This chapter aims to distinguish between pathologies of agency in the strict sense and mere sources of impediments or distortion. Expanding on a recent notion of necessarily less-than-successful agency, it complements a mainstream approach to mental disorders and anomalous psychological conditions in the philosophy of mind and action. According this approach, the interest of such clinical case studies is heuristic, to differentiate between facets of agency that are functionally and conceptually separate even though they typically come (...) together. Yet, in the absence of independent criterion for a pathology of as opposed to inner obstacle to agency, this heuristic is at risk of becoming circular or uninformative, falling back on a clinical diagnosis it is meant to take as a starting point only. The chapter develops such a criterion and shows how it could work tracking agential achievement across two core dimensions of agency: planning and responsiveness to reasons. The discussion concludes with some implications on assessing decisional capacity and safeguarding agent autonomy in psychiatric settings. (shrink)

Pathologies of agency affect both groups and individuals. I present a case study of agential pathology in a group, in which supposedly rogue members of a group act in light of what they take the group’s interests and attitudes to be, but in a way that goes against the group’s explicitly stated agential point of view. I consider several practical concerns brought out by rogue member action in the context of a group agent, focusing in particular on how (...) it undermines the agency of the group and whether or not the group agent itself may be responsible for it. (shrink)

This essay examines the connection between fear and the psychopathologies it can bring, looking in particular at the fears that individuals experience in the face of the climate crisis and environmental degradation more generally. We know that fear can be a source of good and ill. Fears of climate-change-driven heat waves, for instance, can spur both activism and denial. But as of yet, we don’t have a very good understanding of why eco-fears, as we will call them, shape our thoughts (...) and actions in the ways that they do. More importantly, we also don’t really understand why some experiences of eco-fear can lead to depression, PTSD, and other psychopathologies. In an effort to make some progress on this front, we look more closely at the role that feelings of agency – our general feeling that we have enough ability to address the threats and challenges we face – play in shaping our fears. (shrink)

According to the principle known as “the principle of present-tense ascription immunity”, “It is impossible for anyone to have or entertain thoughts without being aware—immediately and self-evidently—that he is thinking that thought”. In other words, my thoughts are fundamentally experienced as mine, and I typically have this experience of mineness immediately, that is, without any inference based on evidence about who is the thinker of the thought. Thought insertion reveals instead that, under particular pathological conditions, people can be startlingly in (...) error about who is thinking a thought. How can this happen? In the attempt to specify how the capacity for self-ascription of a thought can.. (shrink)

How can we be certain that another creature is a conscious being? One path is to rely on introspective reports we can grasp in communication or observation of their behavior. Another path is to infer mentality and consciousness by means of markers tied to their intentional behavior, that is, agency. In this paper we will argue that even if agency is a marker of consciousness in several normal instances (paradigmatically, for mature and healthy human beings), it is not (...) a good marker in several pathological instances, such as the blindsight case, the vegetative state, the akinetic mutism and the locked-in syndrome. If we are right, this can be of great utility in neuroethics; for those kinds of disorders of consciousness are not, after all, instances of complete absence of consciousness. (shrink)

Empirical evidence, it has often been argued, undermines our commonsense assumptions concerning the efficacy of conscious intentions. One of the most influential advocates of this challenge has been Daniel Wegner, who has presented an impressive amount of evidence in support of a model of "apparent mental causation". According to Wegner, this model provides the best explanation of numerous curious and pathological cases of behavior. Further, it seems that Benjamin Libet's classic experiment on the initiation of action and the empirical evidence (...) concerning the confabulation of reason explanations provide further support for this view. In response, I will propose an alternative model of "real mental causation" that can accommodate the empirical evidence just as well as Wegner's. Further, we will see that there is plenty of evidence in support of the assumption that intentions are causally efficacious. This will provide us with ample reason to endorse the model of real mental causation. (shrink)

Recent work has demonstrated that the sense of agency is not only determined by efference-copy-based internal predictions and internal comparator mechanisms, but by a large variety of different internal and external cues. The study by Moore and colleagues [Moore, J. W., Wegner, D. M., & Haggard, P. . Modulating the sense of agency with external cues. Conscious and Cognition] aimed to provide further evidence for this view by demonstrating that external agency cues might outweigh or even substitute (...) efferent signals to install a basic registration of self-agency. Although the study contains some critical points that, so we argue, are central to a proper interpretation of the data, it hints at a new perspective on agency: optimal cue integration seems to be the key to a robust sense of agency. We here argue that this framework could allow integrating the findings of Moore and colleagues and other recent agency studies into a comprehensive picture of the sense of agency and its pathological disruptions. (shrink)

Pathologizing Black Bodies reconsiders the black body as a site of cultural and corporeal interchange; one involving violence and oppression, leaving memory and trauma sedimented in cultural conventions, political arrangements, social institutions and, most significantly, materially and symbolically engraved upon the body, with "the self" often deprived of agency and sovereignty. Consisting of three sections, this text focuses on works of the 20th and 21st century fiction and cultural narratives by mainly African American authors, aiming to highlight the different (...) ways in which race has been pathologized in America and examine how the legacies of plantation ideology have been metaphorically inscribed on black bodies. The variety of analytical approaches and thematic foci with respect to theories and discourses surrounding race and the body allow us to delve into this thorny territory in the hope of gaining perspectives about how African-American lives are still shaped and haunted by the legacies of plantation slavery. Furthermore, this volume offers insights into the politics of eugenic corporeality in an illustrative dialogue with the lasting carceral and agricultural effects of life on a plantation. Tracing the degradation and suppression of the black body, both individual and social, this text includes analysis of the pseudo-scientific discourse of social Darwinism and eugenics; the practice of mass incarceration and the excessive punishment of black bodies; and food apartheid and USDA practices of depriving black farmers of individual autonomy and collective agency. Based on such an interplay of discourses, methodologies and perspectives, this volume aims to use literature to further examine the problematic relationship between race and the body and stress that black lives do indeed matter in the USA. (shrink)

When not acting in ways that are recognised as physical self-defence, women are often – in psychology and in other dominant discourses – generalised as inherently passive during subjection to sexualised coercion (rape and attempted rape). Likewise, in the aftermaths, their (in)actions are frequently pathologised as ‘maladaptive coping strategies’. We present theoretically and empirically based arguments for an agency-oriented approach to women’s perspectives on sexualised coercion. Agency is understood as intentional, situated and strategic. Sexualised coercion is not generalised (...) as a single “traumatic” event, but conceptualised as life events. Meanings of coercion are embedded in social activities connected to discourses on ‘rape’ and ‘trauma’. Thus personal meanings of subjection are understood as developed in and through participation in trajectories across diverse contexts. Adopted in our study, this approach points to the great diversity of personal meanings of sexualised coercion. Moreover, it reveals intimate connections between situated, personal and dominant discursive meanings of coercion, and women’s strategies of (in)actions during and in the aftermaths of the events. Our analysis of participants’ perspectives also indicates an imperative need for reinterpreting concepts such as ‘victim’ and ‘passivity’. In a reinterpretation women, although subjected to sexualised coercion, emerge as subjects both during subjection and in the aftermaths. Furthermore their seemingly pathological behaviour may be re-conceptualised as person ally sense-making strategies of action in reflected attempts at (re)formulating and (re)organising their life strategies. (shrink)

Pathological gambling (PG) is a kind of ‘ideal puzzle’ for the economic model of the consumer. The pathological gambler takes pains to engage in activity that transparently has negative expected returns if utility varies positively with money. She also, typically, spends further resources on commitment devices designed to interfere with her gambling. These properties together describe an agent that is a kind of perfect foil for the rationally maximizing consumer. Recently, aspects of the neuropathology underlying the strange economic agency (...) of the pathological gambler are becoming understood. Thus PG is an ideal test bed phenomenon for working out relationships between economic modeling based on constrained optimization of utility and the new neuroscience of behavior. (shrink)

This goal of this thesis in the philosophy of nature is to move us closer towards a true biological science of consciousness in which the evolutionary origin, function, and phylogenetic diversity of consciousness are moved from the field’s periphery of investigations to its very centre. Rather than applying theories of consciousness built top-down on the human case to other animals, I argue that we require an evolutionary bottomup approach that begins with the very origins of subjective experience in order to (...) make sense of the place of mind in nature. To achieve this goal, I introduce and defend the pathological complexity thesis as both a framework for the scientific investigation of consciousness and as a lifemind continuity thesis about the origins and function of consciousness. (shrink)

In chapter 3 of Delusions and Beliefs, Kengo Miyazono argues that, when delusions are pathological beliefs, they are so due to their being both harmful and malfunctional. In this brief commentary, I put pressure on Miyazono’s account of delusions as harmful malfunctioning beliefs. No delusions might satisfy the malfunction criterion and some delusions might fail to satisfy the harmfulness criterion when such conditions are interpreted as criteria for pathological beliefs. In the end, I raise a general concern about attributing pathological (...) status to single beliefs out of context, and gesture towards the idea of pathology as a failure of agency to which some beliefs can contribute but that can only be identified by considering the person as a whole. (shrink)

Brain implants, such as Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS), which are designed to improve motor, mood and behavioural pathology, present unique challenges to our understanding of identity, agency and free will. This is because these devices can have visible effects on persons' physical and psychological properties yet are essentially undetectable when operating correctly. They can supplement and compensate for one's inherent abilities and faculties when they are compromised by neuropsychiatric disorders. Further, unlike talk therapy or pharmacological treatments, patients need not (...) ‘do’ anything for the treatment to take effect. If one accepts, as we argue here, that brain implants are unique among implantable types of devices, then this can have significant implications for what it means to persist as the same person and be the source of one's thoughts and actions. By examining two of the most common indications for DBS in current use, namely in the motor (Parkinson's Disease) and psychiatric (Major Depression) domains, we further argue that although DBS, as it is currently applied, does not necessarily represent a unique threat to personal identity and agency per se, it introduces an unprecedented ‘third party’ into the debate on these concepts. In this way, DBS can be used as a tool to begin probing, both conceptually and empirically, some of philosophy's most perennial metaphysical questions. (shrink)

Fear generalisation is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when fear that is elicited in response to a frightening stimulus spreads to similar or related stimuli. The practical harms of pathological fear generalisation related to trauma are well-documented, but little or no attention has been given so far to its epistemic harms. This paper fills this gap in the literature. It shows how the psychological phenomenon, when it becomes pathological, substantially curbs the epistemic agency of those who experience the fear (...) that generalizes, limiting their ability to respond to evidence, and substantially limiting their epistemic horizons. It is argued that when these epistemic harms are caused by wrongful actions and decisions of individuals or institutions, because the fear is elicited in response to a traumatic experience inflicted by them, the harms should be considered epistemic wrongs. The epistemic wrongs are closely akin to agential epistemic injustice, a variety of distributive epistemic injustice, and sometimes also involve epistemic exclusion. The paper thereby identifies a previously underexplored psychological mechanism that can be a vehicle through which both individuals and institutions can epistemically wrong others. The argument has implications for how both epistemic wrongs and epistemic injustice should be conceived, suggesting that both can occur without being caused by primarily epistemic flaws or errors, or a bad epistemic character. Finally, it highlights the advantage of taking a victim-centred approach to understanding epistemic harm. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the problem of selfidentification in the domain of action. We claim that this problem can arise not just for the self as object, but also for the self as subject in the ascription of agency. We discuss and evaluate some proposals concerning the mechanisms involved in selfidentification and in agencyascription, and their possible impairments in pathological cases. We argue in favor of a simulation hypothesis that claims that actions, whether overt or covert, are centrally (...) simulated by the neural network, and that this simulation provides the basis for action recognition and attribution. (shrink)

Christopher Frith is a research professor at the Functional Imaging Laboratory of the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience at University College, London. He explores, experimentally, using the techniques of functional brain imaging, the relationship between human consciousness and the brain. His research focuses on questions pertaining to perception, attention, control of action, free will, and awareness of our own mental states and those of others. As the following discussion makes clear, Frith investigates brain systems involved in the choice of one (...) action over another and in the understanding of other people. Such investigations are aimed at understanding brain basis of autism and schizophrenia. In his widely cited study of schizophrenia, The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia , Frith argues that many of the positive symptoms of schizophrenia, such as delusions of control, auditory hallucinations, and thought insertion, involve problems of self-monitoring. Patients, in effect, lose track of their own intentions and mistakenly attribute agency for their own actions to someone else. Frith employs models of motor control, involving comparator mechanisms and efference copy, not only to explain delusions that involve movement, but also to develop a neurocognitive explanation of delusional cognition. (shrink)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is renowned for defending the pity of the state of nature over and against the vanity, cruelty, and inequalities of civil society. In the standard reading, it is this sentiment of pity, activated by our imagination, that allows for the cultivation of compassion. However, a closer look at the "pathologies of pity" in Rousseau's system challenges this idea that pity is a pleasurable sentiment that arises from a recognition of the identity of our natures and leads ultimately (...) to communion with our fellow-creatures. Instead, pity rests inexorably on a sense of difference, is fueled by an aversion to suffering, and is more likely to yield a world of "reluctant spectators" than one of simple souls eagerly rushing to the aid of others. Because compassion is unlikely to encourage the moral equality and willful agency requisite to democracy, trying to make compassion central to democratic theory may very well prove counterproductive. (shrink)

There are, apparently, two inherited stories of intentional action. On the motivational story, intentional agents are pursuers of goals. On the evaluative story, intentional agents are pursuers of value. In a spirit of unification, we might try to supplement the motivational story with the evaluative one – or even collapse the former into the latter. The problem with such moves is that they cannot accomodate certain pathologies of agency. Thus, they convert apparently perverse agents – like Satan and (...) self‐haters – into closet lovers of the good. I argue that pathological agents like Satan and self‐haters are not lovers of the good. They are just lovers of success in action. We can make sense of such agents as practical reasoners because the cares that constitute us as practical reasoners are plural. (shrink)

In this article, I focus on the media's framing of non-mainstream body modification as a social problem. I demonstrate, through an analysis of a sample of 35 newspaper articles on body modification, that a mutilation discourse is one of the dominant frames of meaning used to make sense of body modifiers in the mainstream media. This framing, which effects the pathologization of body modifiers, utilizes the claims making of mental-health experts and relies on a gendered account of body modification as (...) a social problem. While news accounts are a medium for presenting body modification to a large `community of speakers', I find that they have precluded the legitimacy of the claims of subcultural actors. I argue from a poststructuralist perspective that body modifiers' `claims from the underside' are subjugated by accounts that problematize body modification through the dominant discourse of the mental-health model. I suggest that this frame is problematic for its silencing of `underside' or marginal embodied knowledges, which include, for example, alternative accounts of female embodiment. (shrink)

This paper starts from an observation of our practices: when people are ascribed delusional beliefs or conspiracy beliefs, they tend to be excluded from shared epistemic projects relevant to the content of their beliefs. What might motivate this exclusion? One possibility is that delusional beliefs and conspiracy beliefs are considered as evidence of irrationality and pathology, and thus endorsing them suggests that one’s epistemic agency is compromised, at least in some contexts. One common argument for the irrational and pathological (...) nature of delusional beliefs and conspiracy beliefs lies in their being the outputs of faulty cognition. There are some areas of overlap in the cognitive antecedents of delusional beliefs and conspiracy beliefs as identified in the empirical literature. For instance, some biases and thinking styles have been correlated either with the adoption of delusional beliefs and conspiracy beliefs, or with the strength of conviction in such beliefs. The paper challenges the claim that, if delusional beliefs and conspiracy beliefs are the outputs of biased cognition, then it is justified to exclude people endorsing delusional beliefs and conspiracy beliefs from epistemic projects relevant to the content of their beliefs. The relevant biases and thinking styles are widespread in the non-clinical population, do not need to be part of a dysfunctional cognitive process, and can be adaptive in some contexts. (shrink)

I develop an interpretation of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of motor intentionality, one that emerges out of a reading of his presentation of a now classic case study in neuropathology—patient Johann Schneider—in Phenomenology of Perception. I begin with Merleau-Ponty's prescriptions for how we should use the pathological as a guide to the normal, a method I call triangulation. I then turn to his presentation of Schneider's unusual case. I argue that we should treat all of Schneider's behaviors as pathological, not only (...) his abstract movements, as is commonly acknowledged in the secondary literature, but also crucially his concrete movements. Using these facts of Schneider's illness, I reconstruct a ‘fundamental function’ of consciousness, as Merleau-Ponty called it, in which there are two kinds of bodily agency: the power of the body to be solicited by a situation and the power of the body to project a situation. I propose that these powers became dissociated in Schneider's case, as evidenced by his abstract and concrete movements, while in the normal case, these powers comprise a dynamic unity, enacted as motor intentionality. I also discuss how my interpretation complements Merleau-Ponty's assertion that motor intentions exist between mind and matter. (shrink)

Does a diagnosis of brain dysfunction matter for ascriptions of moral responsibility? This chapter argues that, while knowledge of brain pathology can inform judgments of moral responsibility, its evidential value is currently limited for a number of practical and theoretical reasons. These include the problem of establishing causation from correlational data, drawing inferences about individuals from group data, and the reliance of the interpretation of brain findings on well-established psychological findings. Brain disorders sometimes matter for moral responsibility, however, because they (...) change an individual’s moral psychology in a way that is beyond their control. While control over psychological changes is not an excusing factor, brain disorders can mitigate moral responsibility because they confront individuals with new psychological deficits or urges for which their previous moral education and existing external and internal moral resources have not prepared them. (shrink)

Although philosophical approaches to the self are diverse, several of them are relevant to cognitive science. First, the notion of a 'minimal self', a self devoid of temporal extension, is clarified by distinguishing between a sense of agency and a sense of ownership for action. To the extent that these senses are subject to failure in pathologies like schizophrenia, a neuropsychological model of schizophrenia may help to clarify the nature of the minimal self and its neurological underpinnings. Second, (...) there is good evidence to suggest that although certain aspects of the minimal self are primitive and embodied, other aspects may be accessed only in reflective consciousness. Employing a modified concept of the minimal self, it may be possible to construct a robotic form of non-conscious self-reference that depends on an interaction between the robotic body and its environment. In contrast to the minimal self, the narrative self involves continuity over time and is directly relevant to discussions of memory and personal identity. There is growing consensus among philosophers and cognitive scientists about the importance of narrative and its relation to episodic memory and left-hemisphere functions. There are, however, at least two different views of how the narrative self is structured. On one model it is nothing more than an abstract point. On a more extended view, proposed here, the self is a rich amalgam of narratives that allows for the equivocations, contradictions, and self-deceptions of personal life. Even in this case, however, neurocognitive models contribute to our understanding of how narrative identity is structured. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Decision‐Making Procedures and Maxims in Corporate Settings The Need for Collective Responsibility in Business Ethics Applying the Categorical Imperative to Businesses Kant's Account of Moral Agency and the Categorical Imperative Must We Never Treat a Business Merely as a Means? Corporate Policies and Individual Agents Bowie's Defense of Collective Responsibility, and the Need for an Alternative Personal Responsibility within the Corporation The Choice Facing Business Ethicists: Kant or Collective Responsibility?

Scholars in language and social interaction have long been concerned with the role of texts in institutional settings, studying, for example, how interview schedules actively shape conversational dynamics between participants. While texts have been acknowledged as active in this way, their generative capacity remains largely overlooked. This article argues that like human subjects, texts in interaction enact agency. One text in particular, a screening form used to diagnose the learning disability attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, is analyzed to claim that this (...) text brings about the very condition it is designed to measure: a learning disability. Drawing from work in discursive psychology, I show how the measurement requires the client to adopt certain speaking positions, which then enables the text to speak for the client. I also demonstrate how the text constructs otherwise normal behavior as pathological through punctuation and nominalization. Finally, I illustrate how the spatial organization of the text constrains clients’ choices for interacting with it. This article claims that texts produce, rather than reflect, cognitive phenomena, and it moreover encourages that the notion of text as agent be taken seriously, especially when it presents the capacity to disable. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Vulnerabilization and De-pathologizationTwo Philosophical SuggestionsHavi Carel, PhD (bio)Alastair Morgan raises useful and interesting philosophical critiques of the 'power-threat-meaning' framework proposed by Johnstone et al. (2018). In what follows I make two suggestions that may clarify some aspects of the debate. First, to broaden the notion of threat: we can think more broadly about adverse life events as the source of mental suffering by broadening the notion of threat to (...) what I term (in joint work with Ian James Kidd) Vulnerabilization. Second, I offer a distinction between de-pathologizing psychiatric disorders (i.e., removing stigma and negative stereotypes) and de-medicalizing such disorders (i.e., rescinding them from a diagnostic manual), in order to suggest that de-medicalizing on its own does not solve the problem of stigma, but de-pathologizing is a better candidate for achieving that.Threat and VulnerabilizationMorgan argues that the notion of threat is too limited to cover the breadth of psychiatric conditions and presentations. Threat and power may often be present, but how they lead to the appearance of behaviors that meet certain diagnostic criteria, is, as Morgan states, unclear at best and only a partial explanation for psychiatric disorders (it explains some behaviors, not all). I suggest we view threat as one type of a broader category, which I propose to term 'Vulnerabilization' (Carel & Kidd, 2021).Vulnerabilization refers to the effects of interactions and actions that impact on people by harming them and making them more vulnerable to future adversity. For example, removing a struggling child from a classroom causes them to miss the lesson, and if done repeatedly, harms their capacity to continue studying. Leaving a weak patient unsupervised in the wrong kind of bed may cause them to fall and become more vulnerable to disease and infection. Failing to organize accommodation for an inmate about to be released from prison forces them onto the streets and makes them more vulnerable to reoffending. The point of the term is to draw attention to the fact that one is not born vulnerable, to paraphrase de Beauvoir, [End Page 73] but becomes vulnerabilized through acts and omissions of others. Such acts and omissions often take place under the auspices of an institution—health care, social care, education, criminal justice, and so on—and are therefore intimately tied to ethoi and conduct of institutions (for a full analysis see Carel & Kidd, 2021).Vulnerabilization is a common theme in the testimonies of people who have negative experiences of social institutions, including, of course, health care institutions. Ideally, health care systems, schools, courts, and other major institutions scaffold and protect our agency, efficiently support our endeavors, and fairly and reliably disperse social and epistemic resources. But while some people have reliably satisfying experiences of social institutions, others find that many, if not all, of the institutions they encounter abandon, ignore, silence, harm, or even kill them and people like them (this is not an exaggeration: inquiries such as the Francis Report (2013) on the Mid Staffordshire patient neglect case and the Sheldon Review (n.d.) provide plentiful examples of that).1 When vulnerable people encounter institutions, they are often at an epistemic and communicative disadvantage that makes their interactions with institutions a source of suffering and injustice and indeed makes such people even more vulnerabilized. They may be affected by poverty, disability (especially mental ill health and learning disabilities), trauma, domestic violence, ill health, racism, sexism, ageism, or other sources of disadvantage, prejudice and discrimination; and, of course, they can be disadvantaged by a combination of such factors. Seeing power as the source of much suffering, social injustice and poor mental health is, of course, entirely in line with this view and I agree with Morgan that Johnstone et al. (2018) identified an important source of suffering.De-Medicalizing Versus De-PathologizingAnother important issue about psychiatric diagnoses is the stigma and negative stereotypes surrounding mental illness. Calls to de-medicalize a specific or all mental disorders is, in part, a call to remove stigma and negative stereotype from the behaviors and mental states that characterize a mental disorder. However, to de-medicalize... (shrink)

Under normal circumstances the church would function as an agent of change and transformation, but this article focuses on the church herself that needs radical change if she is to remain relevant in mission and ministry in this current era. Clericalism and the centralisation of hierarchical control can be identified as the root causes of institutional pathology and weakening collegiality. To address clericalism may require the adjustment of seminary training, as in the current system seminarians are nurtured in a sense (...) of separateness, promoting male-ego and feed gender exclusivity and doctrinal self-righteousness. While the seminary was once an instrument of reform in the Catholic Church, established to counter problems such as clerical concubinage and illiteracy, but now it is no longer suitable as it has become the forum that breeds other problems. Priority attention should be paid to purge the church of rampant clericalism, discriminatory scapegoating of gay persons, marginalisation of free thinkers, exclusion of women priests, the perceived moral laxity of family life issues and reception of communion by divorced Catholics without the benefits of annulment. Discrediting the personal authority of the pope is hardly an enlightened option. What ought to be transformed is the centralisation of control and allowing increased localised dominion whereby crises such as sexual abuse scandals could be addressed and solved more speedily and liberally, and limit the need to go to the top for solutions. To wait for centralised, hierarchal structures to deal with urgent issues is not desirable, as speedy accountability is needed to address issues that hurt the church in its entirety. (shrink)

In this new work, political theorist Michael J. Thompson argues that modern societies are witnessing a decline in one of the core building blocks of modernity: the autonomous self. Far from being an illusion of the Enlightenment, Thompson contends that the individual is a defining feature of the project to build a modern democratic culture and polity. One of the central reasons for its demise in recent decades has been the emergence of what he calls the cybernetic society, a cohesive (...) totalization of the social logics of the institutional spheres of economy, culture and polity. These logics have been progressively defined by the imperatives of economic growth and technical-administrative management of labor and consumption, routinizing patterns of life, practices, and consciousness throughout the culture. Evolving out of the neoliberal transformation of economy and society since the 1980s, the cybernetic society has transformed how that the individual is articulated in contemporary society. Thompson examines the various pathologies of the self and consciousness that result from this form of socialization--such as hyper-reification, alienated moral cognition, false consciousness, and the withered ego--in new ways to demonstrate the extent of deformation of modern selfhood. Only with a more robust, more socially embedded concept of autonomy as critical agency can we begin to reconstruct the principles of democratic individuality and community. (shrink)

In the revisionist part of the book, Bortolotti aims at defending a non-pathologising view of delusions, according to which they not only compromise but support our agency. By construing delusions as meaningful protective responses, the author attempts to decouple delusionality from pathology. Nevertheless, it is not clear how, according to her approach, delusions could foster agency. Even when seen as a “way of life” and not as psychiatric symptoms, the defensive nature of delusions undermines the person’s sense of (...) agency, for the symptom or defence mechanism never stems from the person themselves. Notwithstanding the benefits delusions might bring along, they seem to display their own intentionality to the detriment of the agent. Here, I suggest that insights from the authenticity debate in psychiatry could support Bortolotti’s revisionist aim and benefit her discussion on identity beliefs. For this purpose, I introduce the concept of self-illness ambiguity (Sadler, 2007) and compare de Haan’s notion of existential stance (2020) and Stanghellini’s concept of position-taking (Stanghellini et al., 2023) to argue that the person’s agency resides in their ability to take a stance on their (psychiatric) condition, especially when struggling with questions of authenticity. Finally, I explore why one cannot just get rid of a delusion and why, when one attempts to, it feels urgent to replace it. (shrink)

We propose an action-oriented understanding of emotion. Emotions are modifications of a basic form of goal-oriented striving characteristic of human life. They are appetitive orientations: pursuits of the good, avoidances of the bad. Thus, emotions are not truly distinct from, let alone opposed to, actions -- as erroneously suggested by the classical understanding of emotions as 'passions'. In the present paper, we will outline and defend this broadly enactive approach and motivate its main claims. Our proposal gains plausibility from a (...) literature- and interview-based investigation of emotional changes characteristic of clinical depression. Much narrative evidence from patient reports points towards the conclusion that many of those changes might result from a catastrophic alteration of the basic form of goal-pursuit at the root of human emotionality. The experience of profound depression could in this respect be a kind of inverted image of non-pathological emotionality--a highly unnatural passivity, giving rise to a profound -- and quite horrifying -- sense of incapacity. (shrink)

The narrated self: time and the dramatisation of historical agency -- The publication of the self: the sublimation of personal identity in publicity and art appreciation -- The disintegration of the self: the origins of abstraction and the de-objectification of the world -- The democratisation of the self: the integration of creative endeavour into the fabric of daily life and the death of art -- The trans-personalisation of the self: the material culture of communication and the communalisation of identity (...) -- The psychological self: the pathology of art and cinematographic modes of self-remembering -- The linguistic self: the de-verberation of the self and the end of meaning. (shrink)

World Crisis and Underdevelopment examines the impact of poverty and other global crises in generating forms of structural coercion that cause agential and societal underdevelopment. It draws from discourse ethics and recognition theory in criticizing injustices and pathologies associated with underdevelopment. Its scope is comprehensive, encompassing discussions about development science, philosophical anthropology, global migration, global capitalism and economic markets, human rights, international legal institutions, democratic politics and legitimation, world religions and secularization, and moral philosophy in its many varieties.

Canguilhem’s take on the normal and the pathological offers an interesting insight to elaborate on a phenomenological account of illness and the medical encounter within the scope of Heidegger’s Daseinanalysis from Being and Time. Fredrik Svenaeus has drawn from the latter a definition of illness as an “unhomelike being in the world”. In this paper, I will elaborate on these concepts through the tale of Adriana, a cancer fighter that got diagnosed at age 26. Through her story, I will try (...) to illustrate Canguilhem’s main criticism against medicine's current state, as well as describe phenomenologically what it means to be ill, and what illness does to the patient's being-in-the-world. (shrink)

Empirical approaches on topics such as consciousness, self-awareness, or introspective perspective, need a conceptual framework so that the emerging, still unconnected findings can be integrated and put into perspective. We introduce a model of self-consciousness derived from phenomenology, philosophy, the cognitive, and neurosciences. We will then give an overview of research data on one particular aspect of our model, self-agency, trying to link findings from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Finally, we will expand on pathological aspects of self-agency, and (...) in particular on psychosis in schizophrenia. We show, that a deficient self-monitoring system underlies, in part, hallucinations and formal thought (language) disorder in schizophrenia. We argue, that self-consciousness is a valid construct and can be studied with the instruments of cognitive and neuroscience. (shrink)

Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Rancière treat speech as the medium for politics and, likewise, both diagnose the pathologies that follow from blockages on civic speech. That said, these broad commonalities give rise to significant divides regarding the social ontology of language, the forms of power that attend linguistic exchange, and how speech informs democratic agency. Ultimately, the essay will argue that Rancière highlights the political deficits within deliberative commitments to democratic values. In doing so, his challenge yields broader (...) insights for a democratic politics of speech and the linguistic resources that facilitate such a politics. (shrink)

The pathologization of women’s depression covers over the social and institutional causes of that symptomology. Insofar as patriarchal values continue to devalue and debase women and mothers in ways that colonize psychic space, and depression becomes a cover for what I call ‘social melancholy.’ This is not the melancholy of traditional psychoanalysis, but a form of melancholy that results from oppression, domination, and the colonization of psychic space. Social melancholy differs from both Freud’s notion of melancholy in that it is (...) the result of social factors that constitute the depressed subject as ashamed and lacking agency. Crucial to my analysis is a distinction between shame and guilt missing from traditional psychoanalytic accounts of melancholy and depression. (shrink)

The core texts of the QAnon conspiracy theory are posts on online image boards made under the name ‘Q’. ‘Q drops’ range from cryptic, to implausible, to downright bizarre. Nonetheless, an enormous community has seemingly developed around the QAnon conspiracy theory. Polling indicates substantial support for core elements of the theory. The community has its own media programs and influencers, and hosts its own conferences, some of which draw prominent U.S. politicians. Various acts of violence have been connected to QAnon, (...) including murders and, most notoriously, the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. How is it that so many can be taken in by such a bizarre theory? Broadly speaking, epistemologists and cognitive scientists have offered three kinds of answers. Individualist answers maintain that belief in QAnon and other conspiracy theories is often rooted in epistemic vices, like gullibility, or in psychological pathologies like hyperactive detection of agency or patterns. According to social structural answers, belief in such theories is due instead to social phenomena like echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. According to deflationist answers, belief in such theories is—despite appearances—rare. I illustrate and briefly assess these accounts of belief in conspiracy theories, focusing mainly on QAnon. (shrink)

Schizophrenia as a pathology of self-awareness has attracted much attention from philosophical theorists and empirical scientists alike. I view schizophrenia as a basic self-disturbance leading to a lifeworld of solipsism adopted by the sufferer and explain how this adoption takes place, which then manifests in ways such as first-rank psychotic symptoms. I then discuss the relationships between these symptoms, not as isolated mental events, but as end-products of a loss of agency and ownership, and argue that symptoms like thought (...) insertion and other ego-boundary disorders are by nature a multitude of paradoxes created by a fragmented awareness. I argue that such fragmentation does not always require or lead to a delusional elaboration as the definitive feature of its phenomenology, and present reasons for the role of the first-person pronoun as a mere metaphor used to represent the patient’s bizarre experiences where sensory perception and thinking processes converge. Further, I discuss the initi... (shrink)

Irrational beliefs are often seen as beliefs that are either costly or even pathological and it is assumed that we should eliminate them when possible. In this paper we argue that not only irrational beliefs are a widespread feature of human cognition and agency but also that, depending on context, they can be beneficial to the person holding them, not only psychologically but also epistemically. Given that rationality is highly valued, judgements of rationality have wide-ranging implications for interpersonal relations (...) at an individual and societal level. We suggest that a better understanding of rationality and its role in cognition can lead to a more compassionate treatment of people who express beliefs that are judged as irrational. (shrink)

Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, and psychiatrists examine the will and its pathologies from theoretical and empirical perspectives, offering a conceptual overview and discussing schizophrenia, depression, prefrontal lobe damage, and substance abuse as disorders of volition. Science tries to understand human action from two perspectives, the cognitive and the volitional. The volitional approach, in contrast to the more dominant "outside-in" studies of cognition, looks at actions from the inside out, examining how actions are formed and informed by internal conditions. In Disorders (...) of Volition, scholars from a range of disciplines seek to advance our understanding of the processes supporting voluntary action by addressing conditions in which the will is impaired. Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, and psychiatrists examine the will and its pathologies from both theoretical and empirical perspectives, offering a conceptual overview and discussing specific neurological and psychiatric conditions as disorders of volition. After presenting different conceptual frameworks that identify agency, decision making, and goal pursuit as central components of volition, the book examines how impairments in these and other aspects of volition manifest themselves in schizophrenia, depression, prefrontal lobe damage, and substance abuse. Contributors George Ainslie, Tim Bayne, Antoine Bechara, Paul W. Burgess, Anna-Lisa Cohen, Daniel Dennett, Stéphanie Dubal, Philippe Fossati, Chris Frith, Sam J. Gilbert, Peter Gollwitzer, Jordan Grafman, Patrick Haggard, Jay G. Hull, Marc Jeannerod, Roland Jouvent, Frank Krueger, Neil Levy, Peter F. Liddle, Kristen L. Mackiewitz, Thomas Metzinger, Jack B. Nitschke, Jiro Okuda, Adrian M. Owen, Chris Parry, Wolfgang Prinz, Joëlle Proust, Michael A. Sayette, Werner X. Schneider, Natalie Sebanz, Jon S. Simons, Laurie B. Slone, Sean A. Spence. (shrink)

The debate about Habermas' use of the system and lifeworld distinction has not focused on the explanation of social pathologies that he offers, but rather only on conceptual problems with the theories that he uses. Twill argue that the explanation offered by his thesis that "systems colonize the lifeworld" fits the main criterion for adequacy for macro-micro explanation: because it establishes macro-micro linkage, it is at least potentially complete. Such an analysis fits the empirical approach to traditional debates between (...) collectivists and individualists among macrosociologists. I shall apply this approach here in three steps. First, I shall use the controversy about functionalist explanation in the social sciences to develop the criterion of completeness for macrosociological explanations (1). Second, I shall generalize the conditions of adequacy for functionalist explanations to macrosociology as a whole and show that Habermas'explanation of the colonization of the lifeworld is at least potentially complete, as an explanation sketch that lacks empirical detail (2). Third, I shall show that this approach also requires that Habermas modify his overly Weberian claims about the effects of bureaucracy, since his stronger notion of reification is based on the incompletness in his explanation of this aspect of the micromacrolinkage (3). Moreover; a more complete account has clearer practical consequences for agency in the form of collective action. (shrink)

The debate over moral bioenhancement has incrementally intensified since 2008, when Persson and Savulescu, and Douglas wrote two separate articles on the reasons why enhancing human moral capabilities and sensitivity through technological means was ethically desirable. In this article, we offer a critique of how Persson and Savulescu theorize about the possibility of moral bioenhancement, including the problem of weakness of will, which they see as a motivational challenge. First, we offer a working definition of moral bioenhancement and underscore some (...) of the challenges in determining whether moral bioenhancement, as conceptualized by Persson and Savulescu, falls into the category of enhancement or constitutes a type of therapeutic intervention. Second, we provide a critical analysis of the way Persson and Savulescu pathologize human behavior in relation to what they see as the main threat to the survival of the human species: weak moral motivation. Next, we critique the claim that the use of genetic manipulation and drug treatment will increase moral motivation. We argue that Persson and Savulescu mischaracterize the nature of human moral psychology because moral motivation includes affective and cognitive dimensions. The type of interventions they envision focus almost exclusively on the former. In the final two sections, we outline three main criticisms of moral bioenhancement and offer a more robust account of moral psychology and moral development than what Persson and Savulescu recommend, through the lens of Aristotle’s work on virtue ethics. Ultimately, we argue that what Persson and Savulescu, and Douglas consider as moral bioenhancement is a misnomer because they do not fully account for the complexity of moral agency. (shrink)

Why Delusions Matter is a reflection on the importance of the study of delusions for better understanding and reshaping our mutual interactions. The study of delusions has transformed the philosophy of mind and psychology in the last thirty years, helping redefine the relationship between rationality and intentionality. It has still a lot to offer to emerging areas at the intersection of ethics and epistemology. These are areas where the focus of the investigation of beliefs is moving from a painstaking assessment (...) of the individual’s cognitive achievements and failures to a broader examination of the environmental and social pressures on the adoption, revisions, and maintenance of beliefs at individual and collective levels. In the book, there is an exploration of the notion of delusionality across clinical and non-clinical contexts which shows how delusions are meaningful beliefs that matter to the speaker's identity but are received by the interpreter as implausible and unshakeable. Delusions are not pathological by default, but they can bring epistemic and psychological costs as well as temporary benefits. Although a speaker's delusions can make collaboration difficult, this should not discourage interpreters from attempts at genuine engagement. Delusions are not a sign of a breakdown in the speaker's capacity for agency and thus understanding them can help interpreters appreciate the speaker's perspective. (shrink)

Schelling’s middle period works have always been a source of fascination: they mark a break with the idealism (in both senses of the word) of his early works and the Fichtean and then Hegelian tradition; while they are not weighed down by the reactionary burden of his late lectures on theology and mythology. But they have been equally a source of perplexity. The central work of this period, the Essay on Human Freedom (1809) takes as its topic the moral problem (...) of freedom, but spends much of its time telling a mystical-metaphysical story about the creation of the world that attempts to paint a picture of a kind of irreducible metaphysical contingency in nature. What is the relation between the moral and the metaphysical elements of the Freedom essay? It has never been obvious. But some recent Anglophone scholarship suggests an answer. In her Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling and Kierkegaard (2006) Michelle Kosch presents a strong case for the view that Schelling’s Freedom essay is motivated by a critique of Kant’s conception of autonomy in ethics. The idea is that Kant’s problems start not if he fails to show that it is rational to be moral, but if he succeeds. For if he does, then it is irrational to be immoral, and hence it is impossible for a rational agent to act immorally: an act not in conformity with duty is evidence of irrationality (perhaps one’s rational agency has been thwarted by pathological inclinations). This is broadly the Socratic position: evil, as a knowing immoral act, is not possible. Officially Kant rejects the classical view, most explicitly in his 1793 Religion with the Bounds of Mere Reason, for a Christian position in which freedom is understood as the freedom to choose between good and evil without thereby abandoning one’s agency. But he has no obvious means for doing so. Kosch attempts to show that Schelling comes, by 1809, to identify his early work with something like this Kantian dilemma: we are as badly off when it comes to our freedom if we are pushed around by reasons as if we are pushed around by causes: the Hegelian ruse of reason is as inimical to our agency as phenomenal determinism. The Freedom essay is the result of Schelling’s attempt to defend a muscular, Christian conception of the possibility of evil. Nevertheless, for Kosch, Schelling’s move to the metaphysical level is still problematic: just where one would expect an account of norms that does not infer them from our rational autonomy, we get, puzzlingly, a cosmology. I will argue that Kosch’s matrix for interpreting Schelling in fact does give us a way of understanding Schelling’s metaphysics of contingency. In broad outline, Schelling’s argument is that our choice of metaphysical schema is constrained by a correct understanding of agency: the world cannot be causally determined because that is inconsistent with our understanding of ourselves as agents; but equally the world cannot be rationally determined, and for the same reason. Schelling’s metaphysics of contingency is an unpacking of the consequences of this inference, and not a botched attempt to ground values outside of rational autonomy. (shrink)

This book attempts to advance Donald Griffin's vision of the "final, crowning chapter of the Darwinian revolution" by developing a philosophy for the science of animal consciousness. It advocates a Darwinian bottom-up approach that treats consciousness as a complex, evolved, and multidimensional phenomenon in nature rather than a mysterious all-or-nothing property immune to the tools of science and restricted to a single species. -/- The so-called emergence of a science of consciousness in the 1990s has at best been a science (...) of human consciousness. This book aims to advance a true Darwinian science of consciousness in which its evolutionary origin, function, and phylogenetic diversity are moved from the field’s periphery to its very centre, thus enabling us to integrate consciousness into an evolutionary view of life. Accordingly, this book has two objectives: (i) to argue for the need and possibility of an evolutionary bottom-up approach that addresses the problem of consciousness in terms of the evolutionary origins of a new ecological lifestyle that made consciousness worth having and (ii) to articulate a thesis and beginnings of a theory of the place of consciousness as a complex evolved phenomenon in nature that can help us to answer the question of what it is like to be a bat, an octopus, or a crow. -/- A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness will appeal to researchers and advanced students interested in advancing our understanding of animal minds as well as anyone with a keen interest in how we can develop a science of animal consciousness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Introduction:The Heat of Mild Cognitive ImpairmentJulian C. Hughes (bio)Keywordsaging, explanation, mild cognitive impairment, understanding, valuesDebates about mild cognitive impairment (MCI) are generating heat, albeit civilized heat. But under the surface, as I think the papers in this special issue demonstrate, the civilized heat comes from a good deal of passion. One way in which philosophy can contribute to the debate is by making plain the sources of this passion, (...) so that the motivating forces are clearer.One motivating force is this: There will be people who do not have dementia but who have symptoms or signs that might predict dementia, which cause them concern, whom we might help by early intervention. The intervention might involve advice and support, or it might involve some form of drug treatment; and in the utopia of our dreams, it might involve prevention. All of this is very motivating for clinical scientists. It also offers a laudable motivation to pharmaceutical companies, who simultaneously must have regard to the possibility of profits for their shareholders.Here, however, is an alternative motivation: The effects of aging must not be ignored if help can be given, but older people must not be stigmatized by a medical process that thrusts disabling labels on them. People age, but they age differently, and it is better to recognize difference, both from a biological and from a philosophical perspective. Thus, a passionate commitment to the cause of individual agency in old age and a desire for authentic autonomy for older people provide strong motivation too.At root, then, the conflicting passions over MCI reflect the age-old struggle in the philosophy of psychiatry between the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) and the human or cultural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften): the tension is between a tendency to approach the problem with the aim of eliciting a scientific explanation and a tendency to try to achieve a human and cultural understanding of the phenomena (Phillips 2004). So, although MCI can be regarded as an explanatory diagnostic entity with some predictive value, it can also be regarded as a label that might cause harm or as a human phenomenon that requires understanding. Furthermore, MCI raises ontological questions about the nature of disease entities. And there is a wider issue as well about how aging itself should be regarded.From a biological perspective, it turns out there is no clear cutoff between what is normal and what [End Page 1] is not. Hence, in a number of ways, values seem to be as important as facts (Sadler 2005). Perhaps philosophy should content itself with saying no more than this: MCI ought not to be considered or debated as if it lies outside the realm of evaluative judgment. The very possibility of its existence as a clinical entity is a matter worthy of moral and social discourse.The direction of thought indicated here and in the papers that follow, however, is more radical than the easily won point that the "diagnosis" of MCI is not value free. On the back of the biological point, that there is a continuum between physiological and pathological aging, is the broader philosophical point that aging can neither be understood solely in terms of physiology nor in terms of pathology, nor even in terms of both. Ageing represents, inter alia, a social and cultural phenomenon manifest in the context of particular psychological and spiritual responses to a mixture of physiological adaptations and pathological predispositions. Without the broader picture, we tend to characterize old age, as Michael Bavidge has suggested elsewhere, in terms of deteriorations: "We should think of old age as offering alternative rather than impaired ways of experiencing life" (2006, 49). The difficulty is that any diagnosis seems to suggest impairment in one form or another. The radical suggestion, therefore, might be to commend descriptions that encourage shared understanding over and above the giving of names and labels.In a brief critique of the scientific approach to "banal memory disorders and MCI", Jean-Marie Léger, like Bavidge, regrets the extent to which people with cognitive impairment "are described in terms of what they have lost, with no regard for the wealth of faculties which are still present." Léger... (shrink)

Actions performed in a state of automatism are not subject to moral evaluation, while automatic actions often are. Is the asymmetry between automatistic and automatic agency justified? In order to answer this question we need a model or moral accountability that does justice to our intuitions about a range of modes of agency, both pathological and non-pathological. Our aim in this paper is to lay the foundations for such an account.

Autistic people continue to face considerable stigmatization. Much work remains to be done to identify and tackle the causes of this stigmatization. We identify two related assumptions that generate and perpetuate this stigmatization: one ontological; one epistemic. We argue that breaking the stigma around autism requires addressing these twin assumptions. The ontological assumption presupposes the pathologization of autism as a disorder. Addressing this first assumption requires taking neurodiversity seriously and moving away from neuronormativity. The epistemic assumption posits that “allistics-know-best” and (...) prevents allistics from acknowledging the epistemic limits of their own perspective. Addressing this second assumption requires centering Autistics’ perspectives and experiences in the production, dissemination, and use of knowledge about Autistics. To make our case against these two problematic assumptions, we draw on the key epistemological notions of standpoint, ignorance, and epistemic injustice—which have implications for all fields that concern minoritized groups and the contents produced about or with them. Fruitfully connecting our original pluralist conception of epistemic agency (which centers crucial experiential knowledge beyond mere propositional knowledge) to 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enacted), we identify a new category of epistemic injustice: ecological epistemic injustice. We then illustrate the importance of addressing the widespread yet problematic ontological and epistemic assumptions underlying the stigmatization of autism by turning to the case of applied behavioral analysis (ABA), which instantiates both neuronormativity and epistemic injustice. (shrink)

Thought insertion is a common delusion in schizophrenia. People affected by it report that there are thoughts in their heads that have been inserted by a third party. These thoughts are self-generated but subjec-tively experienced as alien (hereafter, we shall call them alien thoughts for convenience). In chapter 5 of Transparent Minds, Jordi Fernández convincingly argues that the phenomenon of thought insertion can be accounted for as a pathology of self-knowledge. In particular, he argues that the application of the bypass (...) model of self-knowledge can shed light on what is amiss in people with thought insertion. In this brief commentary, we examine the proposal by Fernández, highlight some of its strengths, and raise one main objection to it. In mainstream philosophical accounts of thought insertion, people who report the delusion are thought to have ownership of the alien thoughts, but to lack a sense of agency with respect to such thoughts, and this is supposed to explain why they ascribe the thoughts to some-one else. Fernández correctly identifies the limitations of mainstream accounts of thought insertion. First, to claim that people with the delu-sion of thought insertion own the alien thoughts does not sit well with the phenomenology of thought insertion as it is reflected in people’s self-reports. Second, people do not need to experience a sense of agency with respect to a thought in order to ascribe the thought to themselves. Sense of agency is too demanding a condition for self-ascription. Fernández puts forward a novel account of thought insertion, at-tempting to solve the problems identified with mainstream accounts. He defends the view that thought insertion is a failure of self-knowledge that consists in the person failing to ascribe one of her be-liefs to herself. Similar accounts to the one Fernández develops in the chapter have been defended by Bortolotti and Broome (2009) and Pickard (2010). For Fernández, the failure in self-ascription is due to the fact that the person with thought insertion does not feel pressured to endorse the content of a belief that she has [Fernández (2013), p. 142]. Fernández explains this phenomenon in detail by reference to the bypass model of self-knowledge. When Fernández develops his own proposal, he relies on the claim that the alien thought is a belief. We challenge this claim.We agree with Fernández that, in thought insertion, the person does not ascribe the alien thought to herself and does not commit to the content of the thought being true, in spite of the thought being self-generated. Such considerations powerfully suggest to us that the alien thought is not a belief. Given the elusive nature of mental states in general and beliefs in particular, this may seem just a terminological issue. But in the present context, whether the alien thought is a belief is important in order to offer a characterisation of thought insertion that makes jus-tice to the first-person reports and other behavioural manifestations of people with the delusion. One may also argue that, as the model of self-knowledge Fernández applies to alien thoughts, that is, the bypass model, is a model of self-knowledge for beliefs, such a model could only feature in the explanation of thought insertion if alien thoughts were beliefs. But we do not think this is necessarily the case, as in the book Fernández successfully applies his bypass model to other types of mental states, such as desires. (shrink)

Kant’s conception of mental illness is unlikely to satisfy contemporary readers. His classifications of mental illness are often fluid and ambiguous, and he seems to attribute to human beings at least some responsibility for preventing mental illness. In spite of these apparent disadvantages, I argue that Kant’s account of mental illness can be illuminating to his views about the normative dimensions of human cognition. In contrast to current understandings of mental illness, Kant’s account is what I refer to as “non-pathological.” (...) That is, most mental illnesses are for Kant continuous with normally functioning cognition. Someone with a healthy reason can easily fall into mental illness and someone with mental illness can (perhaps not as easily) re-establish healthy reason. By accepting a non-pathological definition of mental illness, it follows for Kant that humans have more agency and responsibility regarding their mental health than current views allow, which explains why several of his writings aim to prescribe a “diet of the mind” (2:271). Contrary to popular readings of Kant as a champion of reason’s power, Kant’s conception of mental illness shows that he recognizes how fragile human reason can be. (shrink)