Illness is often understood as a disruption of ordinary temporality, fracturing narrative continuity, constricting horizons of possibility, and immersing sufferers in the slow, uncertain rhythms of waiting. Drawing on phenomenology, existential philosophy, pathography, and East Asian wisdom traditions, this article examines the relationship between growing ill and growing still, being a patient...
Philosophy in medicine is often described through application: philosophical concepts are brought to bear on illness, clinical relationships, ethics, or education. Yet this language can obscure forms of inquiry in which clinical experience also reshapes philosophical questions. This paper develops a conceptual account of reciprocal clinical philosophizing: a bidirectional, open-ended, and...
A woman's chronic pain is controlled to a stable score, yet her sleep, her work, her singing, and her partnership have narrowed around her condition. Each clinical decision was defensible; what failed is the existential composition around them. This article proposes eudynamia as the concept bioethics lacks: the distributed activity through which possibilities are composed across the conditions...
Rehabilitation care concerns not only the restoration of function but also how persons live through disruption. Injury and illness may bring loss, uncertainty, altered dependence, changed self-understanding, and a changed horizon of life. Concepts such as coping and resilience capture important aspects of adaptation but do not fully clarify the inner work involved in bearing and inhabiting such...
Drawing on a genealogical analysis of the distinction between zoē (biological life as organic functioning) and bios (a distinctively human way of life shaped by meaning, orientation, and evaluative practice), the article reconceives bioethics as bios ethikos: ethical reflection on the conditions under which forms of life become meaningful and inhabitable. It introduces the notion of the...
Recent reports indicate that sustained interaction with conversational artificial intelligence (AI) systems can, in a small subset of users, contribute to the emergence or stabilisation of delusional experience. Existing accounts typically attribute such cases either to individual vulnerability or to failures of safety engineering. These explanations are incomplete. Drawing on phenomenology,...
Radical neurophenomenology offers new ways to re-thinking subjectivity and objectivity, and the relation between them. More specifically, radical neurophenomenology crucially relies on the notion of constitution to circumvent the pitfalls that were associated with older, dualistic frameworks. Building on existing work, our paper has two primary goals. First, we will argue that Merleau-Ponty's...
Research into traumatic memory has focused heavily upon re-experiencing symptoms (e.g. flashbacks). Features predominantly associated with complex trauma, such as gaps in the recollection of traumatic events, remain comparatively underexplored. In this article, I draw on the testimonies of survivors of complex trauma who participated in a survey informed by Phenomenologically Grounded...
Chronic pain is a common disorder with enormous sociomedical importance. A major part of primary and secondary costs of illness is caused by the various pain syndromes. Nociception - the sensory perception of a painful stimulus - is a complex process relying on an intricate system of anatomical, neurophysiological and biochemical networks. This applies even more so to pain - the state of...
Psychedelic-assisted Psychotherapy (PAP) combines the use of psychedelic compounds, such as psilocybin, with psychotherapy. PAP has shown some promise as a novel treatment for Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), and empirical research suggests that its efficacy turns on the altered states induced by psychedelic compounds. In this paper we draw on the literature of phenomenology to explain the...
People experiencing mental distress and illness are frequently on the receiving end of stigma, epistemic injustice, and social isolation. A range of strategies are required to alleviate the subsequent marginalisation. We ran a series 'philosophy of mind' workshops, in partnership with a third-sector mental health organisation with the aim of using philosophical techniques to challenge mental...
In the present paper, we discuss the ethics of compassionate psychedelic psychotherapy and argue that it can be morally permissible. When talking about psychedelics, we mean specifically two substances: psilocybin and MDMA. When administered under supportive conditions and in conjunction with psychotherapy, therapies assisted by these substances show promising results. However, given the...
In this paper our aim is to examine whether research conducted on human participants with LSD-25 (lysergic acid diethylamide) raises unique research ethical questions or demands particular concerns with regard to the design, conduct and follow-up of these studies, and should this be the case, explore and describe those issues. Our analysis is based on reviewing publications up to date which...
It is often claimed in parts of the psychiatric literature that neuroscientific research into the biological basis of mental disorder undermines dualism in the philosophy of mind. This paper shows that such a claim does not apply to all forms of dualism. Focusing on Kenneth Kendler's discussion of the mind-body problem in biological psychiatry, I argue that such criticism of dualism often...
In this paper, an attempt is made to develop an understanding of the essence of illness based on a reading of Martin Heidegger's pivotal work Being and Time. The hypothesis put forward is that a phenomenology of illness can be carried out through highlighting the concept of otherness in relation to meaningfulness. Otherness is to be understood here as a foreignness that permeates the ill life...
Scientific medicine has been successful by ways of an ever more detailed understanding and mastering of bodily functions and dysfunctions. Biomedical research promises new triumphs, but discontent with medical practice is all around. Since several decades this has been acknowledged and discussed. The philosophical traditions of phenomenology and hermeneutics have been proposed as promising ways...