On Wednesday 5 October, CHHS welcomed our first speaker of the year, Dr Luis de Miranda. The seminar was chaired by Professor Ulrika Maude, the director of the CHHS.
Dr Luis de Miranda is a researcher at the Center for Medical Humanities at Uppsala University, Sweden, the initiator of the Philosophical Health International network (https://philosophical.health) and the author of a dozen books translated into various languages, including Being and Neonness (MIT Press). His talk was entitled ‘Sense-Making Interviews Looking at Elements of Philosophical Health: Introducing the New SMILE_PH Method through the Case of Spinal Cord Injury’.
He told us about his new semi-structured interviewing method SMILE_PH, an acronym for Sense-Making Interviews Looking at Elements of Philosophical Health. As well as explaining the theoretical underpinnings of his method (including work by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and other phenomenological thinkers), he described some interesting case studies based on a pilot study he conducted with people living with spinal cord injury (SCI). The SMILE_PH method progressively gathers phenomenological information about 1 – our bodily sense; 2 – our sense of self, 3 – our sense of belonging; 4 – our sense of the possible; 5 – our sense of purpose and 6 – our philosophical sense. Dr de Miranda explained that his main motivation is pragmatic: he wants to provide the recent philosophical health movement with a testable method and show that philosophically-oriented interviews are possible in a manner that can be reproduced, compared and used systematically with a population that has received no training in philosophy. It was fascinating to hear about the ways in which philosophy can enrich medicine, and vice versa.