Bas De Boer
Biographic Data
| ID | 459699 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bas De Boer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bas |
| FAMILY NAME | De Boer |
| SIGNATURE | DE BOER B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Twente |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2009-2198 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 7 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Disrupted self, therapy, and the limits of conversational AI
Conversational agents (CA) are thought to be promising for psychotherapy because they give the impression of being able to engage in conversations with human users. However, given the high risk for therapy patients who are already in a vulnerable situation, there is a need to investigate the extent to which CA are able to contribute to therapy goals and to discuss CA’s limitations, especially in complex cases. In this paper, we understand psychot…
The necessity of objectification: Sartre and Lacan on online body shaming
In psychological research, online body shaming is typically linked to objectification, where objectification is considered something to be avoided and fought. In this paper, we take a somewhat different perspective: while agreeing that objectification is indeed a key element to understand online body shaming, our starting point is that objectification cannot be avoided. We argue that online body shaming is grounded in a mismatch between the way o…
Animal Technics: A Tribute to Don Ihde
Healthy Embodiment: Philosophical Reflections on the Experience of Health
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 …
Negotiating becoming: A Nietzschean critique of large language models
Large language models (LLMs) structure the linguistic landscape by reflecting certain beliefs and assumptions. In this paper, we address the risk of people unthinkingly adopting and being determined by the values or worldviews embedded in LLMs. We provide a Nietzschean critique of LLMs and, based on the concept of will to power, consider LLMs as will-to-power organisations. This allows us to conceptualise the interaction between self and LLMs as …
Digital Embodiment: Active Extension and Passive Constitution
The goal of this paper is to outline how digital technologies can be understood as existential media by analyzing how they shape embodiment. This requires examining the relationship between three terms, namely “digital,” “technology,” and “embodiment.” My intent is to show how these three terms can be understood from a phenomenological perspective, as well as to flesh out the relationship(s) between them. The paper is structured as follows: First…
Empowerment: Freud, Canguilhem and Lacan on the ideal of health promotion
Empowerment is a prominent ideal in health promotion. However, the exact meaning of this ideal is often not made explicit. In this paper, we outline an account of empowerment grounded in the human capacity to adapt and adjust to environmental and societal norms without being completely determined by those norms. Our account reveals a tension at the heart of empowerment between (a) the ability of self-governance and (b) the need to adapt and adjus…
Explaining multistability: Postphenomenology and affordances of technologies
A central issue in postphenomenology is how to explain the multistability of technologies: how can it be that specific technologies can be used for a wide variety of purposes (the “multi”), while not for all purposes (the “stability”)? For example, a table can be used for the purpose of sleeping, having dinner at, or even for staging a fencing match, but not for baking a cake. One explanation offered in the literature is that the (material) desig…
Earth Becomes World
In coming to grips with the advent of the Anthropocene, contemporary philosophers have recently pushed beyond its many physical implications (e.g., global warming, reduced biodiversity) and social significance (e.g., climate justice, economics, migration) to interpret the Anthropocene metaphysically. According to such interpretations, the Anthropocene imposes nothing less than a wholly new understanding of the world. This raises the question rega…
Setting the Stage: Disgust as an Aesthetic Food Experience
Disgust is commonly understood as an emotion of aversion. However, people seem to eat certain food items not despite containing disgust eliciting features but because of them. In this paper, we introduce the term aesthetic disgust to capture this phenomenon. We outline in our manuscript how designers use different techniques to stage the food experience and facilitate aesthetic disgust, which can be understood as more than just a pleasurable expe…
Braining’ psychiatry: An investigation into how complexity is managed in the practice of neuropsychiatric research
Neuropsychiatry searches to understand mental disorders in terms of underlying brain activity by using brain imaging technologies. The field promises to offer a more objective foundation for diagnostic processes and to help developing forms of treatment that target the symptoms of a specific mental disorder. However, brain imaging technologies also reveal the brain as a complex network, suggesting that mental disorders cannot be easily linked to …
Imagining digital twins in healthcare: Designing for values as designing for technical milieus
Medicine is increasingly focusing on the prevention of diseases. The digital twin (DT) is considered to be an important technological development for realizing this transition. Broadly speaking, a DT is an in silico representation of an individual that dynamically reflects molecular and physiological status, which makes it possible to monitor precisely health status over time. Currently, DTs are more of an abstract ideal than a concrete technolog…
Living in the Flesh: Technologically Mediated Chiasmic Relationships (in Times of a Pandemic)
During the Corona pandemic, it became clear that people are vulnerable to potentially harmful nonhuman agents, as well as that our own biological existence potentially poses a threat to others, and vice versa. This suggests a certain reciprocity in our relations with both humans and nonhumans. In his The Visible and the Invisible , Merleau-Ponty introduces the notion of the flesh to capture this reciprocity. Building on this idea, he proposes to …
Bringing disgust in through the backdoor in healthy food promotion: A phenomenological perspective
Obesity has been pointed out as one of the main current health risks leading to calls for a so-called “war on obesity”. As we show in this paper, activities that attempt to counter obesity by persuading people to adjust a specific behavior often employ a pedagogy of regret and disgust. Nowadays, however, public healthcare campaigns that aim to tackle obesity have often replaced or augmented the explicit negative depictions of obesity and/or exces…
What is morally at stake when using algorithms to make medical diagnoses? Expanding the discussion beyond risks and harms
In this paper, we examine the qualitative moral impact of machine learning-based clinical decision support systems in the process of medical diagnosis. To date, discussions about machine learning in this context have focused on problems that can be measured and assessed quantitatively, such as by estimating the extent of potential harm or calculating incurred risks. We maintain that such discussions neglect the qualitative moral impact of these t…
How Scientific Instruments Speak: Postphenomenology and Technological Mediations in Neuroscientific Practice
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 develop…
The Advance of Technoscience and the Problem of Death Determination: A Promethean Puzzle
Death determination has long been a topic of intensive technoscientific and medical involvement. Due to advances in twentieth-century medical technology, the distinction between life and death has become less evident. Ambiguities appear when we start to use life-support technologies in order to save lives, bringing about “tragic artifacts” such as brain death and persistent vegetative state. In this paper we ask how this technoscientific and medi…
Technology In Between the Individual and the Political: Postphenomenology and Critical Constructivism
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields
Discovering Subjectivity in the Technosystem: Developing a Critical Position Towards Contingent Forms of Rationality
Two of the main approaches of what is often referred to as the ‘empirical philosophy of technology’ are postphenomenology and critical constructivism. Critical constructivists charge postphenomenologists for paying too little attention to the fact that our society is co-constituted not only by technologies, but also by forms of rationality exercised on a political level. Postphenomenologists, then, charge critical constructivism for insufficientl…
Brain imaging technologies as source for Extrospection: Self-formation through critical self-identification
Brain imaging technologies are increasingly used to find networks and brain regions that are specific to the functional realization of particular aspects of the self. In this paper, we aim to show how neuroscientific research and techniques could be used in the context of self-formation without treating them as representations of an inner realm. To do so, we show first how a Cartesian framework underlies the interpretation and usage of brain imag…
Experiencing objectified health: Turning the body into an object of attention
In current phenomenology of medicine, health is often understood as a state of transparency in which our body refrains from being an object of explicit attention. In this paper, I argue that such an understanding of health unnecessarily presupposes an overly harmonious alignment between subjective and objective body, resulting in the idea that our health remains phenomenologically inaccessible. Alternatively, I suggest that there are many occasio…
Constituting ‘Visual Attention’: On the Mediating Role of Brain Stimulation and Brain Imaging Technologies in Neuroscientific Practice
An important development within cognitive neuroscience is the use of Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation (NIBS), a technique which holds the promise of establishing causal relationships between brain processes and cognitive processes. However, NIBS does not allow researchers to observe neurophysiological processes, and must be coupled with imaging technologies such as Electroencephalography (EEG) for the visualization of neurophysiological change. Tec…
Understanding science-in-the-making by letting scientific instruments speak: From semiotics to postphenomenology
Latour encourages us to use science-in-the-making as an entry point to understanding science, because it allows us to see how scientific knowledge is constituted and through which processes the 'absolute certainties' of ready-made science appear. He approaches science-in-the-making from the perspective of semiotics because it enables him (1) to attribute equal importance to humans and nonhumans, and (2) to let the actors in scientific practices s…
Can the technological mediation approach improve technology assessment? A critical view from ‘within’
The technological mediation approach aspires to complement current Technology Assessment (TA) practices. It aims to do so by addressing ethical concerns from ‘within’ human-technology relations leading to ethical Constructive Technology Assessment (eCTA), as articulated by Kiran, Asle H., Nelly Oudshoorn, and Peter-Paul Verbeek in their 2015 article. In this paper, we problematize this ambition. Firstly, we situate the technological mediation app…
Understanding science-in-the-making by letting scientific instruments speak: From semiotics to postphenomenology
Latour encourages us to use science-in-the-making as an entry point to understanding science, because it allows us to see how scientific knowledge is constituted and through which processes the 'absolute certainties' of ready-made science appear. He approaches science-in-the-making from the perspective of semiotics because it enables him (1) to attribute equal importance to humans and nonhumans, and (2) to let the actors in scientific practices s…
Constituting ‘Visual Attention’: On the Mediating Role of Brain Stimulation and Brain Imaging Technologies in Neuroscientific Practice
An important development within cognitive neuroscience is the use of Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation (NIBS), a technique which holds the promise of establishing causal relationships between brain processes and cognitive processes. However, NIBS does not allow researchers to observe neurophysiological processes, and must be coupled with imaging technologies such as Electroencephalography (EEG) for the visualization of neurophysiological change. Tec…
Can the technological mediation approach improve technology assessment? A critical view from ‘within’
The technological mediation approach aspires to complement current Technology Assessment (TA) practices. It aims to do so by addressing ethical concerns from ‘within’ human-technology relations leading to ethical Constructive Technology Assessment (eCTA), as articulated by Kiran, Asle H., Nelly Oudshoorn, and Peter-Paul Verbeek in their 2015 article. In this paper, we problematize this ambition. Firstly, we situate the technological mediation app…
The Advance of Technoscience and the Problem of Death Determination: A Promethean Puzzle
Death determination has long been a topic of intensive technoscientific and medical involvement. Due to advances in twentieth-century medical technology, the distinction between life and death has become less evident. Ambiguities appear when we start to use life-support technologies in order to save lives, bringing about “tragic artifacts” such as brain death and persistent vegetative state. In this paper we ask how this technoscientific and medi…
Technology In Between the Individual and the Political: Postphenomenology and Critical Constructivism
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields
Discovering Subjectivity in the Technosystem: Developing a Critical Position Towards Contingent Forms of Rationality
Two of the main approaches of what is often referred to as the ‘empirical philosophy of technology’ are postphenomenology and critical constructivism. Critical constructivists charge postphenomenologists for paying too little attention to the fact that our society is co-constituted not only by technologies, but also by forms of rationality exercised on a political level. Postphenomenologists, then, charge critical constructivism for insufficientl…
Brain imaging technologies as source for Extrospection: Self-formation through critical self-identification
Brain imaging technologies are increasingly used to find networks and brain regions that are specific to the functional realization of particular aspects of the self. In this paper, we aim to show how neuroscientific research and techniques could be used in the context of self-formation without treating them as representations of an inner realm. To do so, we show first how a Cartesian framework underlies the interpretation and usage of brain imag…
Experiencing objectified health: Turning the body into an object of attention
In current phenomenology of medicine, health is often understood as a state of transparency in which our body refrains from being an object of explicit attention. In this paper, I argue that such an understanding of health unnecessarily presupposes an overly harmonious alignment between subjective and objective body, resulting in the idea that our health remains phenomenologically inaccessible. Alternatively, I suggest that there are many occasio…
Constituting ‘Visual Attention’: On the Mediating Role of Brain Stimulation and Brain Imaging Technologies in Neuroscientific Practice
An important development within cognitive neuroscience is the use of Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation (NIBS), a technique which holds the promise of establishing causal relationships between brain processes and cognitive processes. However, NIBS does not allow researchers to observe neurophysiological processes, and must be coupled with imaging technologies such as Electroencephalography (EEG) for the visualization of neurophysiological change. Tec…
Understanding science-in-the-making by letting scientific instruments speak: From semiotics to postphenomenology
Latour encourages us to use science-in-the-making as an entry point to understanding science, because it allows us to see how scientific knowledge is constituted and through which processes the 'absolute certainties' of ready-made science appear. He approaches science-in-the-making from the perspective of semiotics because it enables him (1) to attribute equal importance to humans and nonhumans, and (2) to let the actors in scientific practices s…
Bringing disgust in through the backdoor in healthy food promotion: A phenomenological perspective
Obesity has been pointed out as one of the main current health risks leading to calls for a so-called “war on obesity”. As we show in this paper, activities that attempt to counter obesity by persuading people to adjust a specific behavior often employ a pedagogy of regret and disgust. Nowadays, however, public healthcare campaigns that aim to tackle obesity have often replaced or augmented the explicit negative depictions of obesity and/or exces…
What is morally at stake when using algorithms to make medical diagnoses? Expanding the discussion beyond risks and harms
In this paper, we examine the qualitative moral impact of machine learning-based clinical decision support systems in the process of medical diagnosis. To date, discussions about machine learning in this context have focused on problems that can be measured and assessed quantitatively, such as by estimating the extent of potential harm or calculating incurred risks. We maintain that such discussions neglect the qualitative moral impact of these t…
How Scientific Instruments Speak: Postphenomenology and Technological Mediations in Neuroscientific Practice
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 develop…
Setting the Stage: Disgust as an Aesthetic Food Experience
Disgust is commonly understood as an emotion of aversion. However, people seem to eat certain food items not despite containing disgust eliciting features but because of them. In this paper, we introduce the term aesthetic disgust to capture this phenomenon. We outline in our manuscript how designers use different techniques to stage the food experience and facilitate aesthetic disgust, which can be understood as more than just a pleasurable expe…
Braining’ psychiatry: An investigation into how complexity is managed in the practice of neuropsychiatric research
Neuropsychiatry searches to understand mental disorders in terms of underlying brain activity by using brain imaging technologies. The field promises to offer a more objective foundation for diagnostic processes and to help developing forms of treatment that target the symptoms of a specific mental disorder. However, brain imaging technologies also reveal the brain as a complex network, suggesting that mental disorders cannot be easily linked to …
Imagining digital twins in healthcare: Designing for values as designing for technical milieus
Medicine is increasingly focusing on the prevention of diseases. The digital twin (DT) is considered to be an important technological development for realizing this transition. Broadly speaking, a DT is an in silico representation of an individual that dynamically reflects molecular and physiological status, which makes it possible to monitor precisely health status over time. Currently, DTs are more of an abstract ideal than a concrete technolog…
Living in the Flesh: Technologically Mediated Chiasmic Relationships (in Times of a Pandemic)
During the Corona pandemic, it became clear that people are vulnerable to potentially harmful nonhuman agents, as well as that our own biological existence potentially poses a threat to others, and vice versa. This suggests a certain reciprocity in our relations with both humans and nonhumans. In his The Visible and the Invisible , Merleau-Ponty introduces the notion of the flesh to capture this reciprocity. Building on this idea, he proposes to …
Empowerment: Freud, Canguilhem and Lacan on the ideal of health promotion
Empowerment is a prominent ideal in health promotion. However, the exact meaning of this ideal is often not made explicit. In this paper, we outline an account of empowerment grounded in the human capacity to adapt and adjust to environmental and societal norms without being completely determined by those norms. Our account reveals a tension at the heart of empowerment between (a) the ability of self-governance and (b) the need to adapt and adjus…
Explaining multistability: Postphenomenology and affordances of technologies
A central issue in postphenomenology is how to explain the multistability of technologies: how can it be that specific technologies can be used for a wide variety of purposes (the “multi”), while not for all purposes (the “stability”)? For example, a table can be used for the purpose of sleeping, having dinner at, or even for staging a fencing match, but not for baking a cake. One explanation offered in the literature is that the (material) desig…
Earth Becomes World
In coming to grips with the advent of the Anthropocene, contemporary philosophers have recently pushed beyond its many physical implications (e.g., global warming, reduced biodiversity) and social significance (e.g., climate justice, economics, migration) to interpret the Anthropocene metaphysically. According to such interpretations, the Anthropocene imposes nothing less than a wholly new understanding of the world. This raises the question rega…
Negotiating becoming: A Nietzschean critique of large language models
Large language models (LLMs) structure the linguistic landscape by reflecting certain beliefs and assumptions. In this paper, we address the risk of people unthinkingly adopting and being determined by the values or worldviews embedded in LLMs. We provide a Nietzschean critique of LLMs and, based on the concept of will to power, consider LLMs as will-to-power organisations. This allows us to conceptualise the interaction between self and LLMs as …
Digital Embodiment: Active Extension and Passive Constitution
The goal of this paper is to outline how digital technologies can be understood as existential media by analyzing how they shape embodiment. This requires examining the relationship between three terms, namely “digital,” “technology,” and “embodiment.” My intent is to show how these three terms can be understood from a phenomenological perspective, as well as to flesh out the relationship(s) between them. The paper is structured as follows: First…
The necessity of objectification: Sartre and Lacan on online body shaming
In psychological research, online body shaming is typically linked to objectification, where objectification is considered something to be avoided and fought. In this paper, we take a somewhat different perspective: while agreeing that objectification is indeed a key element to understand online body shaming, our starting point is that objectification cannot be avoided. We argue that online body shaming is grounded in a mismatch between the way o…
Animal Technics: A Tribute to Don Ihde
Healthy Embodiment: Philosophical Reflections on the Experience of Health
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 …
Disrupted self, therapy, and the limits of conversational AI
Conversational agents (CA) are thought to be promising for psychotherapy because they give the impression of being able to engage in conversations with human users. However, given the high risk for therapy patients who are already in a vulnerable situation, there is a need to investigate the extent to which CA are able to contribute to therapy goals and to discuss CA’s limitations, especially in complex cases. In this paper, we understand psychot…
Epistemology (13 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Political science (9 works) · Law (7 works) · Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations (7 works) · Social Psychology (7 works) · Cognitive science (5 works)