Hilde Lindemann, Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University, will give a talk entitled “Someone Else’s Words: When Patients and Families Can’t Be Heard”
ABSTRACT
There are many reasons why a patient might be unheard. I examine one that is pervasive, creates moral trouble in the clinic, and goes almost altogether unrecognized. It is the failure of uptake brought about by having to use someone else’s words. To explain, I begin with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s remark in the Philosophical Investigations: “To imagine a language means to imagine a life-form.” In this section, Wittgenstein develops the idea that speaking and understanding language is a part of, and specific to, a particular way of life. The words in the language mean what they do because of how they are used by those who inhabit that way of life; the inhabitants shape the language to serve their own purposes. I contend that the language specific to the life-form of the clinic does not always serve the patient’s purposes. It looks deceptively like the patient’s language, which is why the problem goes unnoticed, but it is actually what Wittgenstein would call a suburb of that language, and it’s an unfamiliar one at that., I describe the patient’s plight when the language of the clinic does not serve her needs, offer some case examples that make the problem more visible, and suggest a partial solution.
This event is sponsored by The New School for Social Research.
The paper draws on the first sentence of Nicomachean Ethics I, but goes beyond interpretation in putting forward a new version of the Guise of the Good (GG). This proposal is Aristotelian in spirit, but defended on philosophical grounds. GG theorists tend to see their views as broadly speaking Aristotelian. And yet they address particular actions in isolation: agents, the thought goes, are motivated to perform a given action by seeing the action or its outcome as good. The paper argues that the GG is most compelling if we distinguish between three levels: the motivation of small-scale actions, the motivation of mid-scale actions or pursuits, and the desire to have one’s life go well. The paper analyzes the relation between small-, mid-, and large-scale motivation in terms of Guidance, Substance, and Motivational Dependence. In its Aristotelian version, the argument continues, the GG belongs to the theory of the human good.
Katja Maria Vogt, Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. She specializes in ancient philosophy, ethics, and normative epistemology. In her books and papers, she focuses on questions that figure both in ancient and in contemporary discussions: What are values? What kind of values are knowledge and truth? What does it mean to want one’s life to go well?
Presented by The New School for Social Research (NSSR) Philosophy Department.