Dave Ward

…So he’d have a (complicated) answer to your q: for economic and cultural reasons, it came to seem to lots of people like the only thing moral truths could be were weird entities that we somehow intuit.

Not explicitly focused on that q, but the first chapters of MacIntyre’s After Virtue have his diagnosis of why anglophone moral philosophy got the way it did in the 20th C…

Fred Keijzer, The Sphex story: How the cognitive sciences kept repeating an old and questionable anecdote - PhilPapers The Sphex story is an anecdote about a female digger wasp that at first sight seems to act quite intelligently, but subsequently is shown to be a mere automaton that can ...

See also this cool paper by Fred Keijzer about how Dennett/Hofstadter have unfairly trashed the intellectual reputation of digger wasps: philpapers.org/rec/KEITHT

Seconding the Favela recommendation! Perhaps Sanneke de Haan’s ‘enactive psychiatry’ for the sense-making stuff - great intro to bioenactivism, then argues that it’s a uniquely useful/integrative framework for psychiatry. Or the ’cognition/consciousness/life’ chapters from ‘The Blind Spot’

Congrats! So nice to see some happy news of something in the world unfolding in roughly the way it should!

Giulio Ongaro, Outline for an Externalist Psychiatry (1): Or, How to Fully Realize the Biopsychosocial Model - PhilArchive The biopsychosocial (BPS) model in psychiatry has come under fire for being too vague to be of any practical use in the clinic. For many, its central flaw consists in lack ...

Been reading @giulio-ongaro.bsky.social's triptych of papers on prospects for an externalist biopsychosocial psychiatry with my MSc class this week. They are *really* good. 1/

philarchive.org/rec/ONGOFA-2

The Social World Is Something We Collectively Create Giulio Ongaro explores what this means for our approach to mental healthcare in a guest post and accompanying Q&A

All the papers are jam-packed with provocative and interesting ideas, and published alongside some great commentaries. Check em out! This interview with @awaisaftab.bsky.social is an excellent primer /FIN

www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/the-social...

Giulio Ongaro, Outline for an Externalist Psychiatry (3): Social Etiology and the Tension Between Constraints and the Possibilities of Construction - PhilArchive Any progress in shaping up an externalist psychiatry, so previous discussion suggested, must begin from questions about the ontology of social causation. So far, research and theory have adhered to a ...

Pt 3 considers challenges for developing a useful biopsychosocial psychiatry in industrialised capitalist societies. How can we construct new, shared frameworks of meaning for understanding ourselves and our problems in such societies? And how much would this help? /4

philarchive.org/rec/ONGOFA-3

Giulio Ongaro, Outline for an Externalist Psychiatry (2): An Anthropological Detour - PhilArchive Philosophical speculation about how psychiatric externalism might function in practice has yet to fully consider the multitude of externalist psychiatric systems that exist beyond the bounds of modern...

Pt 2 draws on Ongaro's fieldwork to argue that the medical practices of the Akha provide a template for how this might look - a web of medicinal, ritual and shamanic practices all housed in a culturally shared system of meanings 3/

philarchive.org/rec/ONGOFA

Central idea: the big challenge for biopsychosocial psychiatry isn't providing an integrative model of how bio, psycho and social dimensions interact. Progress is good here. It's providing a way of understanding the social dimension that is meaningful and empowering for patients and clinicians 2/

Giulio Ongaro, Outline for an Externalist Psychiatry (1): Or, How to Fully Realize the Biopsychosocial Model - PhilArchive The biopsychosocial (BPS) model in psychiatry has come under fire for being too vague to be of any practical use in the clinic. For many, its central flaw consists in lack ...

Been reading @giulio-ongaro.bsky.social's triptych of papers on prospects for an externalist biopsychosocial psychiatry with my MSc class this week. They are *really* good. 1/

philarchive.org/rec/ONGOFA-2

Flattered to be there, and in such excellent company!

Tempted to read, write or think anything about the free energy principle? Read Kate’s book first! The world would be a better place if everyone followed this simple rule.

P.s. I made my dad read one of your papers 🤓. ‘Thanks, very interesting,’ he said.

Don’t know why I only saw this now, but massive congrats! 🥳 Hope you’re loving it!

Ecological psychology = studying the mind in a way that the Gibsons would like. Interested to know if you have a different take? /end

Cognitive ethology = studying cognitive capacities and structures that produce animal behaviour (without caring too much about embedding context, and certainly not about pleasing Gibson)/2

I'm not a behavioural ecologist, cognitive ethologist or ecological psychologist, but my vague sense is: behavioural ecology = studying at animal behaviour and its relation to the environment (without caring much about cognitive underpinnings or pleasing Gibson)/1

(Lionel Terray, Conquistadors of the Useless)

Bright sun shining over a snowy alpine landscape, above the clouds

We rested a long time, gazing at the savage walls, hemmed with lace of snow. A mineral silence entered into us. In that enormous peace I felt that somehow, henceforward, nothing would truly count for me beyond this world of grandeur and purity where every corner held the promise of enchanted hours.

This absolute Banger of a book is available Open Access via your favourite search engine. Anyone into brains, science, or brain science should read.