Discussing the workings of technology in care as aesthetic rather than as ethical or epistemological interventions focusses on how technologies engage in and change relations between those involved. Such an aesthetic study opens up a repertoire to address values that are abundant in care, but are as yet hardly theorized. Kamphof studies the problem that sensor technology reveals things about the elderly patients without the patients being aware of this. I suggest improvement of these relations may be considered in aesthetic (...) terms, for instance by developing the affective quality of people’s technological relationships. (shrink)

In this article, we argue that contemporary biomedicine is shaped by two, seemingly incommensurable, organizational logics, the ‘regime of truth’ and the ‘regime of hope’. We articulate their features by drawing on debates sparked by the recent clinical trial of a new approach to the treatment of Parkinson’s Disease. We also argue that the ‘self’ is configured in the very same process whereby these two organizational logics interlock and become mutually dependent, so that the ‘self’ might be said to be (...) the effect of a ‘parasitic’ relationship between the regimes of ‘truth’ and ‘hope’. We then bring these two arguments to bear on the contrasting views of the relationship between embodiment and political subjectivity articulated by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, on the one hand, and Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, on the other hand. (shrink)

Advances in neuroscience are changing how mental health issues such as addiction are understood and addressed as a brain disease. Although a brain disease model legitimizes addiction as a medical condition, it promotes neuro-essentialist thinking and categorical ideas of responsibility and free choice, and undermines the complexity involved in its emergence. We propose a “biopsychosocial systems” model where psychosocial factors complement and interact with neurogenetics. A systems approach addresses the complexity of addiction and approaches free choice and moral responsibility within (...) the biological, lived experience and sociohistorical context of the individual. We examine heroin-assisted treatment as an applied case example within our framework. We conclude with a discussion of the model and its implications for drug policy, research, addiction health care systems and delivery, and treatment of substance use problems. (shrink)

Evidence-based approaches to policy-making are growing in popularity. A generally embraced view is that with the appropriate evidence at hand, decision and policy making will be optimal, legitimate and publicly accountable. In practice, however, evidence-based policy making is constrained by a variety of problems of evidence. Some of these problems will be explored in this article, in the context of the debates on evidence from which they originate. It is argued that the source of much disagreement might be a failure (...) to addressing crucial philosophical assumptions that inform, often silently, these debates. Three controversial questions will be raised which appear central to some of the challenges faced by evidence-based policy making: firstly, how do certain types of facts candidate themselves as evidence; secondly, how do we decide what evidence we have, and how much of it; and thirdly, can we combine evidence. In addressing these questions it will be shown how a philosophically informed debate might prove instrumental in clarifying and settling practical difficulties. (shrink)