•  98
    Phenomenology as a Resource for Patients
    Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 37 (2): 96-113. 2012.
    Patient support tools have drawn on a variety of disciplines, including psychotherapy, social psychology, and social care. One discipline that has not so far been used to support patients is philosophy. This paper proposes that a particular philosophical approach, phenomenology, could prove useful for patients, giving them tools to reflect on and expand their understanding of their illness. I present a framework for a resource that could help patients to philosophically examine their illness, it…Read more
  •  17
    What Philosophy Is
    with David Gamez
    A&C Black. 2004.
    What do we mean when we talk about philosophy today? How does philosophy relate to science, to politics, to literature? What methods does the modern philosopher use, and how does philosophy progress? Does philosophy differ from place to place? What can philosophy do for us? And what can it not do? This book, with contributions from such exciting and influential contemporary philosophers as Simon Blackburn, Michael Friedman, Simon Critchley and Manuel DeLanda, offers us a fascinating picture of t…Read more
  •  107
    The Phenomenology of Illness
    Oxford University Press UK. 2016.
    The experience of illness is a universal and substantial part of human existence. Like death, illness raises important philosophical issues. But unlike death, illness, and in particular the experience of being ill, has received little philosophical attention. In Phenomenology of Illness Havi Carel argues that the experience of illness has been wrongly neglected by philosophers and provides a distinctively philosophical account of illness. Using phenomenology, Carel explores how illness modifies …Read more
  •  37
    Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger argues that mortality is a fundamental structuring element in human life. The ordinary view of life and death regards them as dichotomous and separate. This book explains why this view is unsatisfactory and presents a new model of the relationship between life and death that sees them as interlinked. Using Heidegger's concept of being towards death and Freud's notion of the death drive, it demonstrates the extensive influence death has on everyday life and g…Read more
  •  251
    Bodily doubt
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 20 (7-8): 7-8. 2013.
    In this paper I explore the tacit underlying sense of bodily certainty that characterizes normal everyday embodied experience. I then propose illness as one instance in which this certainty breaks down and is replaced by bodily doubt. I characterize bodily doubt as radically modifying our experience in three ways: loss of continuity, loss of transparency, and loss of faith in one's body. I then discuss the philosophical insights that arise from the experience of bodily doubt. The paper uses a Hu…Read more
  •  372
    Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare: A Philosophical Analysis
    Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 17 (4): 529-540. 2014.
    In this paper we argue that ill persons are particularly vulnerable to epistemic injustice in the sense articulated by Fricker. Ill persons are vulnerable to testimonial injustice through the presumptive attribution of characteristics like cognitive unreliability and emotional instability that downgrade the credibility of their testimonies. Ill persons are also vulnerable to hermeneutical injustice because many aspects of the experience of illness are difficult to understand and communicate and …Read more
  •  75
    The Philosophical Role of Illness
    Metaphilosophy 45 (1): 20-40. 2014.
    This article examines the philosophical role of illness. It briefly surveys the philosophical role accorded to illness in the history of philosophy and explains why illness merits such a role. It suggests that illness modifies, and thus sheds light on, normal experience, revealing its ordinary and therefore overlooked structure. Illness also provides an opportunity for reflection by performing a kind of suspension (epoché) of previously held beliefs, including tacit beliefs. The article argues t…Read more
  •  190
    Phenomenology and its application in medicine
    Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 32 (1): 33-46. 2010.
    Phenomenology is a useful methodology for describing and ordering experience. As such, phenomenology can be specifically applied to the first person experience of illness in order to illuminate this experience and enable health care providers to enhance their understanding of it. However, this approach has been underutilized in the philosophy of medicine as well as in medical training and practice. This paper demonstrates the usefulness of phenomenology to clinical medicine. In order to describe…Read more
  •  10
    Film as philosophy
    with Greg Tuck
    The Philosophers' Magazine 50 30-31. 2010.
  •  13
    Bedside conversations
    The Philosophers' Magazine 60 94-98. 2013.
  •  150
    Epistemic Injustice in Psychiatry
    with Paul Crichton and Ian James Kidd
    Psychiatry Bulletin 41. 2017.
    Epistemic injustice is a harm done to a person in their capacity as an epistemic subject by undermining her capacity to engage in epistemic practices such as giving knowledge to others or making sense of one’s experiences. It has been argued that those who suffer from medical conditions are more vulnerable to epistemic injustice than the healthy. This paper claims that people with mental disorders are even more vulnerable to epistemic injustice than those with somatic illnesses. Two kinds of con…Read more
  •  12
    The problem of organ donation
    The Philosophers' Magazine 42 43-49. 2008.
    More people desperately require an organ than become donors themselves. When discussing organ donation, people mainly consider the question whether they want to donate, whereas empirically they are more likely to be on the receiving end. So it is rational for each of us to join the organ donor register and to agree to donate our relative’s organs, if we are ever in that situation.
  •  78
    Moral and Epistemic Ambiguity in Oedipus Rex
    Janus Head 9 (1): 91-109. 2006.
    This paper challenges the accepted interpretation of Oedipus Rex, which takes Oedipus’ ignorance of the relevant facts to be an established matter. I argue that Oedipus’ epistemic state is ambiguous, and that this in turn generates a moral ambiguity with respect to his actions. Because ignorance serves as a moral excuse, my demonstration that Oedipus was not ignorant bears significantly on the moral meaning of the play. I next propose to anchor this ambiguity in the Freudian notion of the uncons…Read more