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Today's post on conspiracy theories is by Colin Klein, Peter Clutton and Vince Polito. Colin Klein works on the philosophy of neuroscience at The Australian National University, and is interested in delusions and related phenomena. Colin Klein Peter Clutton is a graduate student in philosophy at The Australian National University, working on delusions and beliefs. is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University, interested in belief formation, self representation, and altered states of consciousness.  Peter Clutton Vince Polito  is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University, interested in belief formation, self representation, and altered states of consciousness. Vince Polito Conspiracy theorists are often thought to be distinctively irrational. When you picture a conspiracy theorist, you might imagine someone scouring the internet and joining dots between seemingly unrelated events

This post is by Ji-Young Lee. This year’s Minorities and Philosophy (MAP) @ Bristol conference theme was ‘Public Philosophy’. We hosted a number of talks exploring the conceptual and practical issues related to the idea of philosophy as a ‘public’ endeavour. Four current Philosophy PhD students are responsible for organizing the event: Chengxiao Dang, Chia-Hung Huang, Ji-Young Lee, and Denise Vargiu. We would also like to acknowledge Minorities and Philosophy, The Marc Sanders Foundation, and the University of Bristol Philosophy Department for kindly supporting this event. We commenced our morning session with a talk from Jane Gatley, on justifying philosophy in secondary schools. She discussed how justifying teaching philosophy through the positive benefits associated with the P4C movement risked ‘conflating claims about philosophy with claims about the distinctive P4C pedagogy’. The benefits attached to P4C might have more to do with dialogue and child-centered learning, rather than

Today's post is provided by Robin Zheng. In this post she introduces her paper " Bias, Structure and Injustice: A reply to Haslangar ", published in Feminist Philosophical Quarterly. Robin Zheng is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. Her research focuses on issues of moral responsibility and structural injustice, along with other topics in ethics, moral psychology, feminist and social philosophy, and philosophy of race.  Some of her other works on topics related to this post include “ Attributability, Accountability, and Implicit Bias ” in Implicit Bias and Philosophy: Volume 2 (eds. Michael Brownstein and Jennifer Saul), “ A Job for Philosophers: Causality, Responsibility, and Explaining Social Inequality ” in Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, and “ What is My Role in Changing the System? A New Model of Responsibility for Structural Injustice ” (forthcoming in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice). For more information, visit her website 

Mind Reading is the yearly conference of the collaboration between UCD Child & Adolescent Psychiatry , researchers at the University ofBirmingham , and the Diseases of Modern Life and Constructing Scientific Communities Projects at St Anne's College, Oxford. Organised by Elizabeth Barrett (Consultant in Liaison Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Children’s University Hospital) and Melissa Dickson (Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Birmingham) the conference, and project more generally, focuses on two simple questions: Do doctors and patients speak the same language, and how can we use literature to bridge the evident gaps? In what follows, I summarise just some of the talks and workshop sessions. How do cultural norms and expectations shape diagnosis and the experience of illness?  Melissa Dickson  showed us that, in 19th Century Britain, there were multiple literary and medical accounts of a psychosis-like state brought about by…green tea. It was an un

Sophie Keeling is currently a philosophy PhD student at the University of Southampton. She primarily works on self-knowledge which has allowed her to research a range of topics in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of psychology. Sophie’s thesis argues that we have a distinctive way of knowing why we have our attitudes and perform actions that observers lack. She gives a brief overview here . This post summarises my paper ‘ Confabulation and Rational Requirements for Self-Knowledge ’ (forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology ). The paper argues for a novel explanation of confabulation: Confabulation is motivated by the desire to have fulfilled a rational obligation to knowledgeably explain our attitudes by reference to motivating reasons. (Following others in the epistemological literature, I term the reason for which we hold an attitude our ‘motivating reason’ for it). I shan’t seek to define confabulation here (a task in its own right) but instead note the subtype I’ll

On 10th and 11th May in Senate House London Michael Hannon and Robin McKenna hosted a two-day conference on Political Epistemology , supported by the Mind Association, the Institute of Philosophy, and the Aristotelian Society. In this report I focus on two talks that addressed themes relevant to project PERFECT. Robert Talisse On day 1,  Robert Talisse  explained what is troubling with polarisation. In the past Talisse developed an account of the epistemic value of democracy in terms of epistemic aspirations (rather than democratic outcomes). In a slogan, "the ethics of belief lends support to the ethos of democracy". We can see this when we think about polarisation. There are two senses of polarisation: (1) political polarisation and (2) belief (or group) polarisation. Political polarisation is the dropping out of the middle ground between opposed ideological stances. That means that opposed stances have fewer opportunities to engage in productive conversations. Belief polar

Benjamin Elzinga recently completed his PhD at Georgetown University with a dissertation on epistemic agency. His research interests include epistemology, the problems of free will, and the philosophy of mind. In this post, he presents work he recently published under the title " Hermeneutical Injustice and Liberatory Education ". In the 50s and 60s, women joining the U.S. workforce and members of the broader society in some sense lacked the conceptual skills for making sense of sexual harassment. Through the practices of the U.S. women’s liberation movement, especially through the organization of consciousness raising groups and speak-outs in the early 70s, feminists developed these resources and encoded them into the legal system. According to Miranda Fricker this is an instance of recognizing and to some extent addressing a problem of hermeneutical injustice, which occurs when members of a certain group are unjustly prevented from developing and distributing important c