Imperfect Cognitions

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...

Today's post is by Lucienne Spencer , currently working on the Renewing Phenomenological Psychopathology project. In this post, she argues for the importance of an intersectional approach. Lucienne Spencer In the search for alternative approaches to psychiatry, there has been a reignited interest in phenomenological psychopathology: an approach that uses the phenomenological method to highlight the lived experience of the person with mental ill-health and invites a person-centred approach to diagnosis and treatment. Phenomenological psychopathology has its roots in Karl Jaspers’ seminal work General Psychopathology (1913), which surpassed the limited scope of pre-structured interviews and diagnostic criteria by examining the patient's life-world. After a long period during which phenomenological psychopathology fell into obscurity, new work in the field and amplification of the patient’s voice through mad-pride activism have led to a resurgence of the approach, giving it a va...

Today's post is by Reinier Schuur, who is a PhD candidate in philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. His primary research interest is in philosophy of medicine. Reinier won the 2022 Peter Sowerby Prize for his essay ‘The Puzzle of Addiction: Knowledge of the Good as an Achievement’. This is a short version of his essay for a wider audience.  Reinier Schuur The puzzle of addiction refers to the problem of explaining how addictive behaviour appears to be both voluntary and destructive. This puzzle arises when we assume that people will stop engaging in a voluntary behaviour if the costs outweigh the benefits, all else being equal. The main solution to the puzzle had been to argue that addictive behaviour is in fact involuntary. This solution, however, has come under criticism over the last few decades, with both empirical data and theoretical analysis arguing that addictive behaviour is voluntary in some significant sense. But this raises again th...

Today's post is by Paul Formosa (Macquarie University) on his recent paper (co-authored with Siavosh Sahebi at Macquarie University) " Social Media and its Negative Impacts on Autonomy " ( Philosophy and Technology, 2022). Paul Formosa Social media plays a crucial role in the lives of many people. It can entertain, inform, influence, and even transform who we are and what we believe and care about. This can include both more extreme cases of radicalisation, where a person is led down rabbit holes of misinformation that can fundamentally rewrite who they are as a person, to more mundane cases of being pushed by an influencer to buy a new pair of shoes you didn’t really need.  But whenever technology has the potential to change who we are, what we do, and what we care about, it raises important questions about our autonomy. When technology changes us or leads us to act or believe in a certain way, does that technology and its use constitute an authentic expression or exten...

Today's post is by Tillmann Vierkant (University of Edinburgh) who presents his recent book The Tinkering Mind (Oxford University Press, 2022). The Tinkering Mind has at its heart a puzzle about epistemic agency and cognitive control. I was always puzzled by the notion of cognitive control, because to me it seemed to combine features that are clearly incompatible. The puzzle in question is as follows: cognitive control is often said to be voluntary, and is a form of cognition.  But cognitive control is also supposed to lead to the acquisition of new beliefs. I have always found it strange that cognitive control is supposed to have all three of these features because if it does, then that seems to indicate that the acquisition of a belief can be a voluntary action when we acquire it by means of cognitive control. This would imply doxastic voluntarism which, like most philosophers nowadays, I find unpalatable. Very many people have pointed out to me that this initial worry is just...

Today's post is by  Sam Wilkinson  (University of Exeter) on his recent book Philosophy of Psychiatry: A Contemporary Introduction (2023, Routledge). When I started teaching philosophy of psychiatry about ten years ago I noticed that, while there was plenty of literature out of which a well-structured and coherent course could be built, there was (to my knowledge) no single textbook around which to base one.  Year-on-year, as my module was tweaked and improved, largely thanks to feedback from my students, it occurred to me (wrongly, as it turns out) that it would be relatively straightforward to turn said module into a textbook. And that’s what I’ve done - eventually! Like the module itself, the textbook is divided into two parts, which reflect two quite different enterprises that fall under the category “philosophy of psychiatry”.  The first enterprise involves philosophical scrutiny of psychiatry, with “psychiatry” here including both psychiatric practice and psyc...

Today's post is by Nimra Ahsan. Nimra is a fifth year medical student at the University of Birmingham, where she is currently completing a Masters in Mental Health. She is interested in how the study of mental health can help inform and improve future clinical practice, including her own. This is the last post in a series of perspectives from students taking the Philosophy and Ethics of Mental Health and Wellbeing module. Nimra Ahsan The interaction between psychiatry and psychopathology is one that is blending (Stanghellini and Broome, 2014). With a contemporary focus on patient experience, human subjectivity (or phenomenology) is creating a holistic perspective concerning mental health conditions, such as schizophrenia. Described as a ‘disturbance of minimal self’, our understanding of schizophrenia has deepened and the ipseity-disturbance model developed by Sass and Parnas has contributed to this substantially ( Nelson, Parnas and Sass, 2014 ). This model led to the formation o...