Lisa Bortolotti - About me

Academic posts

I am Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham, affiliated with the Philosophy Department and with the Institute for Mental Health. I teach MA and MSc modules in the Philosophy and Ethics of Mental Health.

I am also Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ferrara, affiliated with the Department of Neurosciences and Rehabilitation. I teach Philosophy of Cognitive Sciences and Medical Humanities.

I am the Editor in Chief of the journal Philosophical Psychology (Taylor and Francis).

Research interests

My research is in the philosophy of the cognitive sciences. I write about the limitations of human cognition and human agency, investigating irrational beliefs, biases, delusions, and conspiracy theories. I am also interested in the philosophy of medicine and in biomedical ethics: to what extent rationality and agency impact on health and wellbeing, what the scope of medicine is, and how healthcare can become more epistemically just.

Education

Laurea

In 1997 I received my first degree in Philosophy (Laurea summa cum laude in Filosofia) at the Università di Bologna with a dissertation on conceptual relativism supervised by Eva Picardi. For five months during my degree I was an Erasmus student at the University of Leeds, focusing on the history and philosophy of science.

Masters

In 1998 I got an MA in Philosophy with distinction from King's College London where, supervised by Donald Gillies, I wrote a dissertation on the rationality of scientific revolutions. In 2000 I obtained the BPhil in Philosophy (University of Oxford) with a dissertation on the rationality debate in philosophy and the cognitive sciences under the supervision of Bill Newton-Smith.

PhD

After the BPhil, I moved to the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University in Canberra. I worked on my PhD under the supervision of Martin Davies in the Philosophy Programme. My thesis was a challenge to Donald Davidson's rationality constraint on the ascription of beliefs.

Previous work experience

During my PhD, I taught philosophy of science at the Australian National University and at the University of the Third Age in Canberra. Next, I taught A-level Philosophy in a sixth-form college and I tutored undergraduate students at the University of Cambridge in Philosophy of Mind, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science.

After being awarded the PhD in 2004, I worked for one year as a Research Associate on the EC-funded project EU-RECA (on the concept of research and the ethical regulation of research activities) coordinated by John Harris at the Centre for Social Ethics & Policy at the University of Manchester. During that time, I was also Honorary Lecturer in Bioethics at the Centre.

Next I joined the University of Birmingham, where I was Lecturer (2005-2008), Senior Lecturer (2008-2011), and Reader in Philosophy (2011-2013). I started working at the University of Ferrara in March 2025.

PROJECTS

PUBLIC PHILOSOPHY

PUBLICATIONS