| 1. |
|
|
| 2. |
- Liljefors, Max, et al.
(författare)
-
Neuronal Fantasies : Reading Neuroscience with Schreber
- 2012
-
Ingår i: The Atomized Body. The Cultural Life of Stem Cells, Genes and Neurons. - 9789187121920 ; , s. 143-169
-
Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This essay examines the aesthetics and rhetoric through which popular science delivers the message of brain-mind conflation—‘You are your brain’. Noting the entwinement of realist and imaginary visual tropes in popular scientific presentations of brain imaging, author seeks a correlative ‘counter-text’ to this discourse in one of the classic texts in psychiatric history, the memoirs of the paranoid nineteenth-century judge, Daniel Paul Schreber. In this juxtaposition of contemporary neuroscience and a century-old insider report from madness, the author sees two opposite fantasies about the biologization of the mind. In the end, Schreber’s is deemed the most ‘realist’, since his delusions highlight precisely the blind spots of popular neuroscience today, especially the eclipse of societal, collective meaning in strictly biologistic explanations of the mind.
|
|
| 3. |
- Lundin, Susanne, et al.
(författare)
-
Introduction
- 2012
-
Ingår i: The Atomized Body. The Cultural Life of Stem Cells, Genes and Neurons. - 9789187121920 ; , s. 15-40
-
Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Just like the first theories in physics viewed atoms as independent and surrounded by a void, our bodies’ microscopic constituents are often portrayed as disconnected from the body as a unified organism, and from its cultural and social contexts. In The Atomized Body the authors examine the relations between culture, society and bioscientific research and show how our bodies’ singularized atoms indeed still are socially and culturally embedded. In today’s medicine, the biosciences are entangled with state power, commercialism, and cultural ideas and expectations, as well as with the hopes and fears of individuals. Therefore, biomedicine and biotechnology also reshape our perceptions of selfhood and life. From a multidisciplinary perspective, with authors from art science to ethnology, this volume discusses the biosciences and the atomized body in their social, cultural and philosophical contexts.
|
|
| 4. |
|
|
| 5. |
- Wiszmeg, Andréa
(författare)
-
Medical need, ethical scepticism : Clashing views on the use of fœtuses in Parkinson’s disease research
- 2012. - 1
-
Ingår i: <em>The atomized body</em>. - : Nordic Academic Press. - 9789187121920 ; , s. 65-82
-
Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- ‘And if it’s going to die, that little foetus, then it doesn’t matter to me at what stage.’(Patient on the use of foetal neural cells versus the use of embryonic stem cells)This quote neatly captures a central difference between patients and non-affected respondentsin a focus group study of attitudes towards foetal neural cell research and therapy forParkinson’s disease. The patients of the study displayed a pragmatism verging on unconcernin the ethical issues concerning the foetus and its human status; this to a considerably higherdegree than the non-affected respondents, who, on the contrary, seemed quite preoccupied bysuch issues.Parkinson’s disease is a severe neurological disease with symptoms such as rigidity, slowmovement, tremors and sometimes depression and dementia. The aim of this essay is toinvestigate how patients with this disease and non-affected individuals reason about researchthat uses foetal neural cells. The focus is on their thoughts about what is ethically defensible inthe search for treatments for Parkinson’s disease.As such, it falls within the framework of focus group interviews conducted in Sweden as partof the EU project TRANSEURO ().1 One of the key findingsof the Swedish focus group study is that the participants’ ethical attitudes closely correlate totheir relation to the disease. This means that whether you are afflicted or in other respectsaffected by the disease or not will be highly relevant for your ethical stance. I will argue herethat individual circumstances also largely determine the motives and effects of ethicalreflection. I also elaborate on the role of gut feeling in ethics (see Lakoff & Johnson 1999;Lundin, this volume) and how it relates to what I would term anthropocentric concerns.Ulrich Beck’s concept of individual ethical reflexivity in late modernity (1992) serves herenot only as a theoretical point of departure, but also as a point of discussion itself. This latteris a consequence of the results of the study confirming some general trends that Beck pointsto, but also revising some of them in addressing the issue that individual reflexivity needs tobe related to one’s experiences of, in this case, Parkinson’s disease. My argument that one’srelation to the disease fundamentally affects one’s motives and effects of ethical reflectionserves to nuance the generalizability of Beck’s theory.
|
|
| 6. |
|
|
