We’re publishing a new essay today by Sinéad Murphy, a Research Associate in Philosophy at Newcastle University, about the light that the work of the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer can throw on the Government’s handling of the pandemic over the last 12 months. Here are the three opening paragraphs:
One year later, and the Coronavirus Act that has enabled much of the UK Government’s lockdown has just been renewed for another six months. Debate in the lead-up to its renewal has included admissions from the Prime Minister of his failure last year to introduce measures early enough and ‘hard’ enough, submissions from Tory opponents of the Act showing that cases of COVID-19 are now so low as to make continued measures unnecessary, and ongoing concern by the bravest Tory of them all, Charles Walker, about the health of the population when measures continue in defiance of falling cases.
All of these aspects of the debate are important. But it is well past time for scientific analyses and disagreements in respect of measures, cases and health to be supplemented, perhaps even undercut, by a philosophical perspective. These concepts – measure, case, health – have this year been our bread and butter. We have bandied them endlessly, sometimes desperately. But are we fully aware of what they mean?
In a short essay from 1990, entitled “Philosophy and Practical Medicine”, the German philosopher, Hans-Georg Gadamer, provides us with just what we need: a philosophical account of the concepts of measure, case, and health, which reveals just how truncated has been the understanding and application of them during the past year.
Worth reading in full.
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The first thing we must do, when we agree there is a problem, is to make sure we know what the problem is – to measure it. Then we can perhaps start to engineer the solution.
My question from the start of all this BS has been this: how will an invented problem be solved?
There is so much I want to say about this extraordinary essay. But of course, I haven’t got time. So without doing this essay sufficient justice in any way, I MUST at least say how much I value all the writings of Sinead Murphy on LS.
Thank you so much.
Hear, hear!
Another excellent and thought-provoking essay from Sinead Murphy.
I have very serious reservations about this site’s failure to face up to the vaccine narrative and the potential dangers – medical and libertarian – associated with what is going on, but the guest essays do help redress the balance.
Eh? Can you explain?
Incredibly thought-provoking essay. Especially the idea that good health requires trust and an absence of examination.
Any chance of this excellent, excellent essay being sent to 10 Downing Street? Problem is in their arrogance they’d probably file under B for bin.
A brilliant essay. I’m no philosopher, but have been preoccupied for a long time by the difference between what objective statistics tell us (one way or another) and what a subjective, common sensical assessment can provide. I’ve been called reckless and insensitive again and again, and had the classic “You’ve got blood on your hands” thrown at me just a couple of days ago as I left Aldi (having had my bloody mask on the whole time and just taken it off after paying – thrown at me by the representative of the company to whom I’d just give 40 quid). And yet, over a year since this appalling nonsense began, I still know, personally, not a single person who has died of the virus. Nor has a single person said to me, since March 2020, that they directly know a person who has died of the virus. Whence Gadamer/Murphy’s insistence that a subjective, non-scientific assessment of the situation is of as much value as an obsession with R numbers. Great essay, for which many thanks.
Sinead the essay is one of the most scintillating pieces of sense making I have ever read in the moral philosophy field. Your writings generally are a real pleasure, a questing mind fully at work. I shared on Twitter as an anecdote to the latest ghoul summoning pessimism from behavioural scientists. Philosophy and it sense of the importance of thought and human agency is more needed than ever against this danger focused narrative.
Brilliant essay. Like all your previous ones on LS. Thank you.