Bas de Boer – författare

This book provides a philosophical analysis of the experience of health and investigates how this experience is shaped by recent developments in medicine and public health. It shows how phenomenological and Foucauldian approaches to health can be systematically integrated into a general account of healthy embodiment.Many medical practitioners argue for a shift from curative to preventative medicine. Technoscientific developments now enable us to track our health and provide more effective ways to live healthily. This book argues that these developments shape how we experience our health of and others, as well as the way in which we distinguish between health and illness. Its starting point is that health is not so much an object with well-defined boundaries that can be scrutinized scientifically but is better understood as an embodied experience. The author uses phenomenology and the work of Foucault to develop a theory of healthy embodiment. He argues that experiencing oneself as a healthy subject requires being made present as a healthy object by someone or something else. He explores how the experience of health results from the interaction between being a subject and being an object and potentially involves challenging medical norms.Healthy Embodiment will be of interest to researchers and graduate students working in phenomenology, science and technology studies, medical humanities, bioethics and sociology of medicine.

Science is highly dependent on technologies to observe scientific objects. For example, astronomers need telescopes to observe planetary movements, and cognitive neuroscience depends on brain imaging technologies to investigate human cognition. But how do such technologies shape scientific practice, and how do new scientific objects come into being when new technologies are used in science?In How Scientific Instruments Speak, Bas de Boer develops a philosophical account of how technologies shape the reality that scientists study, arguing that we should understand scientific instruments as mediating technologies. Rather than mute tools serving pre-existing human goals, scientific instruments play an active role in shaping scientific work. De Boer uses this account to discuss how brain imaging and stimulation technologies mediate the way in which cognitive neuroscientists investigate human cognitive functions. The development of cognitive neuroscience runs parallel with the development of advanced brain imaging technologies, drawing a lot of public attention—sometimes called “neurohype”—because of its alleged capacity to demystify the human mind. By analyzing how the objects that cognitive neuroscientists study are mediated by brain imaging technologies, de Boer explicates the processes by which human cognition is investigated.