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879Healthcare Practice, Epistemic Injustice, and NaturalismRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 84 1-23. 2018.Ill persons suffer from a variety of epistemically-inflected harms and wrongs. Many of these are interpretable as specific forms of what we dub pathocentric epistemic injustices, these being ones that target and track ill persons. We sketch the general forms of pathocentric testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, each of which are pervasive within the experiences of ill persons during their encounters in healthcare contexts and the social world. What’s epistemically unjust might not be only age…Read more
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728Pathocentric epistemic injustice and conceptions of healthIn Benjamin R. Sherman & Stacey Goguen (eds.), Overcoming Epistemic Injustice: Social and Psychological Perspectives, Rowman & Littlefield International. pp. 153-168. 2019.In this paper, we argue that certain theoretical conceptions of health, particularly those described as ‘biomedical’ or ‘naturalistic’, are viciously epistemically unjust. Drawing on some recent work in vice epistemology, we identity three ways that abstract objects (such as theoretical conceptions, doctrines, or stances) can be legitimately described as epistemically vicious. If this is right, then robust reform of individuals, social systems, and institutions would not be enough to secure epi…Read more
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344Robert A. Hinde. Why Gods Persist: A Scientific Approach to Religion 2nd ed., Routledge, 2010European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 5 (2): 172--175. 2013.
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724Adversity, Wisdom, and ExemplarismJournal of Value Inquiry 52 (4): 379-393. 2018.According to a venerable ideal, the core aim of philosophical practice is wisdom. The guiding concern of the ancient Greek, Indian, and Chinese traditions was the nature of the good life for human beings and the nature of reality. Central to these traditions is profound recognition of the subjection to adversities intrinsic to human life. I consider paradigmatic exemplars of wisdom, from ancient Western and Asian traditions, and the ways that experiences of adversity shaped their life. The sugge…Read more
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556Feyerabend, Pluralism, and ParapsychologyBulletin of the Parapsychological Association 5 (1): 5-9. 2018.Feyerabend is well-known as a pluralist, and notorious for his defences of, and sympathetic references to, heterodox subjects, such as parapsychology. Focusing on the latter, I ask how we should understand the relationship between the pluralism and the defences, drawing on Marcello Truzzi's and Martin Gardner's remarks on Feyerabend along the way.
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711Epistemic Courage and the Harms of Epistemic LifeIn Heather D. Battaly (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology, Routledge. pp. 244-255. 2018.Since subjection to harm is an intrinsic feature of our social and epistemic lives, there is a perpetual need for individual and collective agents with the virtue of epistemic courage. In this chapter, I survey some of the main issues germane to this virtue, such as the nature of courage and of harm, the range of epistemic activities that can manifest courage, and the status of epistemic courage as a collective and as a professional virtue.
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785Confucianism, Curiosity, and Moral Self-CultivationIn Ilhan Inan, Lani Watson, Dennis Whitcomb & Safiye Yigit (eds.), The Moral Psychology of Curiosity, Rowman & Littlefield International. pp. 97-116. 2018.I propose that Confucianism incorporates a latent commitment to the closely related epistemic virtues of curiosity and inquisitiveness. Confucian praise of certain people, practices, and dispositions is only fully intelligible if these are seen as exercises and expressions of epistemic virtues, of which curiosity and inquisitiveness are the obvious candidates. My strategy is to take two core components of Confucian ethical and educational practice and argue that each presupposes a specific virtu…Read more
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15Life, "Technics", and the Decline of the WestThe Berlin Review of Books 00-00. 2017.An essay review of the Routledge Revival edition of Oswald Spengler, 'Man and Technics (1932)
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6Illness as Transformative ExperienceThe Lancet 388. 2017.We propose that certain forms of chronic illness can be transformative experiences, in the sense described by L.A. Paul.
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184Epistemic Corruption and Manufactured Doubt: The Case of Climate SciencePublic Affairs Quarterly 31 (3): 165-187. 2017.Criticism plays an essential role in the growth of scientific knowledge. In some cases, however, criticism can have detrimental effects; for example, it can be used to ‘manufacture doubt’ for the purpose of impeding public policy making on issues such as tobacco consumption and greenhouse gas emissions (e.g., Oreskes & Conway 2010). In this paper, we build on previous work by Biddle and Leuschner (2015) who argue that criticism that meets certain conditions can be epistemically detrimental. We e…Read more
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155Capital Epistemic VicesSocial Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6 (8): 11-16. 2017.I offer a way to reflect on and taxonomise the vices of the mind. This is the idea of capital vices, an idea that has, historically, been mainly confined to moral and spiritual character traits, but is able to play a role in vice epistemology—or so I propose.
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15Epistemic Injustice in Medicine and HealthcareIn Kidd Ian James & Carel Havi (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, Routledge. pp. 336-346. 2017.We survey several ways in which the structures and norms of medicine and healthcare can generate epistemic injustice.
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926Epistemic Corruption and EducationEpisteme 16 (2): 220-235. 2019.I argue that, although education should have positive effects on students’ epistemic character, it is often actually damaging, having bad effects. Rather than cultivating virtues of the mind, certain forms of education lead to the development of the vices of the mind - it is therefore epistemically corrupting. After sketching an account of that concept, I offer three illustrative case studies.
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382Spiritual exemplarsInternational Journal of Philosophy and Theology 79 (4): 410-424. 2018.This paper proposes that spiritual persons are an excellent focus for the study of 'living religion' and offers a methodology for doing so. By ‘spiritual persons’, I have in mind both exemplary figures – like Jesus or the Buddha – and the multitude of ‘ordinary’ spiritual persons whose lives are led in aspiration to the spiritual goods the exemplars manifest (enlightenment, say, or holiness). I start with Linda Zagzebski's recent argument that moral persuasion primarily occurs through encounters…Read more
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817Inevitability, contingency, and epistemic humilityStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 55 12-19. 2016.I reject both (a) inevitabilism about the historical development of the sciences and (b) what Ian Hacking calls the "put up or shut up" argument against those who make contingentist claims. Each position is guilty of a lack of humility about our epistemic capacities.
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163Epistemic Injustice and ReligionIn Ian James Kidd & José Medina (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, Routledge. pp. 386-396. 2017.This chapter charts various ways that religious persons and groups can be perpetrators and victims of epistemic injustice. The practices of testifying and interpreting experiences take a range of distinctive forms in religious life, for instance, if the testimonial practices require a special sort of religious accomplishment, such as enlightenment, or if proper understanding of religious experiences is only available to those with authentic faith. But it is also clear that religious communities …Read more
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18Dean Rickles, The Ashgate Companion to Contemporary Philosophy of Physics Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 30 (3): 212-214. 2010.
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50Biopiracy and the Ethics of Medical Heritage: The Case of India’s Traditional Knowledge Digital Library’Journal of Medical Humanities 33 (3): 175-183. 2012.Medical humanities have a unique role to play in combating biopiracy. This argument is offered both as a response to contemporary concerns about the ‘value’ and ‘impact’ of the arts and humanities and as a contribution to ongoing legal, political, and ethical debates regarding the status and protection of medical heritage. Medical humanities can contribute to the documentation and safeguarding of a nation or people’s medical heritage, understood as a form of intangible cultural heritage. In so d…Read more
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85Wittgenstein and Scientism (edited book)Routledge. 2014.Wittgenstein criticised prevailing attitudes toward the sciences. The target of his criticisms was ‘scientism’: what he described as ‘the overestimation of science’. This collection is the first study of Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism - a theme in his work that is clearly central to his thought yet strikingly neglected by the existing literature. The book explores the philosophical basis of Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism; how this anti-scientism helps us understand Wittgenstein’s philosophical aim…Read more
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69The Contingency of Science and the Future of PhilosophyIn Eric Dietrich & Zach Weber (eds.), Philosophy’s Future, . pp. 312--328. 2011.Contemporary metaphilosophical debates on the future of philosophy invariably include references to the natural sciences. This is wholly understandable given the cognitive and cultural authority of the sciences and their contributions to philosophical thought and practice. However such appeals to the sciences should be moderated by reflections on contingency of sciences. Using the work of contemporary historians and philosophers of science, I argue that an awareness of the radical contingency of…Read more
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2Reappraising FeyerabendStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 57 00-000. 2016.This volume is devoted to a reappraisal of the philosophy of Paul Feyerabend. It has four aims. The first is to reassess his already well-known work from the 1960s and 1970s in light of contemporary developments in the history and philosophy of science. The second is to explore themes in his neglected later work, including recently published and previously unavailable writings. The third is to assess the contributions that Feyerabend can make to contemporary debate, on topics such as perspectivi…Read more
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75Oswald Spengler, Technology, and Human NatureThe European Legacy 17 (1). 2012.Oswald Spengler (1880?1936) is a neglected figure in the history of European philosophical thought. This article examines the philosophical anthropology developed in his later work, particularly his Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life (1931). My purpose is twofold: the first is to argue that Spengler's later thought is a response to criticisms of the ?pessimism? of his earlier work, The Decline of the West (1919). Man and Technics overcomes this charge by providing a novel p…Read more
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Feyerabend on the Ineffability of RealityIn Asa Kasher & Jeanine Diller (eds.), Models of God and Other Ultimate Realities, Kluwer Academic Publishers. 2013.This paper explores the account of ‘ultimate reality’ developed in the later philosophy of Paul Feyerabend. The paper has five main parts, this introduction being the first. Part two surveys Feyerabend’s later work, locates it relative to his more familiar earlier work in the philosophy of science, and identifies the motivations informing his interest in ‘ultimate reality’. Part three offers an account of Feyerabend’s later metaphysics, focusing on the account given in his final book, Conquest o…Read more
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74Feyerabend on Science and EducationJournal of Philosophy of Education 47 (3): 407-422. 2013.This article offers a sympathetic interpretation of Paul Feyerabend's remarks on science and education. I present a formative episode in the development of his educational ideas—the ‘Berkeley experience'—and describe how it affected his views on the place of science within modern education. It emerges that Feyerabend arrived at a conception of education closely related to that of Michael Oakeshott and Martin Heidegger—that of education as ‘releasement’. Each of those three figures argued that th…Read more
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1Doing Science an Injustice: Midgley on ScientismIn Ian James Kidd & Liz McKinnell (eds.), Science and the Self: Animals, Evolution, and Ethics: Essays in Honour of Mary Midgley, Routledge. pp. 151-167. 2015.In this chapter, I offer an account of Midgley‘s critique of scientism that converges on the claim that, among its many faults, scientism is objectionable because it does science an injustice
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934Phenomenology of Illness, Philosophy, and LifeStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 62 56-62. 2017.An essay review of Havi Carel, 'Phenomenology of Illness' (OUP 2015).
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118Why did Feyerabend Defend Astrology? Integrity, Virtue, and the Authority of ScienceSocial Epistemology 30 (4): 464-482. 2016.This paper explores the relationship between epistemic integrity, virtue, and authority by offering a virtue epistemological reading of the defences of non-scientific beliefs, practices, and traditions in the writings of Paul Feyerabend. I argue that there was a robust epistemic rationale for those defences and that it can inform contemporary reflection on the epistemic authority of the sciences. Two common explanations of the purpose of those defences are rejected as lacking textual support. A …Read more
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95Was Feyerabend a Postmodernist?International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 30 (1): 55-68. 2016.ABSTRACTThis article asks whether the philosophy of Paul K. Feyerabend can be reasonably classified as postmodernist, a label applied to him by friends and foes alike. After describing some superficial similarities between the style and content of both Feyerabend’s and postmodernist writings, I offer three more robust characterisations of postmodernism in terms of relativism, ‘incredulity to metanarratives’, and ‘depthlessness’. It emerges that none of these characterisations offers a strong jus…Read more
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29Renewing the Senses: A Study of the Philosophy and Theology of the Spiritual LifePhilosophical Quarterly 64 (255): 356-358. 2014.Review of Mark Wynn's book, Renewing the Senses: A Study of the Philosophy and Theology of the Spiritual Life