Twenty years ago, the then centre-left government of Italy approved a law that modified the Constitution by providing the individual Italian Regions with federalist powers in the management of health care, which was no longer considered a burden for the State alone, but was entrusted to the various regions of the country. It was the notorious law that changed the …
This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
Can a virus ever prompt good philosophy? Within weeks of its emergence, SARS-CoV-2 was galvanizing celebrity European philosophers and social theorists, most of them men in a vulnerable age demographic, to reflect publicly and plentifully on the meaning of the pandemic. These days, it seems, an epidemic demands urgent philosophical inquiry, and lots of it—personal protective equipment for the mind, …
Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming
João Biehl and Peter Locke, editors
Duke University Press, 2017. 400 pages.
If hierarchy is the key to sociological knowledge production, what might it mean to refuse the hierarchy of intelligences between those who know the world, those who can allegedly theorize the world, and those who have to survive the world, or …
This month’s web round up focuses on notions of treatment as enhancement…or vice versa? I’ve recently come off a stretch of spending quite a lot of time reading up on debates surrounding behavioral disorders in children. One issue that seems to crop up repeatedly is whether the use of medications in these young populations, particularly those living with ADHD, is …
This article is part of the following series: Book forum
Science, Reason, Modernity: Readings for an Anthropology of the Contemporary is many things — a carefully curated selection of classic texts ranging from Immanuel Kant’s “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’” and Max Weber’s “Science as a Vocation,” to Georges Canguilhem’s “The Question of Normality in the History of Biological Thought” and Paul Rabinow’s “Anthropos Today: Reflections …
Science, Reason and Modernity is, according to its editors’ introduction, a reader for students beginning science studies, allowing them to consider modern sciences as forms of life, connected to lived realities. Without a doubt, this pedagogical aim is brilliantly reached, especially when it comes to equipping students with a genealogical attention on scientific practices, which is generally missing in STS …