 | Fernando Vidal Research Professor - ICREA (Catalan Institution of Research and Advanced Studies) Anthropology, Bioethics - Medical ethics, History of Medecine, Philosophy, Psychology |
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03.10.2017-31.10.2017
Personhood and the Locked-in Syndrome
The objectives of the project at the intellectual and practical level include gaining a better understanding of the experience of persons in locked-in syndrome (LIS) and of their own views about personhood and the body, and further the study of LIS in fields like medical anthropology, philosophy, biomedical ethics and disability studies. The project deals with LIS less as a strictly medical problem than as an existential condition that raises questions about theory and practice in those fields. Structured according to an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach, the project wishes to promote collaboration between scholars from the human sciences, and medical and care researchers and practitioners who work with LIS patients in Western Europe, Canada and Japan. During my stay at the Brocher Foundation in October 2017 I will focus on writing an article based on the analysis of first-hand testimonies published by persons with LIS (there are about thirty in Western European languages).
I was born and grew up in Buenos Aires, received a BA from Harvard University, graduate degrees in psychology and the history and philosophy of science from the Universities of Geneva and Paris, and a Habilitation from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. I have been been a Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of the Prix Latsis Universitaire, and an Athena Fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation. In 2012, after over a decade as permanent Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin), I joined the Center for the History of Science of the Autonomous University of Barcelona as Research Professor of ICREA, the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies. My work concerns the intellectual history of the human sciences from the early modern period to the present, especially the dynamics of knowledge and values and how they shape views about the human and the relations between mind and body. I have, among others, edited The Moral Authority of Nature (with L. Daston, 2004), Neurocultures (with F. Ortega, 2011) and Endangerment, Biodiversity, and Culture (with N. Dias, 2015). I have also published on the Genevan critic Jean Starobinski and written the Afterword to his L’Encre de la mélancolie (2012). My book The Sciences of the Soul: the Early Modern Origins of Psychology (2011) explores the transformation of inquiries about the soul between the late Renaissance and the Enlightenment. My most recent book, Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject (with F. Ortega, 2017), examines the genealogy and contemporary forms of the idea that human beings are essentially their brains. The project “Personhood and the Locked-in Syndrome,” which is the object of my stay at the Fondation Brocher, pursues related topics, but with a closer connection to disability studies, biomedical ethics and medical anthropology. (For further details and publications, see https://icrea.academia.edu/FVidal.)
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