title: Illness, phenomenology, and philosophical method.
abstract: In this article, I propose that illness is philosophically revealing and can be used to explore human experience. I suggest that illness is a limit case of embodied experience. By pushing embodied experience to its limit, illness sheds light on normal experience, revealing its ordinary and thus overlooked structure. Illness produces a distancing effect, which allows us to observe normal human behavior and cognition via their pathological counterpart. I suggest that these characteristics warrant illness a philosophical role that has not been articulated. Illness can be used as a philosophical tool for the study of normally tacit aspects of human existence. I argue that illness itself can be integral to philosophical method, insofar as it facilitates a distancing from everyday practices. This method relies on pathological or limit cases to illuminate normally overlooked aspects of human perception and action. I offer Merleau-Ponty's analysis of the case of Schneider as an example of this method.
authors.affiliation: Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol, Cotham House, Cotham Hill, Bristol, BS6 6JL, UK. havi.carel@bristol.ac.uk
authors.forename: Havi Hannah
authors.initials: HH
authors.lastname: Carel
mesh_terms: D003071:Cognition; D017281:Cost of Illness; D004194:Disease / Q000523:psychology; D006801:Humans; D010684:Philosophy; D010686:Philosophy, Medical; D012938:Social Perception; D013850:Thinking