Papers by Eleanor A Byrne
The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Medicine, 2025
The history of medicine is permeated with sexist and gender-biassed ideas about women and their b... more The history of medicine is permeated with sexist and gender-biassed ideas about women and their bodies which have been and continue to be harmful. Focusing on distinctively epistemic harms, this chapter provides an overview of some existing work in the field of gendered epistemic injustices in the medical context. The chapter takes the reader through extant thinking on testimonial and hermeneutic injustices and acknowledges the value in recognising structural and intersectional injustices. We engage with some proposed strategies of resistance through patient participation, and close with suggestions for some further directions of study in the field. We suggest that the study of gendered epistemic injustices in medicine may be usefully supplemented by considering how epistemic harms interact with affective harms.
Handbook of the Philosophy of Medicine, 2025
The ways in which we interact with healthcare institutions and contribute to understandings of he... more The ways in which we interact with healthcare institutions and contribute to understandings of health and illness are influenced by uneven and often invisible power relations in the social world. One of the key mechanisms that dictate how healthcare interacts in the sociopolitical arena is the distribution of epistemic power. This chapter offers an in-depth examination of the unique epistemic injustices that arise in the medical context, within both somatic and psychiatric
Topoi, 2024
Recent work on distributed cognition and self-narrative has emphasised how autobiographical memor... more Recent work on distributed cognition and self-narrative has emphasised how autobiographical memories and their narration are, rather than being stored and created by an individual, distributed across embodied organisms and their environment. This paper postulates a stronger form of distributed narration than has been accommodated in the literature so far, which I call narrative deference. This describes the phenomena whereby a person is significantly dependent upon another person for the narration of some significant aspect of their own autobiographical self-narrative. I suggest that a person is more likely to narratively defer where they suffer a mnemonic impairment regarding some significant adverse life experience like trauma, illness or injury. Following a recent turn in the literature towards investigating the harmful aspects of distributed cognition as well as its many advantageous features, this paper explores how the benefits of autobiographical self-narrative deference within close personal relationships are complexly related to its harms.
Philosophical Psychology, 2022
Current attempts to understand unusually high rates of psychiatric illness in complex, chronic il... more Current attempts to understand unusually high rates of psychiatric illness in complex, chronic illnesses can be guilty of operating within an explanatory framework whereby there are two options. Either (a) that the psychiatric predicaments are secondary to the bodily condition, and (b) that they are primary. In this paper, I draw upon philosophical work on affect, contemporary empirical work, and qualitative firstperson patient data to illustrate a much messier reality. I argue that affective experience is generally more complex in such conditions, and that a variety of pre-and post-morbid causal factors dynamically interact such that the resultant psychiatric predicaments do not permit to classification as strictly primary or secondary to the bodily condition. Affective scaffolding, in my view, provides an apt theoretical framework for capturing this nuance.
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2022
This paper points to a more expansive conception of grief by arguing that the losses of illness c... more This paper points to a more expansive conception of grief by arguing that the losses of illness can be genuine objects of grief. I argue for this by illuminating under-appreciated structural features of typical grief-that is, grief over a bereavement-which are shared but under-recognised. I offer a common chronic illness, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME), as a striking case study. I then use this analysis to highlight some clinical challenges that arise should this claim receive uptake in clinical practice. Extant literature on CFS/ME tells us that rates of comorbid depression are atypically high. If one accepts that people with CFS/ME can grieve over losses associated with the condition, and that grief can be easily mistaken for depression in this context, this might suggest that rates of comorbid depression are inflated. I show, however, that the challenge of distinguishing between healthy and pathological grief arises in its place, and is just as tricky to solve.
Philosophical Explorations (special issue), 2022
Various claims have been made concerning the role of narrative in grief. In this paper, we emphas... more Various claims have been made concerning the role of narrative in grief. In this paper, we emphasize the need for a discerning approach, which acknowledges that narratives of different kinds relate to grief in different ways. We focus specifically on the positive contributions that narrative can make to sustaining, restoring, and revising a sense of who one is. We argue that, although it right to suggest that narratives provide structure and coherence, they also play a complementary role in disrupting established structure and opening up new possibilities. We add that both of these roles point to the importance of interpersonal, social, and cultural factors in shaping the trajectory of grief. We conclude by briefly considering the implications for distinguishing between typical and pathological forms of grief.
Brain, Behavior, and Immunity , 2022
The debate around Long Covid has so far shown resistance to accept parallels between Long Covid a... more The debate around Long Covid has so far shown resistance to accept parallels between Long Covid and a set of existing conditions which have historically been subject to stigma. This resistance risks endorsing the stigma associated with such existing conditions, and as such, these dynamics of stigma ought to be dismantled in order to facilitate the development of effective clinical resources for all such implicated conditions. As well as affecting proceedings at the structural level, I discuss how the aforementioned problems also risk affecting patients at the personal level by motivating the reconfiguration and restriction of patient illness narratives. The problems I identify therefore risk affecting both collective and individual understanding of Long Covid.
Allan Køster & Ester Holte Kofod. Eds. Grief Experience: Cultural, Existential and Phenomenological Perspectives. Routledge., 2021
This chapter addresses the nature and role of emotion regulation in grief. Human emotion regulati... more This chapter addresses the nature and role of emotion regulation in grief. Human emotion regulation often involves processes that are interpersonal and social in structure. Given this, the death of a particular person can deprive us of regulatory resources that we would otherwise draw upon in responding to upheaval. A distinctive sense of disorientation and uncertainty therefore arises. The course of grief then depends, to a substantial degree, on how one's emotions, thoughts, and activities continue to be shaped by relations with other people, as well as by wider social and cultural environments. To illustrate these points, we conclude by reflecting on how social restrictions imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic may have affected people's experiences of grief.
Think, 2021
This article addresses the question of whether certain experiences that originate in causes other... more This article addresses the question of whether certain experiences that originate in causes other than bereavement are properly termed ‘grief’. To do so, we focus on widespread experiences of grief that have been reported during the Covid-19 pandemic. We consider two potential objections to a more permissive use of the term: (i) grief is, by definition, a response to a death; (ii) grief is subject to certain norms that apply only to the case of bereavement. Having shown that these objections are unconvincing, we sketch a positive case for a conception of grief that is not specific to bereavement, by noting some features that grief following bereavement shares with other experiences of loss.
Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 2020
Miranda Fricker's influential concept of epistemic injustice (2007) has recently seen application... more Miranda Fricker's influential concept of epistemic injustice (2007) has recently seen application to many areas of interest, with an increasing body of healthcare research using the concept of epistemic injustice in order to develop both general frameworks and accounts of specific medical conditions and patient groups. This paper illuminates tensions that arise between taking steps to protect against committing epistemic injustice in healthcare, and taking steps to understand the complexity of one's predicament and treat it accordingly. Work on epistemic injustice is therefore at risk of obfuscating legitimate and potentially fruitful inquiry. This paper uses Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis as a case study, but I suggest that the key problems identified could apply to other cases within healthcare, such as Medically Unexplained Illnesses, Functional Neurological Disorders and Psychiatric Disorders. Future work on epistemic injustice in healthcare must recognise and attend to this tension to protect against unsatisfactory attempts to correct epistemic injustice.
Husserl's motivation for the Cartesian Meditations was founded in his frustration with the lack o... more Husserl's motivation for the Cartesian Meditations was founded in his frustration with the lack of unity in philosophy that came "with the beginning of modern times" 1 , which we can identify as the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Husserl held that we needed to radically reinvent philosophy as one unitary discipline, and put an end to different schools of philosophy talking past each other, "pseudo-reporting" and "pseudo-criticizing" 1 . To resume "philosophizing seriously" 1 , Husserl claimed, we must seek "objectively valid results" 2 .
Uploads
Papers by Eleanor A Byrne