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Projects

Contents

  1. 1 Work in progress
  2. 2 Current and recent collaborations
  3. 3 Completed projects

Short video where I talk about my research on delusions. Filmed by Stephen Rea for the University of Birmingham.  


Work in progress

The concept of irrationality: a forthcoming book for Polity Press

I am writing a book on irrationality, and on the importance of judgements of irrationality for the moral treatment of others and for policy decisions. The book will be published by Polity Press in their Key Concepts Series.


Current and recent collaborations

Logic and the Unconscious Mind led by Luis Augusto, University of Porto.

Consortium on Bioethics, Sexuality and Gender Identity co-directed by Lance Wahlert and Autumn Fiester, University of Pennsylvania.

Wellcome Trust Project on Autonomy and Mental Health led by Lubomira Radoilska, University of Cambridge.
 
AHRC-funded project on Emotions and Feelings in Psychiatric Illness, coordinated by Matthew Ratcliffe and Tony Atkinson, University of Durham.
 
AHRC Network on The Concept of Health, Illness and Disease managed by Havi Carel, University of the West of England and Rachel Cooper, University of Lancaster.
 
Research group Dying and Death in the 21st Century, which is a sub-group of The End of Life Collaborative, led by Colette Clifford, School of Health Sciences, University of Birmingham.


Completed projects

2011 Wellcome Trust funded project: Rationality and Sanity

My project entitled "Rationality and Sanity: Implications of a Diagnosis of Mental Illness for Autonomy as Self Governance" was funded by the Wellcome Trust with a Research Expenses Grant (January-June 2011). I looked at the relationship between rationality and sanity and its consequences for diagnosis in psychiatry. This was the starting point in order to then explore the notion of autonomy as self-governance and distinguish between two questions: (a) whether one has the capacity to govern oneself; and (b) whether one is successful at governing oneself. In this context, I explored the philosophical literature on the right not to know, especially when the object of knowledge is information about oneself obtained via genetic testing. I also wrote a guest post for the Wellcome Trust blog on the right not to know in the context of psychiatric disorders.

Four outputs of the project can already be read open access: 

2008 Endeavour Research Fellowship

From July to December 2008 I was Endeavour Research Fellow at the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science (MACCS) at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, working on a project on rationality and self-knowledge in delusions. The Fellowship was funded by the Department of Science, Education and Training of the Australian Government. In my time at Macquarie I participated in the Delusions and Hypnosis reading group together with Max Coltheart, Robyn Langdon, Amanda Barnier, Rochelle Cox, and other philosophers and psychologists working on delusions. As a result of my fruitful collaboration with researchers at MACCS, I was asked to be Honorary Associate of the Centre.

Here are two papers co-authored with staff at MACCS:
  • L Bortolotti, R Cox and A Barnier (2012). Can we recreate delusions in the laboratory? Philosophical Psychology 25 (1), 109-131.
  • L Bortolotti and R Cox (2009). Faultless ignorance: strengths and limitations of epistemic definitions of confabulation. Consciousness & Cognition 18 (4), 952-965.

2009 AHRC-funded leave

From January to end of April 2009 I was on AHRC-funded leave to complete a number of articles on delusions and a monograph for Oxford University Press in the International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry Series.  My research question was: Are ownership and authorship of thoughts necessary for intentionality and rationality? The monograph, entitled Delusions and Other Irrational Beliefs, was published in November 2009 and contributes both to the debate on the doxastic conception of delusions and to the literature on belief ascription. I was awarded the American Philosophical Association book prize for the monograph in December 2011.
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