Lisa Bortolotti

This year, World Philosophy Day was for me an opportunity to bring to young people some philosophical reflections on how we make decisions, arrive at explanations, and interact with each other in challenging contexts. In the morning I visited a primary school and talked to year 5 and 6 students about how we seek an explanation when something unexpected happens. We started by considering some definitions of philosophy and accounts of the value of philosophy ("What is philosophy for?") and then we watch two brief videos together.  The Ant and the Grasshopper  is about how we tend to blame others (especially people and institutions we don't like) when we find ourselves in a crisis; and The Fox and the Owl  is about how we often prefer to arrive at the solution of a problem by ourselves, without consulting with other people, even when they may have relevant knowledge to share. In the discussion after watching the videos, children recognised in the various animal characters di...

On 10th August Why Delusions Matter is out in paperback! One of the key ideas of the book is that we should avoid thinking of beliefs that we find irrational as a sign of a pathology. In the last few days, two open-access papers have been published where I capture some aspects of this idea. In one paper,  Is it pathological to believe conspiracy theories? , I ask how we decide that some ways of thinking about the world are pathological. Either those ways are considered to be harmful or the output of a malfunctioning mechanism. But in the case of conspiracy beliefs, harmfulness is hard to ascertain, and beliefs that are harmful in some ways can also bring benefits.  For instance, the belief that a vaccine is unsafe and is promoted by health authorities to benefit the pharmaceutical company who produced it may lead someone not to take advantage of the vaccine. As a result, the person is left unprotected against a serious disease. But conspiracy theories also aim to respond to e...

  One month to the publication of Why Delusions Matter (Bloomsbury, 2023)!  This week I will present the main ideas in the book at an in-person event in Oxford, a lecture for the MSt in Practical Ethics, and at an online seminar in Poland , at the Institute of Applied Psychology, Faculty of Management and Social Communication, Jagiellonian University. Reflecting on what happens when we call another person's belief delusional helps us realise that we tend to disapprove of that belief because we regard it as implausible, unshakeable, and costly. But there is another dimension to delusional beliefs: for the person who reports the belief and defends it from challenges, the delusion may be a way to explain distressing or unexpected events and to find meaning.

Four years after the end of project PERFECT, funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant, I am happy to be involved in another major project, this time funded by the Wellcome Trust.  It's EPIC (another gorgeous acronym), a multidisciplinary project on epistemic injustice in healthcare made possible by a Wellcome Discovery Award and led by Havi Carel at the University of Bristol. Most of the work we will be contributing to at the University of Birmingham will be on epistemic injustice in mental health, with a special focus on psychosis, dementia, and depression. If you want to learn more about the project, check our provisional website, at epicproject.org.uk . We will soon advertise for research fellowships and other posts.

On Monday 20th February 2023 I will join Julian Baggini for a Salon event at St George's Bristol, entitled "How to to think like a philosopher" and hosted by Bristol Ideas.  Is it problematic to question everything? Are modesty and self-scrutiny important for thinking well?  Here is the podcast if you want to learn more:

On 5th and 6th January 2023, a workshop hosted by Birkbeck University and organised by Alex Grzankowski will explore the nature of happiness ( book here ).  My talk will focus on whether we can be delusional and happy at the same time. Here is the full (provisional) programme: January 5th  Lisa Bortolotti (Birmingham) — Can we be delusional and happy? Jonathan Mitchell (Cardiff) — Affective experiences of higher values Mark Textor (KCL) and Alex Grzankowski (Birkbeck) — Happiness is a mood January 6th MM McCabe (KCL) — Choosing lives Dan Haybron (Saint Louis University) — Happiness and human agency Luca Barlassina and Max Hayward (Sheffield) — Affect and satisfaction: from the folk concept of happiness to happiness (and back) Christine Vitrano (CUNY Brooklyn) — A life well lived: happiness and goodness

On 15th December 2022, I will participate in a special event at the University of Pavia , dedicated to the memory of Italian philosopher Eva Picardi, who taught me in Bologna in the 90s. During the day, two new publications will be presented and discussed by students and colleagues of Eva Picardi: Frege on Language, Logic and Psychology , Oxford University Press 2022. The Selected Writings of Eva Picardi. From Wittgenstein to American Neo-Pragmatism , Bloomsbury 2020/2022. These volumes gather Eva Picard's philosophical work and have been curated by Annalisa Coliva. From the poster of the event Villa sull'Adriatico by Salvatore Nocera