"Multiple Truths: Reality, Perception and Belief."
The YRT Team announces the next Faculty Roundtable at Yale to be held on Tuesday, Sept. 25, 2018. The topic will be presented by Tyrone Cannon. He will provide context for the faculty participants to consider some of the ways that his research into schizophrenia can provide us with insights into "reality testing" in our scientific work, teaching and daily lives. Participants will be encouraged to consider how healthy community and civil discourse can be affected and encouraged by these insights. Yale Philosophy's Michael Della Rocca will highlight the ways that "belief systems" impact our understanding of the various sorts of cognitive data we encounter. Together they will ask if the lessons from their fields can help us develop future generations of scholars who can overcome the deep social divisions of the post-2016 west.
Tyrone Cannon is the Clark L. Hull Professor of Psychology. He focuses his research on the interplay between psychological-level phenomena and neurobiological mechanisms as they relate to disturbances of perception, belief, motivation, and emotional processing in people with mental illness, principally schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
Cannon directs the Clinical Neuroscience Laboratory in the Department of Psychology. The primary goals of the laboratory are to elucidate genetic, neural, and behavioral mechanisms underlying psychotic forms of mental illness — principally schizophrenia and bipolar disorder — and to develop effective intervention and prevention strategies targeting these mechanisms. The laboratory’s approaches include structural, functional, and metabolic brain imaging; neurocognitive assessment; and quantitative and molecular genetics. These approaches are applied in the context of twin studies, longitudinal developmental studies, birth cohort studies, and randomized, controlled trials.
A graduate of Dartmouth College, Cannon earned his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Southern California. He began his teaching career at the University of Pennsylvania before serving as the Staglin Family Professor of Major Mental Illness at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA). At UCLA, Cannon was also director of the Staglin Center for the Assessment and Prevention of Prodromal States and the Staglin Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, both based in the Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the Geffen School of Medicine. He joined the Yale faculty in 2012 as a professor of psychology and of psychiatry.
Michael Della Rocca is the Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy and an authority on the history of early modern philosophy (particularly rationalism) and metaphysics. He is also interested in philosophy of mind and epistemology.
He is the author of “Spinoza,” part of the Routledge Philosophers Series, and “Representation and the Mind-Body Problem in Spinoza.” He is the editor of “The Oxford Handbook of Spinoza.” His many articles have explored such topics as essentialism and judgment and will, as well as the philosophies of Spinoza.
A graduate of Harvard University, Della Rocca joined the Yale faculty in 1991 as an assistant professor after earning his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of California-Berkeley. He was named a full professor in 2000, and he has chaired the Department of Philosophy since 2001.
The Faculty Roundtable is sponsored by the Rivendell Institute at Yale University.
