From what I understood of this lecture\u2014and I cannot pretend that was much, in the grand scheme of things\u2014there is perplexity to the way in which Descartes mentioned and then quickly abandoned the conception of madness as a challenge to proving the existence of an entity. Dr. Gorman led this discussion by first exploring the ways in which philosophy and mental illness have been known to interact through the case of Phineas Gage. Gage, the man we have to learn about in every psychology course to have ever existed, sustained a traumatic brain injury (specifically injuring the frontal lobe) and supposedly had a large change in personality and behavior. This obviously really impacted the ways in which we view humanity (mind, body, soul \u2018n\u2019 whatnot), but that is not exactly where this talk went with it. According to Dr. Shelley Tremain, this purported change in personality came about in response to differential treatment and ableism post-trauma; this ableism, baked into the sciences, raises a lot of questions for philosophers interested in discovering ethical approaches to disability. With that in mind, there was a circle back to Descartes\u2019 argument. I still have no real idea where I stand on that; I imagine there is validity to the idea that he ditched it in order to avoid being stigmatized. What got me interested in the lecture, though, was the whole explanation of the principle of charity (not assuming the worst argument possible is intentional) and the principle of humanity (actions as close to your imagined own) as correlated and potentially undermining of neurodivergence. It reminded me of Dr. Alisha Gaines\u2019 talk about a year ago on the ways in which many white \u2018allies\u2019 have responded to racism; the gist of that being that so much \u2018allyship\u2019 has historically centered the privileged self and based itself on the contention that if an experience is \u2018unempathizable\u2019 (for lack of a better word) to the masses then it is not worth considering and\/or dignifying. In the same way that a dreaming state has often been likened with madness, perhaps as a \u2018more accessible\u2019 form of mental illness, white \u2018allies\u2019 have a deep history of parading around in blackface in order to witness (witness, not experience) racial discrimination \u2018first hand.\u2019 It all ties together in my head with assumed experiences over lived experiences; Gage\u2019s condition medically being assumed over his condition socially, etc. (I am truly hoping at least 2% of this response made sense).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
WC: 410
\nI pledge: Rebekah Stone<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From what I understood of this lecture\u2014and I cannot pretend that was much, in the grand scheme of things\u2014there is perplexity to the way in which Descartes mentioned and then quickly abandoned the conception of madness as a challenge to proving the existence of an entity. Dr. Gorman led this discussion by first exploring the … Continue reading “Bekah\u2019s Response to August Gorman\u2019s Descartes and the Madness Argument (3\/26\/19)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[48,46],"class_list":["post-1451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-cpr-series-mad-lectures","tag-extra-credit-response"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/papJgd-np","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1451"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1455,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1451\/revisions\/1455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}