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We are Iskra Fileva and Jonathan Tresan . Both of us teach philosophy, at the University of Colorado, Boulder and at the University of Rochester, respectively. We recently wrote a paper in response to " Neurosentimentalism and Moral Agency ," by Philip Gerrans and Jeanette Kennett published in Mind in 2010. We summarize our paper " Metaethics and Mental Time Travel " here. When we make moral judgments, we often experientially project ourselves into the past or the possible futures, a capacity dubbed “mental time travel” (MTT). For instance, in judging whether her mom was wrong to keep her away from her dad after the parents divorced, Sally may try to recall what it was like to be her father’s daughter. Was it a good experience or a bad one? Was the mother rightly protective or just trying to spite the dad? Sally’s evaluation will likely be informed not just by propositional memories (e.g., “My father was born in June”) but by richly detailed and vivid first-person...

In this post I reflect on what the Disney film Frozen can tell us about youth mental health. (This is a slightly expanded version of a post that appeared on the University of Birmingham website on 16th December 2019.) When it was released in 2013, Frozen was praised for having a leading female character who was different: a guest at Elsa’s coronation calls her a monster when she loses control; Elsa isolates herself from the people she loves for fear of harming them; and she is distressed because she does not fully comprehend what is happening to her. Elsa does not ‘fit in’, and often makes those around her feel uncomfortable. When Elsa celebrates her liberation from her stuffy conventional life with the song “Let it go”, some critics talked about Disney’s ‘gay agenda’ and Elsa was welcomed in some circles as a queer icon. Some were hoping that she would get a girlfriend in Frozen II . But there is another form of diversity that Elsa embodies just as convincingly, that of a young per...

Today's post is by Natalie Ashton (University of Stirling). She is reporting on a workshop held at the University of Warwick on 19th of September as part of the AHRC-project Norms for the New Public Sphere . It was the first of a series of workshops planned to take place over the next two years. These workshops are designed to bring together academic philosophers with media scholars, professionals, and activists in order to investigate the opportunities and challenges that new social media pose for the public sphere. This first workshop focused on the epistemic norms that can foster a public sphere in which democracy can flourish. Alessandra Tanesini kicked the event off with a talk titled “Bellicose Debates: Arrogant and Liberatory Anger On and Off-line”. Her main claims were that anger can be divided into different kinds: status anger, which is typically arrogant , and liberatory anger, which she says can offer distinctive motivational, epistemic and communicative benefits in t...

For today's post I interviewed Fabienne Peter , Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, specializing in political philosophy, moral philosophy, and social epistemology. She talks about her research interests, a new exciting project she is participating in, and the role of philosophers in public life. LB: How did you become interested in the norms that govern political debate? FP: I’ve been doing research on the question of what makes political decisions legitimate for some time now. This research has led me to see that an inclusive and fair political debate is an important condition for legitimate political decision-making. Inclusive and fair political debate of political issues matters in a number of ways. It helps to gather relevant considerations that bear on the decision-making, for example in relation to the implications of possible political decisions for different people. It also helps to weigh the importance of those considerations. Political debate matters in...

In today's post Quassim Cassam  (Warwick) is presenting his new book, Conspiracy Theories (Polity, 2019). See also his post on the Polity Books blog on why we should not ignore conspiracy theories, and the  interview on the New Books Network on conspiracy theories as a form of propaganda. In my book, I address four questions: What is a conspiracy theory? Why do people believe them? What is the problem with conspiracy theories? How should we respond to them? The take home message of the book is that conspiracy theories are a form of political propaganda. This is, in a technical sense, their function , and also what makes them dangerous. The deeper meaning of conspiracy theories is political, and these theories are as pernicious as the political causes they promote. In practice, these causes have often been extremist causes. Anti-Semitism is part of the DNA of conspiracy theories, and even seemingly apolitical theories are a gateway to more overtly political theories. H...

Today I want to share some thoughts on last week's interesting post  on de-rationalising delusions. In the  pre-print  of their thought provoking paper, Vaughan Bell has argued, with Nichola Raihani and Sam Wilkinson, for the view that models of delusions need to include "alterations to coalitional cognition" and to depart from the dominant views that characterise delusions primarily as irrational beliefs. Here I am not going to discuss their positive proposal, which sounds plausible, but just comment on how the so-called 'dominant account' the authors object to in the paper groups together heterogeneous views of what makes delusions distinctive and pathological. Some of the cognitive accounts Bell and colleagues have as their polemical target hold that: (1) the irrationality of delusions is distinctive from (more radical than) the irrationality of other beliefs; and (2) the irrationality of delusions is the main source (if not the only source) of their pathologic...

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 explain delusions. Th...