Special issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology
Guest Editors
Alexandre Billon (Université de Lille Nord de France)
Francesca Garbarini (Università degli Studi di Torino)
Invited Contributors
José Luis Bermudez (Texas A&M University)
Philip Gerrans (University of Adelaide)
Daniele Romano (Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca)
Schedule
Submission Deadline: September 1st 2016
Self-awareness is the kind of awareness of ourselves that underlies our standard, first-personal attributions of conscious states and actions. It displays various epistemic, semantic and psychological features that have drawn the attention of philosophers at least since Descartes.
It is widely believed that self-awareness is impaired in patients suffering from schizophrenia, and the study of such patients has been one of the most important sources for the empirical study of self-awareness. However, schizophrenic patients also suffer from deficits that may have nothing to do with self-awareness and it is not clear that they constitute the best probe for self-awareness. On the other hand, lesser studied conditions, such as depersonalization, the Cotard syndrome, somatoparaphrenia, or even split-brain, Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) and other ‘dissociative’ conditions seem to involve specific impairment of self-awareness and have been widely neglected in the literature on the topic.
In recent years, neuroscientists have also designed new paradigms, contrasting the treatment of self-related vs. non-self-related stimuli, purported to study self-awareness in the healthy. Are these paradigms, the study of schizophrenia, depersonalization, split-brain, Cotard syndrome MPD, etc. equally legitimate ways to investigate self-awareness? Do they converge? If so, what picture of self-awareness do they suggest? Or do they target different kinds of self-awareness?
The purpose of this special issue is to unite philosophers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and neuroscientists in order to further our understanding of the disorders of self-awareness. We particularly welcome submissions that seek to clarify or question the significance of various disorders and experimental paradigms for the study of self-awareness or that purport to disentangle the use of “self-awareness” and the related “sense of ownership” “sense of agency” “sense of the self” and “self-consciousness” in the literature.
Potential issues to be addressed include but are not limited to:
• The varieties of self-awarenesses and its disorders. What are the different kinds or facets of self-awareness? How are they related? In which psychiatric conditions do they break down? What is the relationship between disorders such as schizophrenia, depersonalization, the Cotard syndrome and pain asymbolia?
• Understanding specific disorders of self-awareness. Can a better understanding of self-awareness help us understand some puzzling psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia, split-brain, MPD, the Cotard syndrome or depersonalization?
• Probing self-awareness. What are the best empirical probes for self-awareness. Can the study of self-related processing really aid our understanding of self-awareness? How do patients suffering from various disorders of self-awareness process self-related stimuli? What is the relationship between self-awareness and the ‘default mode’ neural network?
• Lessons from psychopathology. What can the psychopathology of self-awareness teach us about the self, experiences and actions, or the phenomenology, epistemology and psychosemantics of self-attributions ?
How to submit
Prospective authors should register at: https://www.editorialmanager. com/ropp to obtain a login and select “Pathologies of Self-Awareness” as an article type.
Manuscripts should be approximately 8,000 words. Submissions should follow the author guidelines available on the journal’s website https://www.springer.com/ philosophy/journal/13164.
Contact
For any queries, please email: alexandre.billon@univ-lille3.fr