•  92
    How do people understand the concepts of mental health and disorder? The objective of this paper is to examine the impact of several factors on people’s judgments about whether a condition constitutes a mental disorder or a healthy state. Specifically, this study examines the impact of the source of the condition, its outcome, individual valuation (i.e., the value the individual attaches to the condition), and group valuation (i.e., the value the relevant group attaches to the condition). While …Read more
  •  53
    Could Dehumanization Be Perceptual?
    In Kronfeldner, M.E. (2020) Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization, . 2021.
    A large part of the contemporary literature on dehumanization is committed to three ideas: (a) dehumanization involves some degree of denial of humanness, (b) such denial is to be comprehended in mental terms, and (c) whatever exact mechanisms underlie the denial of humanness, they belong in the realm of post-perceptual processing. This chapter examines (c) and argues that the awareness of minds might belong to perceptual processing. This paves the way for the possibility that dehumanization mig…Read more
  • Science, Medicine, and the Aims of Inquiry
    Cambridge University Press. forthcoming.
    This book reassesses current criticisms of medicine, offers an account of its nature and aim, and suggests solutions to challenges.
  •  94
    Debates about the genuine disease status of controversial diseases rely on intuitions about a range of factors. Adopting tools from experimental philosophy, this paper explores some of the factors that influence judgments about whether low sexual desire should be considered a disease and whether it should be medically treated. Drawing in part on some assumptions underpinning a divide in the literature between viewing low sexual desire as a genuine disease and seeing it as improperly medicalized,…Read more
  •  489
    Body Checking in Anorexia Nervosa: from Inquiry to Habit
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1-18. forthcoming.
    Body checking, characterized by the repeated visual or physical inspection of particular parts of one’s own body (e.g. thighs, waist, or upper arms) is one of the most prominent behaviors associated with eating disorders, particularly Anorexia Nervosa (AN). In this paper, we explore the explanatory potential of the Recalcitrant Fear Model of AN (RFM) in relation to body checking. We argue that RFM, when combined with certain plausible auxiliary hypotheses about the cognitive and epistemic roles …Read more
  •  191
    Philosophical accounts denying that temporal passage is an objective feature of reality face an explanatory challenge with respect to why it appears to us as though time passes. Recently, two solutions have surfaced. Cognitive illusionism claims that people experience the passage of time due to their belief that time passes. Cognitive error theory claims that we do not experience the passage of time, but hold the belief that we do, which we have acquired through making an inference from the prio…Read more
  •  195
    Proponents of manipulation arguments against compatibilism hold that manipulation scope (how many agents are manipulated) and manipulation type (whether the manipulator intends that an agent perform a particular action) do not impact judgments about free will and moral responsibility. Many opponents of manipulation arguments agree that manipulation scope has no impact but hold that manipulation type does. Recent work by Latham and Tierney (2022, 2023) found that people's judgments were sensitive…Read more
  •  1000
    Curiosity and Zetetic Style in ADHD
    Philosophical Psychology. forthcoming.
    While research on Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has traditionally focused on cognitive and behavioral deficits, there is increasing interest in exploring possible resources associated with the disorder. In this paper, we argue that the attention-patterns associated with ADHD can be understood as expressing an alternative style of inquiry, or “zetetic” style, characterized mainly by a lower barrier for becoming curious and engaging in inquiry, and a weaker disposition to regulat…Read more
  •  203
    The Aim of Medicine. Sanocentricity and the Autonomy Thesis
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (4): 720-745. 2023.
    Recent criticisms of medicine converge on fundamental questions about the aim of medicine. The main task of this paper is to propose an account of the aim of medicine. Discussing and rejecting the initially plausible proposal according to which medicine is pathocentric, the paper presents and defends the Autonomy Thesis, which holds that medicine is not pathocentric, but sanocentric, aiming to promote health with the final aim to enhance autonomy. The paper closes by considering the objection th…Read more
  •  82
    The continuity of inquiry and normative philosophy of science
    Metaphilosophy 52 (5): 655-667. 2021.
    This paper aims to contribute to debates about the nature of philosophical inquiry and its relation to science. The starting point is the Discontinuity View (DV), which holds that philosophy is discontinuous with science. Upon critically engaging two lines of argument in favor of DV, the paper presents and defends the Continuity View (CV), according to which philosophy and science are continuous forms of inquiry. The critical engagement sheds light on continuities between philosophical and scien…Read more
  •  133
    Understanding in Medicine
    Erkenntnis. 2023.
    This paper aims to clarify the nature of understanding in medicine. The first part describes in more detail what it means to understand something and links a type of understanding (i.e., objectual understanding) to explanations. The second part proceeds to investigate what objectual understanding of a disease (i.e., biomedical understanding) requires by considering the case of scurvy from the history of medi- cine. The main hypothesis is that grasping a mechanistic explanation of a condi- tion i…Read more
  •  23
    Understanding in Medicine
    Erkenntnis 1-25. forthcoming.
    This paper aims to clarify the nature of understanding in medicine. The first part describes in more detail what it means to understand something and links a type of understanding (i.e., objectual understanding) to explanations. The second part proceeds to investigate what objectual understanding of a disease (i.e., biomedical understanding) requires by considering the case of scurvy from the history of medicine. The main hypothesis is that grasping a mechanistic explanation of a condition is ne…Read more
  •  205
    "The great mixing machine”: multisensory integration and brain-breath coupling in the cerebral cortex.
    with Heck Detlef
    Pflügers Archiv - European Journal of Physiology 475 5-14. 2022.
    It is common to distinguish between “holist” and “reductionist” views of brain function, where the former envisions the brain as functioning as an indivisible unit and the latter as a collection of distinct units that serve different functions. Opposing reductionism, a number of researchers have pointed out that cortical network architecture does not respect functional boundaries, and the neuroanatomist V. Braitenberg proposed to understand the cerebral cortex as a “great mixing machine” of neur…Read more
  •  377
    The DSM‐5 highlights two essential psychological features of anorexia nervosa (AN): recalcitrant fear of gaining weight and body image disturbance. Prominent accounts grant false beliefs about body weight and shape a central role in the explanation of AN behavior. In this article, we propose a stronger emphasis on recalcitrant fear. We show that such fear can explain AN behavior without the intermediary of a false belief, and thus without the associated explanatory burdens and conceptual difficu…Read more
  •  89
    The criticism of medicine at the end of its “golden age”
    Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 43 (5): 401-419. 2022.
    Medicine is increasingly subject to various forms of criticism. This paper focuses on dominant forms of criticism and offers a better account of their normative character. It is argued that together, these forms of criticism are comprehensive, raising questions about both medical science and medical practice. Furthermore, it is shown that these forms of criticism mainly rely on standards of evaluation that are assumed to be internal to medicine and converge on a broader question about the aim of…Read more
  •  902
    Respiratory rhythms of the predictive mind
    with Micah Allen and Detlef H. Heck
    Psychological Review (4): 1066-1080. 2022.
    Respiratory rhythms sustain biological life, governing the homeostatic exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Until recently, however, the influence of breathing on the brain has largely been overlooked. Yet new evidence demonstrates that the act of breathing exerts a substantive, rhythmic influence on perception, emotion, and cognition, largely through the direct modulation of neural oscillations. Here, we synthesize these findings to motivate a new predictive coding model of respiratory brain …Read more
  •  18
    Naturalism, Disease, and Levels of Functional Description
    Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 47 (3): 482-493. 2022.
    The paper engages Christopher Boorse’s Bio-Statistical Theory. In its current form, BST runs into a significant challenge. For BST to account for its central tenet—that lower-level part-dysfunction is sufficient for higher-level pathology—it must provide criteria for how to decide which lower-level parts are the ones to be analyzed for health or pathology. As BST is a naturalistic theory, such choices must be based solely on naturalistic considerations. An argument is provided to show that, if B…Read more
  •  599
    It is widely agreed that obsessive-compulsive disorder involves irrationality. But where in the complex of states and processes that constitutes OCD should this irrationality be located? A pervasive assumption in both the psychiatric and philosophical literature is that the seat of irrationality is located in the obsessive thoughts characteristic of OCD. Building on a puzzle about insight into OCD (Taylor 2022), we challenge this pervasive assumption, and argue instead that the irrationality of …Read more
  •  6
    Medicine as science. Systematicity and demarcation
    Synthese 199 (1-2): 3783-3804. 2021.
    While medicine is solidly grounded on scientific areas such as biology and chemistry, some argue that it is in its essence not a science at all. With medicine playing a substantial societal role, addressing questions about the scientific nature of medicine is of obvious urgency. This paper takes on such a task and starts by consulting the literature on the “demarcation” problem in the philosophy of science. Learning from failures of earlier approaches, it proposes that we adopt a Deflated Approa…Read more
  • Practice-guided public health philosophy
    Health Promotion International 36. 2021.
    Although highly relevant, philosophical theory and philosophical competences are rarely integrated in empirical public health research. We suggest a variant of applied philosophy that is valuable for the development and improvement of public health research. We call it practice-guided public health philosophy because: (i) research questions derive from public health challenges, i.e. real-life concerns that relate to the prevention of disease or the promotion of health and well-being, (ii) the ul…Read more
  •  23
    While medicine is solidly grounded on scientific areas such as biology and chemistry, some argue that it is in its essence not a science at all. With medicine playing a substantial societal role, addressing questions about the scientific nature of medicine is of obvious urgency. This paper takes on such a task and starts by consulting the literature on the “demarcation” problem in the philosophy of science. Learning from failures of earlier approaches, it proposes that we adopt a Deflated Approa…Read more
  •  11
    Critical social philosophy, Honneth and the role of primary intersubjectivity
    European Journal of Social Theory 15 (2): 243-260. 2012.
    Gesellschaftskritik, or social philosophy that aims to provide firm criticism of pathological social practices, requires normatively grounded evaluative principles. In this article, we assess different possibilities for such principles with focus on a model that takes specific patterns of intersubjective interaction as its point of reference. We argue that in order to understand the full significance of this ‘intersubjective turn’ for social philosophy, and to strengthen the normative foundation…Read more
  •  27
    In this paper we engage in a reciprocal analysis of situated cognition and the notion of ‘meshed architecture’ as found in performance studies (Christensen, Sutton & McIlwain 2016). We argue that the model of meshed architecture can operate as a tool that enables us to better understand the notion of situated cognition. Reciprocally, by means of this new understanding of situation we develop a richer conception of meshed architecture. This enriched notion of a meshed architecture includes affect…Read more
  •  18
    Self-Deception, Self- Knowledge, and Autobiography
    In Christopher Cowley (ed.), The Philosophy of Autobiography, University of Chicago Press. pp. 141-155. 2015.
  •  47
    Grief is often described as characterized by a particular emotional response to another person’s death. While this is true of paradigm cases, we argue that a broader notion of grief allows accommodating forms of this emotional experience that deviate from the paradigmatic case. The bulk of the paper explores such a nonparadigmatic form of grief, anticipatory-vicarious grief, which is typically triggered by pondering the inevitability of our own death. We argue that AV-grief is a particular moral…Read more
  •  38
    Challenges to the Dimensional Approach
    Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 26 (1): 77-79. 2019.
    The publication of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has stirred many emotions both inside and outside of the psychiatric community. But when the director of the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health, Thomas Insel's, critique of the DSM-5 became public, even some antipsychiatrists were surprised. Insel argued that although the DSM's diagnostic categories have become the standard to obtain research grants and to conduct trials, they are not based on…Read more