Somogy Vargas
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 365215 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Somogy Vargas |
| NOMBRES | Somogy |
| APELLIDO | Vargas |
| FIRMA | VARGAS S |
| AFILIACIONES | Aarhus University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9383-7843 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 41 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 37 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 41 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2010 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Dysregulation of Epistemic Emotions in ADHD
While difficulties with emotion regulation are widely recognized to be prevalent in individuals with ADHD, researchers disagree on the centrality and explanatory role of dysregulated emotions in ADHD. “Lumpers” comprehend emotion dysregulation as a core symptom alongside inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity, while “splitters” view the combination as a distinct entity, and “diplomats” hold that they are correlated but ultimately dissociable …
Medical Progress
In recent years, notable figures within the medical community have expressed concerns about the rate of medical progress, suggesting that the rapid advances of medicine’s ‘golden age’ are now giving way to an ‘age of disappointment’. While these pessimistic pronouncements about medical progress must–implicitly if not explicitly–appeal to some criteria for what medical progress would be, the task of explicitly defining medical progress has been no…
Concept(s) of Health
One significant project within the philosophy of medicine has been to explore the concepts of health and disease and their conceptual relationship—whether health is the absence of disease (negativism) or the presence of a positive state or capacity (positivism). While some contend that this project is hampered by some limitations of traditional philosophical analysis, this paper employs a multi-method approach, incorporating corpus linguistics, s…
Value-freedom & patient autonomy
A longstanding debate in philosophy of medicine-whether disease concepts are value-free (naturalism) or value-laden (normativism)-intersects with broader discussions about patient autonomy and the move away from paternalistic practices. An important argument supporting naturalism is the idea that value-freedom is necessary to protect patient autonomy. This paper challenges that view, arguing that autonomy does not require value-freedom. We first …
Health, Disease, and the Medicalization of Low Sexual Desire
Debates about the genuine disease status of controversial diseases rely on intuitions about a range of factors. Adopting tools from experimental philosophy, this paper explores some of the factors that influence judgments about whether low sexual desire should be considered a disease and whether it should be medically treated. Drawing in part on some assumptions underpinning a divide in the literature between viewing low sexual desire as a genuin…
A Matter of Standing
Using experimental philosophy methodologies, this paper explores standing to blame and praise, specifically within respect to health and health advice. Our primary aim is to contribute insights to the literature on standing, while also addressing work in medical ethics on the appropriate roles of doctors. Two main principles regarding standing emerge from these areas: the Differential Relationship Principle and the Hypocrisy Principle. To propel …
Akratic thinking
Akratic action is voluntarily acting against one’s better judgment. Akratic belief is believing against one’s better judgment. We here provide an account of a phenomenon that sits somewhere between the two: “akratic thinking.” This is where we engage in a thought process against our better judgment. While the idea of akratic thinking has been tentatively considered before, no account has yet been offered of it. This is what we’ll offer here. Our …
The Wicked and the Ill
This study investigates the influence of evaluative judgments, specifically regarding an individual’s moral character, on judgments of health and disease. Though it might seem that judgments of health and disease should be impervious to evaluative judgments, two hypotheses suggest that health and disease judgments could be influenced by evaluative judgments: the “naturalization hypothesis” which centers on our inclination to assign blame, and the…
Curiosity and zetetic style in ADHD
While research on Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has traditionally focused on cognitive and behavioral deficits, there is increasing interest in exploring possible resources associated with the disorder. In this paper, we argue that the attention-patterns associated with ADHD can be understood as expressing an alternative style of inquiry, or “zetetic” style, characterized mainly by a lower barrier for becoming curious and engagi…
Concepts of health and disease
The aim of the paper is to explore how people understand the concepts of health and disease, including the factors that influence their judgments about whether a condition is a disease or a healthy state. The study investigates whether health and disease judgments come apart, and whether they are affected by factors such as typicality, dysfunction, and disvalue. We conclude that the folk concept of health is positive (such that being healthy is c…
Privacy
The concept of privacy is both significant and contested, with ongoing philosophical debate about whether it is best understood in terms of non-access or as involving some form of control. This paper advances the discussion by employing experimental philosophy to examine folk intuitions about privacy. Our findings show that these intuitions favor a control-based concept of privacy. Additionally, we show that the type of information at stake influ…
Is “Dysfunction” a Value-Neutral Concept
Two important issues in the philosophy of medicine are the evaluative issue (whether the concept of disease is value-laden) and the neutrality issue (whether the concept of dysfunction is value-laden). The aim of this study was to empirically examine whether a person’s evaluation of their own condition (i.e., patient evaluation) influences whether their condition is considered to be a disease and dysfunction. With respect to the evaluative issue,…
Body Checking in Anorexia Nervosa
Body checking, characterized by the repeated visual or physical inspection of particular parts of one’s own body (e.g. thighs, waist, or upper arms) is one of the most prominent behaviors associated with eating disorders, particularly Anorexia Nervosa (AN). In this paper, we explore the explanatory potential of the Recalcitrant Fear Model of AN (RFM) in relation to body checking. We argue that RFM, when combined with certain plausible auxiliary h…
Obsessive-compulsive disorder and recalcitrant emotion
It is widely agreed that obsessive-compulsive disorder involves irrationality. But where in the complex of states and processes that constitutes OCD should this irrationality be located? A pervasive assumption in both the psychiatric and philosophical literature is that the seat of irrationality is located in the obsessive thoughts characteristic of OCD. Building on a puzzle about insight into OCD, we challenge this pervasive assumption, and argu…
Understanding in Medicine
Is health the absence of disease
While philosophical questions about health and disease have attracted much attention in recent decades, and while opinions are divided on most issues, influential accounts seem to embrace negativism about health, according to which health is the absence of disease. Some subscribe to unrestricted negativism, which claims that negativism applies not only to the concepts of health and disease as used by healthcare professionals but also to the lay c…
Scientific understanding in biomedical research
Motivated by a recent trend that advocates a reassessment of the aim of medical science and clinical practice, this paper investigates the epistemic aims of biomedical research. Drawing on contemporary discussions in epistemology and the philosophy of science, along with a recent study on scurvy, this paper (1) explores the concept of understanding as the aim of scientific inquiry and (2) establishes a framework that will guide the examination of…
What is mental health and disorder? Philosophical implications from lay judgments
How do people understand the concepts of mental health and disorder? The objective of this paper is to examine the impact of several factors on people’s judgments about whether a condition constitutes a mental disorder or a healthy state. Specifically, this study examines the impact of the source of the condition, its outcome, individual valuation (i.e., the value the individual attaches to the condition), and group valuation (i.e., the value the…
Mental health promotion and the positive concept of health
A prevailing view holds that the main goal of mental health promotion is to maintain and improve positive mental health, which is not merely defined by the absence of mental disorders, but by the presence of certain abilities. There are, however, challenges associated with this view that this paper aims to identify and explore. We start by highlighting three requirements for an ethically and politically justified mental health promotion scheme: (…
The Aim of Medicine. Sanocentricity and the Autonomy Thesis
Recent criticisms of medicine converge on fundamental questions about the aim of medicine. The main task of this paper is to propose an account of the aim of medicine. Discussing and rejecting the initially plausible proposal according to which medicine is pathocentric, the paper presents and defends the Autonomy Thesis, which holds that medicine is not pathocentric, but sanocentric, aiming to promote health with the final aim to enhance autonomy…
On the roles of false belief and recalcitrant fear in anorexia nervosa
The DSM‐5 highlights two essential psychological features of anorexia nervosa (AN): recalcitrant fear of gaining weight and body image disturbance. Prominent accounts grant false beliefs about body weight and shape a central role in the explanation of AN behavior. In this article, we propose a stronger emphasis on recalcitrant fear. We show that such fear can explain AN behavior without the intermediary of a false belief, and thus without the ass…
Non-dynamism and temporal disturbances
Philosophical accounts denying that temporal passage is an objective feature of reality face an explanatory challenge with respect to why it appears to us as though time passes. Recently, two solutions have surfaced. Cognitive illusionism claims that people experience the passage of time due to their belief that time passes. Cognitive error theory claims that we do not experience the passage of time, but hold the belief that we do, which we have …
The criticism of medicine at the end of its “golden age”
Medicine as science. Systematicity and demarcation
Interpersonal judgments, embodied reasoning, and juridical legitimacy
A particular branch of the embodied cognition (EC) research program explicates abstract concepts and metaphors as grounded in particular domains of bodily experience. This chapter explores conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) and some recent behavioral and neuroscientific research that appears to offer some support for it. While this research indicates that bodily states exert non-negligible influence on cognition and behavior, the influences appear …
The politics of Nation Branding
Nation Branding is broadly conceived of as an apolitical marketing strategy that targets external markets to establish and communicate a specific image of national identity. However, in this article it is argued that Nation Branding displays characteristics that make it constructive to analyse in terms of an implicit cultural policy. The main point is that Nation Branding is essentially an inner-oriented, cultural- political measure that targets …
Critical social philosophy, Honneth and the role of primary intersubjectivity
Gesellschaftskritik, or social philosophy that aims to provide firm criticism of pathological social practices, requires normatively grounded evaluative principles. In this article, we assess different possibilities for such principles with focus on a model that takes specific patterns of intersubjective interaction as its point of reference. We argue that in order to understand the full significance of this 'intersubjective turn' for social phil…
The Marketization of Foreign Cultural Policy
Critical Theory and the Two-Level Account of Recognition - Towards a New Foundation
Axel Honneth makes initial and promising steps towards what could be called a two-level account of recognition, according to which the normatively substantial forms of recognition represent various manners in which the primordial acquaintedness with others is expressed. It will be argued that Honneth's promising approach must be revised in regard to the issue of intentionality, which may be achieved by reference to earlier critical theorists such…
Mental disorder between naturalism and normativism
Worries about the potential medicalization of social and moral problems has propelled the debate on the nature of mental disorder, with normativists insisting that psychiatric classification is inherently value-laden and naturalists maintaining that a purely descriptive account of disease is possible. In recent work, some authors take a different path, accepting that the concepts of disease and mental disorder are value-laden but maintaining that…
Interaction and extended cognition
Is “Dysfunction” a Value-Neutral Concept
Two important issues in the philosophy of medicine are the evaluative issue (whether the concept of disease is value-laden) and the neutrality issue (whether the concept of dysfunction is value-laden). The aim of this study was to empirically examine whether a person’s evaluation of their own condition (i.e., patient evaluation) influences whether their condition is considered to be a disease and dysfunction. With respect to the evaluative issue,…
Non-dynamism and temporal disturbances
Philosophical accounts denying that temporal passage is an objective feature of reality face an explanatory challenge with respect to why it appears to us as though time passes. Recently, two solutions have surfaced. Cognitive illusionism claims that people experience the passage of time due to their belief that time passes. Cognitive error theory claims that we do not experience the passage of time, but hold the belief that we do, which we have …
Medicine as science. Systematicity and demarcation
Critical Theory and the Two-Level Account of Recognition - Towards a New Foundation
Axel Honneth makes initial and promising steps towards what could be called a two-level account of recognition, according to which the normatively substantial forms of recognition represent various manners in which the primordial acquaintedness with others is expressed. It will be argued that Honneth's promising approach must be revised in regard to the issue of intentionality, which may be achieved by reference to earlier critical theorists such…
Existential choices
Primary Goods, Contingency, and the Moral Challenge of Genetic Enhancement
Habermas' "Species Ethics", and the Limits of "Formal Anthropology
This article seeks to defend two claims: First, that universalist ethics in Habermas and Rawls cannot function without some recourse to the good Life, or human well-being. Second, that such ethical reflection must involve formal anthropological considerations. In other words, it must involve a consideration of the good that also encompasses reflection on what we are as humans. As an example, the paper draws on Habermas' recent thoughts on "specie…
The Paradox of Authenticity
The ideal of authenticity—roughly, that one should lead a life that is expressive of what the person takes herself to be—has become a strong and widespread ethical ideal with an immense impact on popular culture, most revealingly in the quest for authenticity in popular self-help literature. The “age of autonomy” that emphasized the individual's self-governing abilities is replaced by what Charles Taylor called “the age of authenticity.”1 In the …
Critical social philosophy, Honneth and the role of primary intersubjectivity
Gesellschaftskritik, or social philosophy that aims to provide firm criticism of pathological social practices, requires normatively grounded evaluative principles. In this article, we assess different possibilities for such principles with focus on a model that takes specific patterns of intersubjective interaction as its point of reference. We argue that in order to understand the full significance of this 'intersubjective turn' for social phil…
The politics of Nation Branding
Nation Branding is broadly conceived of as an apolitical marketing strategy that targets external markets to establish and communicate a specific image of national identity. However, in this article it is argued that Nation Branding displays characteristics that make it constructive to analyse in terms of an implicit cultural policy. The main point is that Nation Branding is essentially an inner-oriented, cultural- political measure that targets …
The Marketization of Foreign Cultural Policy
The Metaphysics of Psychopathology
Journal Article The Metaphysics of Psychopathology Get access The Metaphysics of Psychopathology.ByZachar Peter. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. Pp. 288. Price £35.00.) Somogy Varga Somogy Varga University of Memphis, USA E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 65, Issue 259, April 2015, Pages 307–310, https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqu065 Published: 31 O…
Interaction and extended cognition
Taking Refuge from History in Morality
Reading Marx’s work on central issues such as alienation and class struggle, one is often under the impression that the concept of dignity serves as a normative framework underpinning his diagnosis and criticism—especially in his early work. However, Marx also vehemently opposes concepts like “human dignity,” suggesting that moral terms like dignity are little more than “empty phrases.” To provide a better understanding of this tension, this refl…
Rhythms of the body, rhythms of the brain
The case for mind perception
Mental disorder between naturalism and normativism
Worries about the potential medicalization of social and moral problems has propelled the debate on the nature of mental disorder, with normativists insisting that psychiatric classification is inherently value-laden and naturalists maintaining that a purely descriptive account of disease is possible. In recent work, some authors take a different path, accepting that the concepts of disease and mental disorder are value-laden but maintaining that…
Interpersonal judgments, embodied reasoning, and juridical legitimacy
A particular branch of the embodied cognition (EC) research program explicates abstract concepts and metaphors as grounded in particular domains of bodily experience. This chapter explores conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) and some recent behavioral and neuroscientific research that appears to offer some support for it. While this research indicates that bodily states exert non-negligible influence on cognition and behavior, the influences appear …
Relaxed” natural kinds and psychiatric classification
Toward a Perceptual Account of Mindreading
A number of philosophers argue that consistent with the phenomenology of everyday mindreading, appropriately endowed observers are sometimes able to visually perceive that someone is angry. Call this view the Perceptual Account of Mindreading ( PA ). The paper starts by exploring the merits and limits of the main strategies that have been employed to defend PA . The second aim is to present and defend a version of PA , according to which some men…
Medicine as science. Systematicity and demarcation
The criticism of medicine at the end of its “golden age”
The Aim of Medicine. Sanocentricity and the Autonomy Thesis
Recent criticisms of medicine converge on fundamental questions about the aim of medicine. The main task of this paper is to propose an account of the aim of medicine. Discussing and rejecting the initially plausible proposal according to which medicine is pathocentric, the paper presents and defends the Autonomy Thesis, which holds that medicine is not pathocentric, but sanocentric, aiming to promote health with the final aim to enhance autonomy…
On the roles of false belief and recalcitrant fear in anorexia nervosa
The DSM‐5 highlights two essential psychological features of anorexia nervosa (AN): recalcitrant fear of gaining weight and body image disturbance. Prominent accounts grant false beliefs about body weight and shape a central role in the explanation of AN behavior. In this article, we propose a stronger emphasis on recalcitrant fear. We show that such fear can explain AN behavior without the intermediary of a false belief, and thus without the ass…
Non-dynamism and temporal disturbances
Philosophical accounts denying that temporal passage is an objective feature of reality face an explanatory challenge with respect to why it appears to us as though time passes. Recently, two solutions have surfaced. Cognitive illusionism claims that people experience the passage of time due to their belief that time passes. Cognitive error theory claims that we do not experience the passage of time, but hold the belief that we do, which we have …
Body Checking in Anorexia Nervosa
Body checking, characterized by the repeated visual or physical inspection of particular parts of one’s own body (e.g. thighs, waist, or upper arms) is one of the most prominent behaviors associated with eating disorders, particularly Anorexia Nervosa (AN). In this paper, we explore the explanatory potential of the Recalcitrant Fear Model of AN (RFM) in relation to body checking. We argue that RFM, when combined with certain plausible auxiliary h…
Obsessive-compulsive disorder and recalcitrant emotion
It is widely agreed that obsessive-compulsive disorder involves irrationality. But where in the complex of states and processes that constitutes OCD should this irrationality be located? A pervasive assumption in both the psychiatric and philosophical literature is that the seat of irrationality is located in the obsessive thoughts characteristic of OCD. Building on a puzzle about insight into OCD, we challenge this pervasive assumption, and argu…
Understanding in Medicine
Philosophy (29 obras) · Epistemology (27 obras) · Psychology (23 obras) · Mental Health and Psychiatry (14 obras) · Metaphysics (12 obras) · Political science (12 obras) · Sociology (12 obras) · Law (11 obras) · Cognitive science (9 obras) · Computer Science (9 obras)