What is moral philosophy? That is the question with which this important volume grapples. Its starting point is the famous critique made in 1958 by Elizabeth Anscombe, who argued that moral philosophy begins from a mistake: that it is fundamentally wrong about the sort of concept that the word 'moral' represents. Anscombe rejected moral philosophy as it was then (and mostly now still is) practised. She offered instead a blueprint for the task moral philosophers must embrace if they are to (...) speak intelligibly to society about good and bad, right and wrong, duty and obligation. The chapters in this book are inspired by Anscombe's classic text. One of the most powerful voices here, among many authoritative voices, is that of Philippa Foot – Anscombe's lifelong friend – who asserts that 'any account of practical reason evacuated of an understanding of what human beings need to flourish is inadequate and must be rejected.'. (shrink)

This study compares 20 subjects, in each of three different settings, with serious psychotic disorder who hear voices, and compares their voice-hearing experience. We find that while there is much that is similar, there are notable differences in the kinds of voices that people seem to experience. In a California sample, people were more likely to describe their voices as intrusive unreal thoughts; in the South Indian sample, they were more likely to describe them as providing (...) useful guidance; and in our West African sample, they were more likely to describe them as morally good and causally powerful. What we think we may be observing is that people who fall ill with serious psychotic disorder pay selective attention to a constant stream of many different auditory and quasi-auditory events because of different “cultural invitations”—variations in ways of thinking about minds, persons, spirits and so forth. Such a process is consistent with processes described in the cognitive psychology and psychiatric anthropology literature, but not yet described or understood with respect to cultural variations in auditory hallucinations. We call this process “social kindling.”. (shrink)

Hearing Voices and Other Unusual Experiences examines the long-recognized and striking similarities between features of mental disorders and features of religions. Robert McCauley and George Graham emphasize underlying cognitive continuities between familiar features of religiosity, of mental disorders, and of everyday thinking and action. They contend that much religious thought and behavior can be explained in terms of the cultural activation of humans' natural cognitive systems, which address matters that are essential to human survival: hazard precautions, agency detection, (...) language processing, and theory of mind. Those systems produce responses to cultural stimuli that may mimic features of cognition and conduct associated with mental disorders, but are sometimes coded as "religious" depending on the context. Their approach promises to shed light on both mental abnormalities and religiosity. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is not to provide an overall picture of care ethics, but, rather, to reflect upon the concept of care, which has gained significance in particular scientific contexts. Undoubtedly, the importance of the subject of care represents a challenge on the level of fundamental philosophical positions and a diversified look into the occurring forms of the psychological and social suffering, dependency, and vulnerability. I will shed light on tenets that are considered central to the care ethics (...) and that have led to the setting up of the relationship between care and democracy. By introducing the basic aspects of Carol Gilligan’s and Joan Tronto’s theories, I will emphasize their vocation to be politically relevant. A discussion on the relationship between care and justice on the one hand, and needs and rights on the other, will follow. Can hearing voices of care make democracy more just? How can care ethics provide a concrete support for democracy? On the political level, care ethics builds on the assumptions of the necessary relatedness and equality between individuals who are decisive in the light of the welfare state perspective. Upon closer examination, one may see that the setting up of these relationships is not new to the liberal perspective. Liberalism is historically rooted in the fundamental interconnection between freedom and equality. Virtues such as care and meekness can be formulated in the language of politics, but they still remain unpolitical. On the one hand, engaging in a critical reflection upon such virtues might be an indispensable measuring instrument for distinguishing a good democracy from a bad one. On the other hand, care ethics does not prove to be a real alternative to the ethics of justice. In this regard, care ethics seems to show its feet of clay. (shrink)

This paper is an intervention within feminist and queer debates that have re-posed so-called negative states of being as offering productive possibilities for political practice and social transformation. What is sometimes called the politics of negative affect or analyses of political feeling has sought to de-pathologise shame, melancholy, failure, depression, anxieties and other forms of ‘feeling bad’, to open up new ways of thinking about agency, change and transformation. Ann Cvetkovich's recent memoir explores depression as a public feeling and argues (...) that ‘feeling bad might, in fact, be the ground for transformation’. As she suggests, the question, ‘how do I feel’ could usefully be reframed as ‘how does capitalism feel’? This performative staging of political forms of psychosocial reflexivity opens up new strategies for survival, new visions of the future, and importantly de-medicalises feeling beyond an individual expression of psychopathology. The grounds for affective politics might be found within new feminist futures that are attentive to the relations between emotion, affect, feelings and politics. This paper will be situated within these debates and the challenge of thinking about the productive possibilities of negative states of being. However, rather than focus on depression, I will turn my attention to experiences such as psychosis and temporal dissociation, based on my long-standing research with the Hearing Voices Network. In the context of discussions of disability and capability I will discuss the value of concepts such as debility, and ‘living in prognosis’, and respond to the call to think through what such states might offer for feminist and queer practice. (shrink)

This paper reports on a case study which aims to recreate the hearing voices symptom in schizophrenia. The case study was submitted for a co-curricular module at King’s College London by a first-year undergraduate Music student, Bethany James, and was created using the web application, Mahara. The core of the case study consists of a soundscape of both everyday and unusual sounds, in conjunction with an original musical composition. The paper describes the case study and discusses it using (...) chaos narrative as an analytical lens. The paper argues that the case study effectively evokes the hearing voices symptom, conveying a lucid sense of the experience to non-sufferers and thus potentially creating use value for clinicians and care workers. (shrink)

I can only speculate about the echo of slavery and its impact upon how theories of race are disconnected from theories of mental illness.Haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony.Why might psychiatry need postcolonial theories? Critical discourse on psychiatry and clinical psychology—itself quite heterogeneous across the humanities and the so-called psy disciplines—has intermittently focused on the redress of power in clinical encounters, which are often constituted by an interaction between persons in very different life circumstances and with divergent positions (...) in relation to authority and privilege, or social capital and capital itself. Postcolonial theories are relevant to this topic because they... (shrink)

The phenomenon of 'hearing voices,' often viewed as a symptom of schizophrenia, is commonly called, in the scientific and clinical literature, 'auditory-verbal hallucination.' However, reports of hearing soundless voices, voices that are not auditory, which go as far back as Tuttle and Kraepelin and appear in phenomenological interviews and questionnaires are relatively common. What are we to make of such reports?One option is to dismiss these claims: one cannot hear soundless voices. This dismissal could (...) be due to a combination of the following seemingly reasonable claims, each sufficient to consign the notion of 'hearing soundless voices' to the status... (shrink)

Hearing Things is the first work to treat systematically the relation between Cavell's pervasive authorial voice and his equally powerful, though less discernible, impulse to produce a set of usable philosophical methods.

Many philosophers and psychologists have sought to explain experiences of auditory verbal hallucinations and “inserted thoughts” in schizophrenia in terms of a failure on the part of patients to appropriately monitor their own inner speech. These self-monitoring accounts have recently been challenged by some who argue that AVHs are better explained in terms of the spontaneous activation of auditory-verbal representations. This paper defends two kinds of self-monitoring approach against the spontaneous activation account. The defense requires first making some important clarifications (...) concerning what is at issue in the dispute between the two forms of theory. A popular but problematic self-monitoring theory is then contrasted with two more plausible conceptions of what the relevant self-monitoring deficits involve. The first appeals to deficits in the neural mechanisms that normally filter or attenuate sensory signals that are the result of one’s own actions. The second, less familiar, form of self-monitoring approach draws an important analogy between Wernicke’s aphasia and AVHs in schizophrenia. This style of self-monitoring theory pursues possible connections among AVHs, inserted thoughts, and the disorganized speech characteristic formal thought disorder. (shrink)

This article offers a hybrid rhetorical-qualitative discourse analysis of the FDA’s 2011 Avastin Hearing, which considered the revocation of the breast cancer indication for the popular cancer drug Avastin. We explore the multiplicity of stakeholders, the questions that motivated deliberations, and the kinds of evidence presented during the hearing. Pairing our findings with contemporary scholarship in rhetorical stasis theory, Mol’s (2002) construct of multiple ontologies, and Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe’s (2011) “hybrid forums,” we demonstrate that the FDA’s deliberative (...) procedures elides various sources of evidence and the potential multiplicity of definitions for “clinical benefit.” Our findings suggest that while the FDA invited multiple stakeholders to offer testimony, there are ways that the FDA might have more meaningfully incorporated public voices in the deliberative process. We conclude with suggestions for how a true hybrid forum might be deployed. (shrink)

It has been forty years since the first multi-channel cochlear implant was used in Australia. While heralded in the hearing world as one of the greatest inventions in modern medicine, not everyone reflects on this achievement with enthusiasm. For many people in the Deaf community, they see the cochlear implant as a tool that reinforces a social construct that pathologizes deafness and removes Deaf identity. In this paper, I set out the main arguments for and against cochlear implantation. While (...) I conclude that, on balance, cochlear implants improve the well-being and broaden the open futures of deaf children, this does not justify mandating implants in circumstances where parents refuse them because this may compound unintended harms when society interferes in the parent-child relationship. For this reason, I argue that parental refusal of cochlear implantation falls within Gillam’s concept of the zone of parental discretion. (shrink)

With regards to ecology, there has been a constant struggle between the scientific perspective and the philosophical approaches. This commentary dwells on the nature and structure of voices emerging from feminist environmentalists. Analogous to the feminist understanding that environmental degradation is a symbol of masculine domination leading to the suppression of the feminine, this paper tries to excavate the nature of a feminist perspective to environmental ethics.

This book is designed to make the various hardships encountered by many students more personal in order to give teachers insight into the very real needs of today’s students.

The experiences described in the VIP transcripts are incredibly varied and yet frequently explicitly labelled by participants as "voices." How can we make sense of this? If we reflect carefully on uses of the word "voice", we see that it can express at least two entirely different concepts, which pick out categorically different phenomena. One concept picks out a speech sound (e.g. "This synthesizer has a "voice" setting"). Another concept picks out a specific agent (e.g. "I hear two (...) class='Hi'>voices: one is a ten year-old boy…"). This chapter explores how these two concepts are related to one another in the context of voice-hearing. (shrink)

Classical conceptual distinctions in philosophy of education assume an individualistic subjectivity and hide the learning that can take place in the space between child and adult. Grounded in two examples from experience I develop the argument that adults often put metaphorical sticks in their ears in their educational encounters with children. Hearers’ prejudices cause them to miss out on knowledge offered by the child, but not heard by the adult. This has to do with how adults view education, knowledge, as (...) much as child, and is even more extreme when child is also black. The idea is what Miranda Fricker calls ‘epistemic injustice’ which occurs when someone is wronged specifically in their capacity as a knower. Although her work concerns gender and race, I extrapolate her radical ideas to child. Awareness of the epistemic injustice that is done to children and my proposal for increased epistemic modesty and epistemic equality could help transform pedagogical spaces to include child subjects as educators. A way forward is suggested that involves ‘cracking’ the concept of child and a different non-individualised conception of education. (shrink)

A sensitive remembrance of bluegrass dreams and lessons.

This article takes a genealogical approach to the problem of affective communication that we find coalescing around the phenomenon of ‘affective transfer’ identified in experiences such as voice-hearing, telepathy and hypnotic suggestion. These experiences breach the boundaries between the self and other, inside and outside, and material and immaterial, and make visible some of the central issues that are important in re-thinking affect, relationality and embodiment. The article will attempt to re-engage the problematic of subjectivity by asking what a (...) turn to affect entails within such technologies of listening and attention. This is particularly important when such turning or opening to affect engenders a conversation with traumatic memories, albeit a conversation that does not occur primarily in a verbal register. The key focus will be on the marginalized status of telepathic modalities of affective transfer throughout the histories of the development of the psychological sciences. The article uses this as a platform to consider the connections between what is occluded or excluded from the psychological sciences, and what is being silenced within work on affect taking form across the humanities. Taking us back to the practice of telepathy in the 19th century and the problem of hypnotic suggestion in the mid 20th century (the Macy Conferences), the article discloses how both function as carriers of what is being overlooked and silenced in the engagement by many affect scholars with the knowledge-practices of the psychological and neurosciences. (shrink)

Investigations of the early order of the canonical material in the name of unity show that the unity displayed lies more in the hermeneutical principles used than in the material itself.

This article explores how theoretical arguments in relation to the concepts of embodiment and identity can allow one to analyse and explore the cultural and psychological significance of a contemporary set of practices of the `hallucinatory self', exemplified by members of the Hearing Voices Network. The article considers work in `critical psychology', which has largely been ignored by media and cultural theory. Through specific analysis of the ways in which a group of voice-hearers are enacting their identities outside (...) of the frameworks of the `psy' disciplines, the limits of current theories of identity will be exemplified. The article suggests that cultural and social theory must move beyond `consumption' as one of the key sites of subjectification, and begin to explore the significance of sites organized through divisions made between the normal and the abnormal. This will involve developing theories of subject formation which can adequately theorize the relations between truth, power and desire, and can pay attention to those situated practices which produce the various possibilities of experience in relation to contemporary forms of selfhood. (shrink)

Although Gadamer has been criticized, on the one hand, for being a “traditionalist” and on the other, for embracing relativism, I argue that his approach to knowing, being, and being-in-the world offers contemporary theorists a third way, which is both historically attuned and able to address significant social and ethical questions.

The military service of combat soldiers may pose many threats to their well being and often take a toll on body and mind, influencing the physical and emotional make-up of combatants and veterans. The current study aims to enhance our knowledge about the combat experiences and the challenges that female soldiers face both during and after their service. The study is based on qualitative methods and narrative analysis of in-depth semi-structured personal interviews with twenty military veterans. It aims to analyze (...) the narratives of American and Israeli female combat soldiers regarding their military service, with emphasis on the soldiers’ descriptions, in their own words, about their difficulties, challenges, coping and successes during their service and transition to civilian life. A recurring theme in the interviews with the veterans of both militaries was the need to be heard and the fact that societies, therapists, and military institutions do not always truly listen to female veterans’ experiences and are not really interested in what actually ails them. Our research suggests that conventional methods used in research relating to veterans might at times be inadequate, because the inherent categorization might abstract, pathologize, and fragment a wide array of soldiers’ modes of post-combat being. Moreover, female veterans’ voices will not be fully heard unless we allow them to be active participants in generating knowledge about themselves. (shrink)

Auditory scene analysis is an elementary aspect of music perception, yet only little research has scrutinized auditory scene analysis under realistic musical conditions with diverse samples of listeners. This study probed the ability of younger normal-hearing listeners and older hearing-aid users in tracking individual musical voices or lines in JS Bach's The Art of the Fugue. Five-second excerpts with homogeneous or heterogenous instrumentation of 2–4 musical voices were presented from spatially separated loudspeakers and preceded by a (...) short cue for signaling the target voice. Listeners tracked the cued voice and detected whether an amplitude modulation was imposed on the cued voice or a distractor voice. Results indicated superior performance of young normal-hearing listeners compared to older hearing-aid users. Performance was generally better in conditions with fewer voices. For young normal-hearing listeners, there was interaction between the number of voices and the instrumentation: performance degraded less drastically with an increase in the number of voices for timbrally heterogeneous mixtures compared to homogeneous mixtures. Older hearing-aid users generally showed smaller effects of the number of voices and instrumentation, but no interaction between the two factors. Moreover, tracking performance of older hearing aid users did not differ when these participants did or did not wear hearing aids. These results shed light on the role of timbral differentiation in musical scene analysis and suggest reduced musical scene analysis abilities of older hearing-impaired listeners in a realistic musical scenario. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to report on research findings that could contribute to the development of decolonised academic material. Africanisation of curricula implies that education and training as well as praxis be informed by the reality of the South African context, the viewpoints of the people of South Africa and their descriptions of what is needed to build a just society. This is relevant to a variety of service professions. This article was presented from a trans-disciplinary framework, and (...) the term ‘professional carers’, including the social service and theology professions, was used. The discussion explored how academia can approach the development of curricula that will inform praxis and which is relevant to the African context. The terms ‘Africanisation’, ‘decolonisation’ and ‘contextualisation’ were linked, whereafter a developmental approach to the development of the content and presentation of academic material was proposed. The article is concluded with recommended strategic options for the development of Africanised curricula. (shrink)