Affect in Social Movements and Organizing took place on 31 May 2018 at the University of Kent in Canterbury. The conference aimed to bring together academics, activists, policy-makers and practitioners to share current concerns and developments in the research and practice surrounding emotion, organizing and social movements. It was co-hosted by the Gender, Sexuality and Culture Research Cluster in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research at Kent and kindly sponsored by the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies , the School of English and the Centre for Gender, Sexuality and Writing . The organizers Katja May and Angela Matthews , are both PhD students at Kent, and their joint interest in affect, emotion and social transformation was the driving force behind this conference. Veteran activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis (2016) claims that in order...

Today's post is by Candice Shelby on her new book Addiction: A Philosophical Perspective . Candice Shelby is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado Denver. She has published in the history of philosophy, philosophy of psychology, metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of addiction. She regularly speaks around the U.S. and Europe on the complex problem of addiction, and has recently completed a month teaching on the topic in Beijing, China. In my new book I argue that most analyses of addiction get off on the wrong foot from the start, by assuming a simple linear cause-and-effect understanding the world. Very little about human beings can be understood in such a straightforward way, and certainly nothing having to do with mind or experience. Like other human phenomena, including mind itself, I believe that addiction is an emergent property of a complex dynamic system. It is better understood as a process than as a disease, a moral proble...