Philip Gerrans

University of Adelaide, Philosophy, Faculty Member

I'm interested in the relationship between cognitive neuroscience and psychology. I started out working on autism and theory of mind and issues in developmental psychology. I then became interested in psychiatry, especially delusions, writing a book, Measure of Madness, about the relationship between fundamental neuroscience and psychology and philosophy. I argued there that recent evidence from cognitive neuroscience supports the idea that delusions are essentially story fragments generated by neural systems which evolved to provide a subjective narrative context for experiences. This view contrasts with a view of delusions as causal explanations of experience. I explored the consequences of that contrast for integrative theories of cognitive function. I have an ongoing collaboration with researchers at the Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences which informs my research into connections between emotional processes and self representation. Depersonalisation disorder and personality disorders are a focus of this research, which links up with much earlier work I did on the Cotard delusion ( in which people say they have disappeared or no longer exist). I think that that project will lead back to developmental psychology, since it seems many disorders have a source in the developmental relationship between emotional regulation and other aspects of cognition. The philosophical approach to the mind I find most congenial is exemplified in the work of people like Jesse Prinz, Kim Sterelny and Dan Sperber.
Phone: 61 08 8303 5297
Address: Department of Philosophy
University of Adelaide
Adelaide SA 5005
AUSTRALIA

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Papers

Aesthetic Experience in the Evolutionary Perspective

Negli ultimi vent’anni, un ampio spettro di discipline è stato mobilitato nella formulazione di m... more Negli ultimi vent’anni, un ampio spettro di discipline è stato mobilitato nella formulazione di modelli teorici e sperimentali in grado di rispondere alle principali domande che emergono quando si cerca di ripensare l’estetica in ottica evoluzionistica: esiste una facoltà estetica? Qual è l’origine della grandi produzioni artistiche del Paleolitico superiore? Che ruolo gioca l’attitudine estetica nel lungo processo di evoluzione dell’Homo sapiens? L’esperienza estetica è un adattamento, un exaptation, un by-product o un tratto culturale? Attraverso il contributo di autori che provengono da tradizioni e discipline differenti, questo fascicolo della Rivista di estetica mira a raccogliere talune sfide poste dall’estetica evoluzionistica e a contribuire al processo di riconfigurazione dell’estetica tradizionale

The psychophysiology of everyday life

Seeing Double: Illusions of Identity in Delusional Disorders

People with the Capgras delusion typically believe that a familiar person (typically a spouse or ... more People with the Capgras delusion typically believe that a familiar person (typically a spouse or close relative) has been replaced by someone else who is perceptually indistinguishable from the familiar. An influential explanation within Cognitive Neuropsychiatry argues that the content of the delusion preserves the content of perceptual experience evoked by presence of the familiar (Ellis, 1998). In effect that the delusional subject “sees” a different person who appears identical to the familiar. This is puzzling. If the double is qualitatively identical to (that is has all the same perceptible properties as) the familiar why is she not perceived as the familiar?

Depersonalization Disorder, Affective Processing and Predictive Coding

Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2018

Philip Gerrans

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