The history of the relationship between pragmatism and psychoanalysis is both complex and fragmentary. On the pragmatist side, the engagement with Sigmund Freud’s thought – and with the psychoanalytic tradition more generally – tends to be cursory, nonlinear, and at times slightly adversarial. For instance, William James notoriously rejects the unconscious as a concept and develops a different theory of the subconscious. Similarly, Charles S. Peirce frequently refers to the unconscious dimens...

Dieses Buch bietet die erste systematische Diskussion von Husserls Cartesianischen Meditationen. Beginnend mit einem Kommentar zum Text der fünf Meditationen werden in den hier veröffentlichten Aufsätzen einige der wichtigsten Begriffe der Husserlschen Philosophie untersucht und geklärt: Intentionalität, Synthese, Evidenz, Intersubjektivität. Darüber hinaus bietet das Buch die erste Diskussion von Husserls später Version der Transzendentalphilosophie und ihrer Relevanz für zeitgenössische Debatten in der kontinentalen und analytischen Philosophie. Mit Beiträgen von Andreea Smaranda Aldea | Lilian Alweiss | Stefano Bancalari | Jakub Čapek (...) | Emanuela Carta | Daniele De Santis | Aurélien Djian | Saulius Geniusas | Sara Heinämaa | Leonard Ip | Hynek Janoušek | Federico Lijoi | Claudio Majolino | Danilo Manca | Sergio Pérez-Gatica | Witold Plotka | Alice Pugliese | Ignacio Quepons | Rosemary Rizo-Patrón de Lerner | Agustín Serrano de Haro | Wojciech Starzyński. (shrink)

Bortolotti argues that we cannot distinguish delusions from other irrational beliefs in virtue of their epistemic features alone. Although her arguments are convincing, her analysis leaves an important question unanswered: What makes delusions pathological? In this paper I set out to answer this question by arguing that the pathological character of delusions arises from an executive dysfunction in a subject’s ability to detect relevance in the environment. I further suggest that this dysfunction derives from an underlying emotional imbalance—one that leads (...) delusional subjects to regard some contextual elements as deeply puzzling or highly significant. (shrink)

Several theories propose that one of the core functions of inner speech (IS) is to support subjects in the completion of cognitively effortful tasks, especially those involving executive functions (EF). In this paper we focus on two populations who notoriously encounter difficulties in performing EF tasks, namely, people diagnosed with schizophrenia who experience auditory verbal hallucinations (Sz-AVH) and people within the Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC). We focus on these two populations because they represent two different ways in which IS can (...) fail to help in EF tasks, which can be illustrative for other mental conditions. First, we review the main components of EF (Section 1). Then we explain the functions that IS is taken to perform in the domain of EF (Section 2) and review the evidence concerning problems about EF in the two populations of our study: Sz-AVH (Section 3) and ASC (Section 4). After this we further detail our account about what a properly functioning IS can do for both populations and how different IS profiles may impact EF performance: in the case of Sz-AVH, the uncontrolled and intrusive character of IS negatively affects EF performance, whereas in ASC, EF is not sufficiently supported by IS, given the tendency in this population to present a diminished use of IS (Section 5). We finally briefly discuss Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Developmental Language Disorders (DLD). (shrink)

The notions of at-risk and subthreshold conditions are increasingly discussed in psychiatry to describe mild, brief, or otherwise atypical syndromes that fail to meet the criteria for clinical relevance. However, the concept of vulnerability is still underexplored in philosophy of psychiatry. This article discusses psychiatric vulnerability to clarify some conceptual issues about the various factors contributing to vulnerability, the notions of risk and protection, and the idea that there are multiple ways of crossing the threshold to clinical relevance. My goal (...) is to lay the groundwork for a finer-grained discussion on psychiatric vulnerability that reflects the complex nature of mental conditions and illustrates the kind of thinking needed in clinical practice. (shrink)

According to several researchers, core affect lies at the foundation of our affective lives and may be characterized as a consciously accessible state combining arousal (activated-deactivated) and valence (pleasure-displeasure). The interaction between these two dimensions is still a matter of debate. In this paper we provide a novel hypothesis concerning their interaction, by arguing that subjective arousal levels modulate the experience of a stimulus’ affective quality. All things being equal, the higher the arousal, the more a given stimulus would be (...) experienced as pleasant (or unpleasant). While marshaling some preliminary evidence in favor of this hypothesis, we also show how it might be relevant in reframing our conception of depressive disorders (i.e., major and bipolar depression). (shrink)

Despite several criticisms surrounding the DSM classification in psychiatry, a significant bulk of research on mental conditions still operates according to two core assumptions: a) homogeneity, that is the idea that mental conditions are sufficiently homogeneous to justify generalization; b) additive comorbidity, that is the idea that the coexistence of multiple conditions in the same individual can be interpreted as additive. In this paper we take autism research as a case study to show that, despite a plethora of criticism, psychiatric (...) research often continues to operate in accordance with this model. Then we argue that such a model runs into problems once facts about comorbidity are taken into account. Finally, we offer some suggestions on how to tackle the challenge raised by comorbidity and its impact on heterogeneity. To do so, we explore transdiagnostic stratification accounts and network models to show that combining these approaches can move us in the right direction. (shrink)

Characterizations of autism include multiple references to rigid or inflexible features, but the notion of rigidity itself has received little systematic discussion. In this paper we shed some light on the notion of rigidity in autism by identifying different facets of this phenomenon as discussed in the literature, such as fixed interests, insistence on sameness, inflexible adherence to routines, black-and-white mentality, intolerance of uncertainty, ritualized patterns of verbal and non-verbal behavior, literalism, and discomfort with change. Rigidity is typically approached in (...) a disjointed fashion (i.e., facet by facet), although there are recent attempts at providing unifying explanations. Some of these attempts assume that the rigidity facets mainly relate to executive functioning: although such an approach is intuitively persuasive, we argue that there are equally plausible alternative explanations. We conclude by calling for more research on the different facets of rigidity and on how they cluster together in the autistic population, while suggesting some ways in which intervention could benefit from a finer-grained view of rigidity. (shrink)

Although the idea of dignity has always been applied to human beings and although its role is far from being uncontroversial, some recent works in animal ethics have tried to apply the idea of dignity to animals. The aim of this paper is to discuss critically whether these attempts are convincing and sensible. In order to assess these proposals, I put forward two formal conditions that any conception of dignity must meet and outline three main approaches which might justify the (...) application of dignity to animals: the species-based approach, moral individualism and the relational approach. Discussing in particular works by Martha Nussbaum and Michael Meyer I argue that no approach can convincingly justify the extension of dignity to animals because all fail to meet the formal conditions and do not provide an appropriate basis for animal dignity. I conclude by arguing that the recognition of the moral importance of animals and their defense should appeal to other normative concepts which are more appropriate than dignity. (shrink)

The initial online publication contained several typesetting errors.

In this commentary, I argue that the cognitive-emotional framework put forward by Pessoa (2013) can be successfully applied to psychopathology and, in particular, to the reasoning of delusional subjects. More specifically, I show that the notion of executive competition offers a significant contribution to the idea that delusions may involve both executive and emotional dysfunctions.

Introduction to the special issue "The Bounds of Rationality".

En este artículo, analizamos el significado de las matrices densidad en el formalismo de la mecánica cuántica. Discutimos el problema de los "sistemas cuánticos compuestos" en la lógica cuántica así como también la interpretación de las mezclas impropias. Tomando en cuenta el desarrollo de la lógica cuántica convexa, presentamos un análisis de la estructura formal de la teoría que, argumentaremos, debe ser considerado a la hora de desarrollar un nuevo esquema conceptual para la interpretación de las mezclas cuánticas. In this (...) article, we analyze the meaning of density matrices within the formalism of quantum mechanics. We discuss the problem of compound systems in the context of quantum logic as well as the interpretation of improper mixtures. Taking into account the development of convex quantum logic, we present an analysis of the formal structure of the theory which we will argue, must be taken into account when developing a new conceptual scheme for the interpretation of quantum mixtures. (shrink)