Wrongful Medicalization and Epistemic Injustice in Psychiatry

In this paper, my goal is to use an epistemic injustice framework to extend an existing normative analysis of over-medicalization to psychiatry and thus draw attention to overlooked injustices. Kaczmarek (2019) has developed a promising bioethical and pragmatic approach to over-medicalization, which consists of four guiding questions covering issues related to the harms and benefits of medicalization. In a nutshell, if we answer “yes” to all proposed questions, then it is a case of over-medicalization. Building on an epistemic injustice framework, I will argue that Kaczmarek’s proposal lacks guidance concerning the procedures through which we are to answer the four questions, and I will import the conceptual resources of epistemic injustice to guide our thinking on these issues. This will lead me to defend more inclusive decision-making procedures regarding medicalization in the DSM. Kaczmarek’s account complemented with an epistemic injustice framework can help us achieve better forms of medicalization. I will then use a contested case of medicalization, the creation of Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD) in the DSM-5 to illustrate how the epistemic injustice framework can help to shed light on these issues and to show its relevance to distinguish good and bad forms of medicalization.

The Indigenous Dimension of the Intersocietal: Dussel, Exteriority and the Sámi People

Proponents of uneven and combined development (U&CD) as a theoretical approach to International Relations (IR) have presented it as providing the conceptual means for overcoming Eurocentrism. While the U&CD scholars have made valuable contributions to anti-Eurocentric IR scholarship, this article argues that U&CD has analytical limitations that impede its anti-Eurocentric potential. These limitations derive from U&CD’s reliance on the concepts of ‘development’ and the ‘whip of external necessity’, which require developmental ranking of societies and lock U&CD into a state-centric social ontology. To provide complementary conceptual resources to overcome U&CD’s analytical limitations, this article introduces Enrique Dussel’s liberation philosophy (LP), which can incorporate peoples other than states as agents and entities of global politics through its concept of ‘exteriority’. U&CD and LP are then jointly applied to analyse the relations between the Nordic states and the indigenous Sámi people to assess the approaches’ relative strengths and weaknesses and identify synergies between them. Based on this assessment, the article outlines the potential for synthesising a ‘thin’ version of U&CD with LP, by using the concept of ‘exteriority’ to reorient U&CD’s analytical focus towards people excluded by the states-system.

The Argument from Divine Hiddenness and Christian Love

In the paper it is argued that the conceptual resources of Christianity topple the hiddenness argument. According to the author, the variability of the divine love cast doubt on the soundness of Schellenberg’s reasoning. If we understood a perfect love as a maximal and equal concern and identification with all and for all, then a divine love would entail divine impartiality, but because of conflicts of interest between human beings the perfect, divine love cannot be maximal.

Exploring and Applying a Socially Progressive Hermeneutical Lens in Hindu Thought

Hermeneutics is the theory and methodology of interpreting texts. In this paper, I describe and explore the implications of a hermeneutical lens that was utilized by the Caitanya Vaiṣṇava theologian A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda (1896–1977 CE). My aims in doing so are to (1) contribute toward inter-religious reform within the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), which Prabhupāda founded in 1966, and to (2) further develop Hindu conceptual resources that can inspire societal change. I also apply Prabhupāda’s hermeneutical lens to one narrative within the Bhāgavatapurāṇa (c. 9th to 10th century CE) and show how reading this narrative through this lens can de-emphasize certain patriarchal attitudes that are found within Hindu universes. Moreover, I demonstrate this lens’ applicability within ISKCON. I conclude by showing how this lens can also be applied in some other Hindu contexts.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the motivation for the book, the methodology, and the arguments of Hope Under Oppression. It offers an overview of the emerging interest in the nature and value of hope in philosophy, and it also explains how the author came to the subject of hope from feminist approaches to moral, social, and political thought. Feminist philosophy helps to reveal the nature and scope of complex and overlapping systems of privilege and oppression, and in doing so, it can give rise to questions about hope. A feminist approach to moral psychology enables reflection on how hope is experienced and valued by people who live under oppression, offering new conceptual resources for understanding the nature, value, and risks of hope in human life.

“Is there no Balm in Gilead?”: Health, Illness, Death, and Dying in the Hebrew Bible and Today

This essay argues that the Hebrew Bible contains conceptual resources that can contribute to and enrich the ongoing discussions surrounding healthcare in the U.S. and in other modern Western societies. These biblical ideas may help us reframe our understandings of sickness and health, something urgently needed if we wish individuals and their families to have less medically invasive and less alienating experiences of illness, most especially during end of life care.

Debunking the holy trinity: competition, individualism, and meritocracy

This chapter draws on conceptual resources from debates on collective intentionality and responsibility to call into question the close links between competition, ontological atomism, and individual responsibility implied by meritocracy. Against this ‘holy trinity’, we argue that competition is not reducible to an ontology of atomized agents and individual notions of responsibility, which supposedly justify meritocratic justifications of unequal outcomes in competition. By offering a non-individualist concept of competition, we argue that competitive actions are collective and relational. As a result, responsibility in competition is much more shared between competitors and within competitive teams than is commonly thought. This argument implies that the collective foundations of competition should be more appreciated and that the redistribution of recognition among winners and losers in competition should be reconsidered.

Poetic Vanguardism and Political Violence in Capel Lofft’s “Chartist Epic”

In 1839, an economically battered Britain teetered on the threshold of revolution. The neo-Spencean poet Capel Lofft aspired to use his anonymously circulated epic, Ernest; or, Political Regeneration, to send it over the brink. Ernest describes, in sanguinary detail, the growth and eventual triumph of an agrarian-communist insurrection. A charismatic poet leads the revolt, using fiery oratory to inspire his co-conspirators. Because Ernest was clearly intended to galvanize militant elements within the Chartist movement into action—and because its author was alarmingly eloquent—hysteria greeted the epic’s appearance. This chapter’s reading of Ernest traces how Lofft employs vanguardism, the belief that artists can lead the masses in a progressive direction, to allay his own doubts about the viability of popular self-governance. More broadly, it utilizes Ernest, a hybrid of contemporaneous radical social and political thought, as a staging ground to investigate the uneasy comingling of Chartism and Owenite socialism, the two great working-class movements of the first half of the nineteenth century. Lofft’s epic stages several questions with exemplary clarity: is revolution a political event, or the anti-political mechanism by which “politics” is definitively superseded? Are the people the heroes of the emancipatory narrative? Or does the revolutionary leader, rendered sublime by the fervency of his commitment, inevitably eclipse them? Can poetry, a literary mode increasingly defined by its detachment from practical concerns, marshal the rhetorical and conceptual resources of the aesthetic to foster national regeneration?