How medical education and practice can move beyond a narrow focus on biological intervention to recognize the lived experiences of illness, suffering, and death. In Afflicted, Nicole Piemonte examines the preoccupation in medicine with cure over care, arguing that the traditional focus on biological intervention keeps medicine from addressing the complex realities of patient suffering. Although many have pointed to the lack of compassion and empathy in medical practice, few have considered the deeper philosophical, psychological, and ontological reasons for it. (...) Piemonte fills that gap, examining why it is that clinicians and medical trainees largely evade issues of vulnerability and mortality and, doing so, offer patients compromised care. She argues that contemporary medical pedagogy and epistemology are not only shaped by the human tendency to flee from the reality of death and suffering but also perpetuate it. The root of the problem, she writes, is the educational and institutional culture that promotes reductionist understandings of care, illness, and suffering but avoids any authentic confrontation with human suffering and the fear and self-doubt that can come with that confrontation. Through a philosophical analysis of the patient-practitioner encounter, Piemonte argues that the doctor, in escaping from authentic engagement with a patient who is suffering, in fact “escapes from herself.” Piemonte explores the epistemology and pedagogy of medicine, examines its focus on calculative or technical thinking, and considers how “clinical detachment” diminishes physicians. She suggests ways that educators might cultivate the capacity for authentic patient care and proposes specific curricular changes to help students expand their moral imaginations. (shrink)

A perspective is developed for approaching affliction as a social fact. Disability and disease are considered as two ways in which we suffer a disjunction which arises from the need to take initiative with respect to the inexorable, whether that means the mark of disability or the unconquerability of disease.The story of affliction always raises and masks in certain respects the problem of suffering as the collective representation of our experience of subjectivity where that experience passes through the (...) separateness of being marked to the singularity of being without hope. (shrink)

The developers of Red Hook Studios’ 2016 gothic horror game ‘Darkest Dungeon’ said that they wanted to ‘capture the human response to stress’. This paper analyses how the game does this with its ‘stress’, ‘affliction’ and ‘virtue’ mechanics. With reference to research literature on stress, I show how these mechanics, which could easily have been cheap gimmicks, approach the topic of stress with admirable detail, offering a complex reflection on the various aspects, positive and negative, of several possible human (...) responses to stress. They show how different responses include similar symptoms, how stress impacts the people around the stressed person, and make the case that stress can break people, but also fuel heroism. It is a fantastic example of how video game mechanics can be used to educate people about complex subjects without explicitly saying this is what they’re doing. (shrink)

For Simone Weil the invocation of ‘rights’ to address extreme human suffering–what she calls ‘affliction’–is ‘ludicrously inadequate’. Rights, Weil argues, invite a response, whereas what the affli...

The author comments on the article “The neurobiology of addiction: Implications for voluntary control of behavior,‘ by S. E. Hyman. Hyman presents that addiction is a brain disease or a moral condition. The authors present that addiction is a strong preference, similar to appetitive preferences. They state that addiction is merely a form of pleasure-seeking. The authors conclude that the problem of addiction is the problem of the management of pleasure, not treatment of a disease. Accession Number: 24077914; Authors: Foddy, (...) Bennett 1; Email Address: [email protected] Savulescu, Julian 2; Affiliations: 1: University of Melbourne, Monash University, Australia; 2: University of Oxford; Subject: EDITORIALS; Subject: ADDICTIONS; Subject: HYMAN, S. E.; Subject: BRAIN -- Diseases; Subject: PLEASURE; Subject: NEUROBIOLOGY; Subject: BEHAVIOR; Number of Pages: 4p. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume 30, Number 2, November 2004, pp. 213-236 Pleased and Afflicted: Hume on the Paradox of Tragic Pleasure E. M. DADLEZ How fast can you run? As fast as a leopard. How fast are you going to run? A whistle sounds the order that sends Archie Hamilton and his comrades over the top of the trench to certain death. Racing to circumvent that order and arriving seconds (...) too late, Archie's friend Frank screams in rage and despair. Archie is cut down before he has run twenty yards. Peter Weir's film Gallipoli is a chronicle of the disastrous Dardanelles campaign of the first World War, but it is also a film about racing. Archie is trained by his uncle Jack to run "as fast as a leopard." The film begins as it ends, with Archie sprinting in response to a whistle. Frank is first shown racing after a train, along with friends who are on their way to enlist. Archie and Frank meet while competing in a race, they race in Cairo once they have enlisted, and they finally race death. From the beginning, Archie has been faster; even at the end he is the first to die. And from the beginning he has swept Frank along in his wake, encouraging him, pushing him, inspiring him, and helping him to positions for which he is inadequately qualified. In the end, Archie's compassion and kindness prompt a decision which has grim consequences both for himself and for hundreds of others. Knowing that his friend fears death in the trenches, Archie recommends Frank as a substitute for himself, a designated message runner. But Frank is not fast enough, and falls short by mere seconds which Archie would not have lost. This is what leads to the failure of the one real effort to countermand the fatal charge. E. M. Dadlez is Professor of Humanities and Philosophy, University of Central Oklahoma, Edmond, OK 73034, USA. e-mail: [email protected] 214 E. M. Dadlez I am an emotional wreck by the time the movie is over, though I should admit that most of my tears are the result of sheer rage. Both my dogs exited the room in some haste once I began to shout at the television and the unpardonably dimwitted British officers who sat sipping tea at a comfortable distance as they gave the order for soldiers to commit suicide. But it isn't just the scope of the real human disaster, or the enormity of the blunder, or the pointlessness of the entire enterprise, or even my renewed conviction that stupidity is, in fact, evil, that is so unsettling. The film unnerves with respect to personal as well as global concerns, focusing attention on the chance of vanity's leading one to undertake responsibilities beyond one's competence, the possibility of advancement or security being achievable only at the expense of another, and the realization of how easy it might be to let those things happen. Gallipoli is a sad, disturbing film, and the spectator is grieved and disturbed in the course of watching it. Yet, having said that, I must own to having a copy in my possession, and to having watched it more than once. I recommend it to friends, offering to lend them my videotape. In fact, I press it on them. I say that it is a terrific, rewarding work which they should take the time to see. How is it that I can describe my experience of the film in such glowing terms and at the same time acknowledge the extreme distress I felt in the course of watching it? How can I reconcile the discordant aspects of my experience? David Hume explores some possible answers in his essay "Of Tragedy."1 He begins by calling attention to the paradox of tragic pleasure: It seems an unaccountable pleasure, which the spectators of a well written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror... and other passions, which are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy. The more they are touched and affected, the more are they delighted with the spectacle.... The whole art of the poet is employed in rousing and supporting the compassion and... (shrink)

Over one in five adults in the United States and around the world are estimated to live with chronic pain. How are we to attend well to persons living with pain? This is a difficult, pressing question for both healthcare institutions and Christian communities, and it is only made more complex both by the contemporary opioid crisis and by how experiences of pain and addiction are shaped in the American context by race, gender, and class. Attending faithfully to persons in (...) pain demands thoughtful, creative resources on both practical and conceptual levels. In this special issue of Christian Bioethics, eight scholars from different disciplines—Sarah Barton, Farr Curlin, Jaime Konerman-Sease, Brett McCarty, Joel Shuman, Devan Stahl, John Swinton, and Emmy Yang—engage the meaning of attending to persons in pain for Christian bioethics and for faithful Christian practice. (shrink)

This book provides an evaluation of 18 voting procedures in terms of the most important monotonicity-related criteria in fixed and variable electorates. All voting procedures studied aim at electing one out of several candidates given the voters' preferences over the candidates. In addition to (strict) monotonicity failures, the vulnerability of the procedures to variation of the no-show paradoxes is discussed. All vulnerabilities are exemplified and explained. The occurrence of the no-show paradoxes is related to the presence or absence of a (...) Condorcet winner. The primary readership of this book are scholars and students in the area of social choice. (shrink)

Males are selectively afflicted with the neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders of childhood, a broad and virtually ubiquitous phenomenon that has not received proper attention in the biological study of sex differences. The previous literature has alluded to psychosocial differences, genetic factors and elements pertaining to male “complexity” and relative immaturity, but these are not deemed an adequate explanation for selective male affliction. The structure of sex differences in neurodevelopmental disorders is hypothesized to contain these elements: Males are more frequently (...) afflicted, females more severely; disorders arising in females are largely mediated by the genotype; in males, by a genotype by environment interaction; complications of pregnancy and delivery occur more frequently with male births; such complications are decisive and influence subsequent development. We hypothesize that there is something about the male fetus that evokes an inhospitable uterine environment. This “evocative principle” is hypothesized to relate to the relative antigenicity of the male fetus, which may induce a state of maternal immunoreactivity, leading either directly or indirectly to fetal damage. The immunoreactive theory thus constructed is borrowed from studies of sex ratios and is the only explanation consistent with negative parity effects in the occurrence of pregnancy complications and certain neurodevelopmental disorders. Although the theory is necessarily speculative, it is heuristic and hypotheses derived from it are proposed; some are confirmed in the existing literature and by the authors' research. (shrink)

If the guiding question of ethics is “how should I live?,” then the guiding question of aesthetics might be “what is beauty?” For Simone Weil, these two questions have intertwined answers that turn on a like conceptual apparatus. Focussing on Weil's foremost ethical problem, the plight of the afflicted (malheur), this article offers an account of the philosophical basis to Weil's claim that, when truly recognized, beauty and affliction motivate the same form of experience. I argue that, for Weil, (...) both the aesthetic and moral disposition are grounded in an experience of the real, an experience that both requires and compels the subject to the same attentive state. Finally, I address the charges that might be leveled at Weil for suggesting that our experience of beauty is the same as our experience of affliction, specifically arguing that rather than this experience leading to a form of passive aesthetic arrest, as the experience of beauty has typically been theorized to lead to, Weil understands the experience of beauty and affliction as fundamentally motivational toward the Good. (shrink)

Simone Weil's ideas on affliction and sacrifice have been interpreted by some as though they are the product of psychological problems. I will approach her writings on necessity and affliction through G. M. Hopkins' little prose masterpiece. Later I will suggest that she may be profitably related to some French spiritual writers in the 17th Century, who develop a link between the necessity of offering sacrifice to God and the radical contingency of created existence.

The goals of this paper are twofold. First, the paper seeks to show the relevance of French philosopher Simone Weil’s writings on work for contemporary political and social theory. More specifically, by drawing on Weil’s “factory writings”—i.e. the diary she kept during the many months she spent working in factories, and the essays and letters that followed shortly after—the article shows that Weil’s analysis of speed, humiliation and affliction is highly pertinent for reflecting upon the consequences of the increasingly (...) ubiquitous recourse to digital tracking and monitoring tools by today’s employers. Secondly, the paper proposes to read Weil’s account of degradation and affliction in light of the contemporary scholarship on “slow violence”. Inspired by Rob Nixon’s work, this scholarship is interested in forms of harm that are slow-paced, attritional, ‘out of sight’ and intimately tied to our (distracted) attention regimes. As I argue, Weil very lucidly described the paradox at the heart of many types of modern work: namely, that its fast pace causes the slow death of workers’ souls and bodies. Demonstrating the important resonances of Weil’s account of factory life and contemporary suffering in the era of digital surveillance, the paper underlines the significance of Weil’s account of affliction for understanding the depths of the harms caused by these forms of domination. (shrink)

This research thesis explores the concept of attention as outlined and practised in the life of Simone Weil (1909-1943), a French woman variously described as a philosopher, mystic and activist yet someone who eludes categorisation or systematisation. It outlines the background to her life in a France between two world wars, and seeks to situate her within the context of the Christianity she claimed as her cultural backdrop. It explores the concept of attention as both a spiritual exercise and a (...) practice in the life of Weil, something that then evolved into a core principle of her thinking. The central question here is the age-old one, harking back to ancient philosophy, concerning the living of a good life, particularly within the context of a lifelong acquaintanceship with Weil‘s work. As this study examines Weil‘s ideas on reading, it also interrogates how she is read, particularly by poets today, with a view to assessing her influence. Weil was a writer who loved poetry and wrote some herself. Poetry and the recitation of prayers played an important role in her mystical experiences. The role of affliction in her mysticism and in her life is important and it will be seen how her stance in the face of affliction is something that marks her thinking. The concept of attention today incorporates issues around the commodification of the attention span, as well as its deficits. This study examines some of these issues and draws forth from the life and work of Simone Weil a more expanded, practical, and reflective understanding of the idea of attention. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe contention that abortion harms women constitutes a new strategy employed by the pro‐life movement to supplement arguments about fetal rights. David C. Reardon is a prominent promoter of this strategy. Post‐abortion syndrome purports to establish that abortion psychologically harms women and, indeed, can harm persons associated with women who have abortions. Thus, harms that abortion is alleged to produce are multiplied. Claims of repression are employed to complicate efforts to disprove the existence of psychological harm and causal antecedents of (...) trauma are only selectively investigated. We argue that there is no such thing as post‐abortion syndrome and that the psychological harms Reardon and others claim abortion inflicts on women can usually be ascribed to different causes. We question the evidence accumulated by Reardon and his analysis of data accumulated by others. Most importantly, we question whether the conclusions Reardon has drawn follow from the evidence he cites. (shrink)

In several European countries former pupils of Catholic nuns have made accusations of physical and emotional abuse. Feminist scholars have tended to perceive nuns as heroines because of their authority and their contribution to raising the social status of women. But there is also a darker side to convent education. Committees established by national governments have identified systemic factors leading to abuse in educational institutions. This article argues that these factors should include a feminist theological explanation: a dualistic, sacrificial spirituality (...) underpinned the Rules of charitable orders and influenced the nuns’ blurred understanding of what constitutes humane treatment. Supporting evidence is drawn from testimonies of privileged pupils of convent boarding schools in the 1910s, from stories of ex-nuns who fled the convent, and from nuns who openly acknowledged the problem during Post Vatican II renewal when at last they were able to revolt against their spiritual value-systems. (shrink)

"Towards the Death of Humanity" is the endless demonstration of the disastrous side effects left on our environment, on life on this planet, on health and most of all on human dehumanization by a century of tremendous scientific and technological realizations and their material values. It illustrates how these unhealthy side effects are highly linked to the hasty and thoughtless decisions of scientists, intellectuals and governments to replace the humanities and the traditional methods of teaching with their own methods of (...) science, technology and their essentially material values. Unfortunately totally deprived of the smallest bit of humanity, this method of education has killed the rudiments of humanity acquired during the course of history, has dehumanized the people, their institutions and their societies. These side effects originate in the age-old desire of intellectuals and scientists to take hold of the power of religion over man and to satisfy their morbid need to build a new world, re-designed following Hegel' belief that the matter is eternal and God. Although these ideologies have lost all their legitimacy today because science has recently demonstrated that the matter is not eternal, scientists and intellectuals keep on teaching the falseness of their materialistic social system as if the logic of their reasoning were the only truth. This work promotes certain guidelines that individuals must follow to make the lucid and effective compromises needed to try and solve these destructive problems affecting man and society before the end of History. (shrink)

The Holocaust marks a decisive moment in modern suffering in which it becomes almost impossible to find meaning or redemption in the experience. In this study, C. Fred Alford offers a new and thoughtful examination of the experience of suffering. Moving from the Book of Job, an account of meaningful suffering in a God-drenched world, to the work of Primo Levi, who attempted to find meaning in the Holocaust through absolute clarity of insight, he concludes that neither strategy works well (...) in today's world. More effective are the day-to-day coping practices of some survivors. Drawing on testimonies of survivors from the Fortunoff Video Archives, Alford also applies the work of Julia Kristeva and the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicot to his examination of a topic that has been and continues to be central to human experience. (shrink)

Many of our hermeneutic, literary critic, and poststructuralist ideas on mediation imply that the medium determines how a textual or narrative account must be taken. In contrast to these, Émmanuel Lévinas suggests that responsibility for the other person is not determined by the medium. Responsibility is already established in proximity to the other person; a relationship that we as moral subjects need to ethically understand. In relation to Primo Levi’s memoir of survival in Auschwitz, If this is a Man, this (...) article show in what ways Slavoj Žižek’s and Hayden White’s aesthetic ideas on mediation make us unprepared to take on the responsibility for the other person that Lévinas shows us. (shrink)

The contention that abortion harms women constitutes a new strategy employed by the pro-life movement to supplement arguments about fetal rights. David C. Reardon is a prominent promoter of this strategy. Post-abortion syndrome purports to establish that abortion psychologically harms women and, indeed, can harm persons associated with women who have abortions. Thus, harms that abortion is alleged to produce are multiplied. Claims of repression are employed to complicate efforts to disprove the existence of psychological harm and causal antecedents of (...) trauma are only selectively investigated. We argue that there is no such thing as post-abortion syndrome and that the psychological harms Reardon and others claim abortion inflicts on women can usually be ascribed to different causes. We question the evidence accumulated by Reardon and his analysis of data accumulated by others. Most importantly, we question whether the conclusions Reardon has drawn follow from the evidence he cites. (shrink)

Traditionally, the problem of evil, in its various formulations, has been one of the strongest objections against perfect being theism. In the voluminous literature on this problem, the motif of evil has usually been discussed with respect to human flourishing. In recent decades more focused attention has been paid to animal suffering and the philosophical problems that such suffering poses for perfect being theists. However, this growing body of literature, in Anglo-American philosophical milieus, is largely aimed at sketching a specifically (...) Christian or Christianity-inflected theodicy that would reconcile animal suffering with the existence of an omni-God. In contrast, there are few, if any, systematic attempts to put forth a Hindu theodicy that aims to offer morally justifiable reasons that God has for allowing animal suffering. In this article, we address this scholarly lacuna by illustrating how a Hindu perfect being theist might respond to the problem of animal suffering. (shrink)

Philosopher and physician Drew Leder shows how a phenomenology of lived embodiment reveals a series of healing strategies available in the face of the bodily breakdowns and challenges that are a part of the human condition.