Shane Glackin | University of Exeter (original) (raw)
Papers by Shane Glackin
Evaluation & the Health Professions, May 17, 2021
Paul Gugiu argues that Kaplan and Baron-Epel’s central idea or underlying premise is not merely w... more Paul Gugiu argues that Kaplan and Baron-Epel’s central idea or underlying premise is not merely wrong, but “dangerous with potentially dire consequences,” particularly in our current circumstances of a pandemic and a polarized political atmosphere. We disagree in the strongest terms and believe that nothing in Kaplan and Baron-Epel’s article can be fairly thought to support such a claim. We begin by addressing Gugiu’s framing of Kaplan and Baron-Epel’s position, before examining his criticisms of that position in turn.
Behavioural Brain Research, Feb 1, 2023
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Aug 31, 2020
Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Jul 11, 2010
In this paper, I explore the links between liberal political theory and the evaluative nature of ... more In this paper, I explore the links between liberal political theory and the evaluative nature of medical classification, arguing for stronger recognition of those links in a liberal model of medical practice. All judgments of medical or psychiatric "dysfunction," I argue, are fundamentally evaluative, reflecting our collective willingness or reluctance to tolerate and/or accommodate the conditions in question. Illness, then, is "socially constructed." But the relativist worries that this loaded phrase evokes are unfounded; patients, doctors, and communities will agree in the vast majority of cases about what counts as illness. Where they cannot come to agreement, however, we are faced with precisely the sort of dispute about values and ways of life that the institutions of the liberal state are designed to accommodate. I accordingly sketch a model of medical practice, based loosely on Jürgen Habermas's political theories, designed to maximize both our awareness and our understanding of these disputes.
The Quarterly Review of Biology, Sep 1, 2017
Analysis, Apr 1, 2017
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from OUP via the DOI in th... more This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from OUP via the DOI in this record.If mental illnesses are externally constituted, then so are somatic illnesses. Will Davies makes a persuasive case for externalism in psychiatry; as I show here, parallel examples exist in somatic medicine
Medicine Health Care and Philosophy, May 9, 2012
Journal of Medical Ethics, Oct 16, 2014
It is widely supposed that the prescription of placebo treatments to patients for therapeutic pur... more It is widely supposed that the prescription of placebo treatments to patients for therapeutic purposes is ethically problematic on the grounds that the patient cannot give informed consent to the treatment, and is therefore deceived by the physician. This claim, I argue, rests on two confusions: one concerning the meaning of 'informed consent' and its relation to the information available to the patient, and another concerning the relation of body and mind. Taken together, these errors lead naturally to the conclusion that the prescription of placebos to unwitting patients is unethical. Once they are dispelled, I argue, we can see that providing 'full' information against a background of metaphysical confusion may make a patient less informed and that the 'therapeutic' goal of relieving the patient of such confusions is properly the duty of the philosopher rather than the physician. Therapeutic placebos therefore do not violate the patient's informed consent or the ethical duties of the doctor.
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Mar 1, 2012
Journal of Applied Philosophy, Mar 17, 2015
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Sep 1, 2021
Behavioural Brain Research, Feb 1, 2021
Legal Theory, Feb 4, 2014
The Philosophical Quarterly, Dec 31, 2018
Journal of Moral Philosophy, Oct 21, 2021
Review of Philosophy and Psychology, Jul 5, 2023
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Jun 1, 2014
This volume represents a timely and comprehensive overview of a field that, though ancient in its... more This volume represents a timely and comprehensive overview of a field that, though ancient in its roots, is currently gripped by an unmistakeably youthful sense of excitement and expansion. One of the key attractions of the volume is the long introductory essay by the editors, who have been at the forefront of the past decade’s efforts to carve out a broad and distinctive disciplinary ambit for the philosophy of medicine. Carel and Cooper do an excellent job of mapping out a terrain that, by contrast with its sister field of medical ethics, has until recently been underexposed and underdeveloped. Medical ethics is not included in the scope of the book, and nor are the recent developments in metaphysics and epistemology of medicine; the volume is divided into three sections of four essays each, on ‘Concepts of Health and Disease’, ‘The Experience of Illness’, and ‘Illness and Society’. The editors’ conscious aim here is to show the range of new directions of enquiry, which the discipline is opening up, beyond the more traditional aim of providing a conceptual analysis of disease. The literature somewhat stubbornly resists the editors’ effort at categorization, however; Lennart Nordenfelt (Chapter 1), for instance, points up the affinities between his ‘holistic theory of health’ and the phenomenological work of Fredrik Svenaeus; Svenaeus’ own essay (Chapter 5), though it opens the second section, begins with, and repeatedly returns to, the attempt to define and demarcate the ‘essence’ of medicine. Both of these essays exemplify one of the major strengths of the volume, which is the exposure it gives to the valuable work being done in the phenomenology of medicine, much of it spurred by Havi Carel’s own recent monograph, Illness ([2008]). BJPS readers may be primarily concerned with the book’s contribution to philosophical analysis of the distinctively medical Brit. J. Phil. Sci. 65 (2014), 413–417
History and Philosophy of The Life Sciences, Apr 4, 2019
Evaluation & the Health Professions, May 17, 2021
Paul Gugiu argues that Kaplan and Baron-Epel’s central idea or underlying premise is not merely w... more Paul Gugiu argues that Kaplan and Baron-Epel’s central idea or underlying premise is not merely wrong, but “dangerous with potentially dire consequences,” particularly in our current circumstances of a pandemic and a polarized political atmosphere. We disagree in the strongest terms and believe that nothing in Kaplan and Baron-Epel’s article can be fairly thought to support such a claim. We begin by addressing Gugiu’s framing of Kaplan and Baron-Epel’s position, before examining his criticisms of that position in turn.
Behavioural Brain Research, Feb 1, 2023
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Aug 31, 2020
Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Jul 11, 2010
In this paper, I explore the links between liberal political theory and the evaluative nature of ... more In this paper, I explore the links between liberal political theory and the evaluative nature of medical classification, arguing for stronger recognition of those links in a liberal model of medical practice. All judgments of medical or psychiatric "dysfunction," I argue, are fundamentally evaluative, reflecting our collective willingness or reluctance to tolerate and/or accommodate the conditions in question. Illness, then, is "socially constructed." But the relativist worries that this loaded phrase evokes are unfounded; patients, doctors, and communities will agree in the vast majority of cases about what counts as illness. Where they cannot come to agreement, however, we are faced with precisely the sort of dispute about values and ways of life that the institutions of the liberal state are designed to accommodate. I accordingly sketch a model of medical practice, based loosely on Jürgen Habermas's political theories, designed to maximize both our awareness and our understanding of these disputes.
The Quarterly Review of Biology, Sep 1, 2017
Analysis, Apr 1, 2017
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from OUP via the DOI in th... more This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from OUP via the DOI in this record.If mental illnesses are externally constituted, then so are somatic illnesses. Will Davies makes a persuasive case for externalism in psychiatry; as I show here, parallel examples exist in somatic medicine
Medicine Health Care and Philosophy, May 9, 2012
Journal of Medical Ethics, Oct 16, 2014
It is widely supposed that the prescription of placebo treatments to patients for therapeutic pur... more It is widely supposed that the prescription of placebo treatments to patients for therapeutic purposes is ethically problematic on the grounds that the patient cannot give informed consent to the treatment, and is therefore deceived by the physician. This claim, I argue, rests on two confusions: one concerning the meaning of 'informed consent' and its relation to the information available to the patient, and another concerning the relation of body and mind. Taken together, these errors lead naturally to the conclusion that the prescription of placebos to unwitting patients is unethical. Once they are dispelled, I argue, we can see that providing 'full' information against a background of metaphysical confusion may make a patient less informed and that the 'therapeutic' goal of relieving the patient of such confusions is properly the duty of the philosopher rather than the physician. Therapeutic placebos therefore do not violate the patient's informed consent or the ethical duties of the doctor.
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Mar 1, 2012
Journal of Applied Philosophy, Mar 17, 2015
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Sep 1, 2021
Behavioural Brain Research, Feb 1, 2021
Legal Theory, Feb 4, 2014
The Philosophical Quarterly, Dec 31, 2018
Journal of Moral Philosophy, Oct 21, 2021
Review of Philosophy and Psychology, Jul 5, 2023
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Jun 1, 2014
This volume represents a timely and comprehensive overview of a field that, though ancient in its... more This volume represents a timely and comprehensive overview of a field that, though ancient in its roots, is currently gripped by an unmistakeably youthful sense of excitement and expansion. One of the key attractions of the volume is the long introductory essay by the editors, who have been at the forefront of the past decade’s efforts to carve out a broad and distinctive disciplinary ambit for the philosophy of medicine. Carel and Cooper do an excellent job of mapping out a terrain that, by contrast with its sister field of medical ethics, has until recently been underexposed and underdeveloped. Medical ethics is not included in the scope of the book, and nor are the recent developments in metaphysics and epistemology of medicine; the volume is divided into three sections of four essays each, on ‘Concepts of Health and Disease’, ‘The Experience of Illness’, and ‘Illness and Society’. The editors’ conscious aim here is to show the range of new directions of enquiry, which the discipline is opening up, beyond the more traditional aim of providing a conceptual analysis of disease. The literature somewhat stubbornly resists the editors’ effort at categorization, however; Lennart Nordenfelt (Chapter 1), for instance, points up the affinities between his ‘holistic theory of health’ and the phenomenological work of Fredrik Svenaeus; Svenaeus’ own essay (Chapter 5), though it opens the second section, begins with, and repeatedly returns to, the attempt to define and demarcate the ‘essence’ of medicine. Both of these essays exemplify one of the major strengths of the volume, which is the exposure it gives to the valuable work being done in the phenomenology of medicine, much of it spurred by Havi Carel’s own recent monograph, Illness ([2008]). BJPS readers may be primarily concerned with the book’s contribution to philosophical analysis of the distinctively medical Brit. J. Phil. Sci. 65 (2014), 413–417
History and Philosophy of The Life Sciences, Apr 4, 2019
Behavioural Brain Research, 2021
In addiction, apparently causally significant phenomena occur at a huge number of levels; addicti... more In addiction, apparently causally significant phenomena occur at a huge number of levels; addiction is affected by biomedical, neurological, pharmacological, clinical, social, and politico-legal factors, among many others. In such a complex, multifaceted field of inquiry, it seems very unlikely that all the many layers of explanation will prove amenable to any simple or straightforward, reductive analysis; if we are to unify the many different sciences of addiction while respecting their causal autonomy, then, what we are likely to need is an integrative framework. In this paper, we propose the theory of "Externalist" or "4E"-for extended, embodied, embedded, and enactive-cognition, which focuses on the empirical and conceptual centrality of the wider extra-neural environment to cognitive and mental processes, as a candidate for such a framework. We begin in Section 2 by outlining how such a perspective might apply to psychiatry more generally, before turning to some of the ways it can illuminate addiction in particular: Section 3 points to a way of dissolving the classic dichotomy between the "choice model" and "disease model" in the addiction literature; Section 4 shows how 4E concepts can clarify the interplay between the addict's brain and her environment; and Section 5 considers how these insights help to explain the success of some recovery strategies, and may help to inform the development of new ones.
Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology
Externalist theories hold that a comprehensive understanding of mental disorder cannot be achieve... more Externalist theories hold that a comprehensive understanding of mental disorder cannot be achieved unless we attend to factors that lie outside of the head: neural explanations alone will not fully capture the complex dependencies that exist between an individual's psychiatric condition and her social, cultural, and material environment. Here, we firstly offer a taxonomy of ways in which the externalist viewpoint can be understood, and unpack its commitments concerning the nature and physical realization of mental disorder. Secondly, we apply a strongly externalist approach to the case of Autistic Spectrum Disorder, and argue that this condition can be illuminated by appeal to the hypothesis of extended cognition. We conclude by briefly considering the significance this strongly externalist approach may have for psychiatric practice and pedagogy.