@chloedecanson.bsky.social
Formerly assistant professor of philosophy • bedbound since 2022 with severe myalgic encephalomyelitis, a type of long COVID • philosophy of science, epistemology incl. social, and their history • chloedecanson.net • 🇵🇸
Thank you for this amazing resource. I especially love the “decide for me” card.
New on the Archive:
de Canson, Chloé (2026) Diseases as Homeostatic Property Clusters. [Preprint]
https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/28478/
This paper draws heavily on @harrif.bsky.social's fantastic paper on disease kinds, which I heartily recommend: philarchive.org/rec/FAGRNK
This is a preliminary paper for my larger project on the notion of 'medically unexplained symptom'. This notion runs together several importantly distinct phenomena and ultimately serves to further controversialise infection-associated chronic conditions like ME and Long COVID. Stay tuned!
My paper on disease has been accepted at Philosophy of Medicine!
I argue that diseases form homeostatic property clusters: their underlying pathomechanisms cause clustering in their symptomatology, biological signature, response to treatments, and prognosis
philpapers.org/rec/CANDAH
Yeah the shock wasn’t surprise ofc but upset and anger!
Watching on in utter shock as the access disabled people gained to academia and social life more generally in 2020 got slowly stripped from us, and it’s now in some ways even worse than pre-pandemic
Oh that’s such a good point! Although one of my papers on Black theory was under review for 14 months before i heard back so…
In my experience there’s a wild difference between generalist journals (regularly take over six months, sometimes over a year) and top philosophy of science journals (you get a response within weeks)
I went from never having had an allergic reaction in my life to being able to eat only about 10 foods as a result of long COVID. This is somehow very rarely discussed in research, so it's nice to see it!
Charles S. Peirce on William James: “he so concrete, so living; I a mere table of contents, so abstract, a very snarl of twine”
🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍
The headers really set the tone!
“Pharmaceuticals are quick fixes” is a very RFK Jr coded sentence
And many people (myself included) think his work profoundly interesting. Taken together, this suggests that the content of the work may have something to do with it? Something about its concerns being not “existential” or “humanistic”?
I think Peirce is probably an example of someone who thought he was worthy of a cult of personality, but it never materialised. In many ways his personality was very similar to Wittgenstein’s for instance (incredibly arrogant, viewed himself as a genius, exasperating to everyone around him) …
“HIV taught us how chronic viral infections can affect the body long after initial illness, and how important it is to involve patients in that research,” said @michaelpelusomd.bsky.social. “Applying those lessons to #LongCovid has helped us accelerate discovery” www.ucsf.edu/news/2026/01...
I’ve been crying reading her diaries—the moments of elation when she could go outside to lie in the grass—the relief and joy she felt at having a concrete diagnosis—the raging desire to live and simultaneous constant thoughts of suicide—her devoted love for her wonderful carer
Alice James’s diary entries on the suicides of random people
The meaning of words is to be decided not by their use, usefulness, or history, but by their commercial benefit to the most powerful lobby groups. I have a recipe for almond milk in a cookbook from 1226. It has been used as a term in English for hundreds of years.
www.theguardian.com/business/202...
It's ironic to see a discipline care **so much** about unbiasedness (causal inference!) at the level of a single test but then have a research production system and culture that is basically a ferocious bias generation machine. This is not good.
despite the “poverty of [her] outside experience”, was able to live a life she herself found “significant”.
May the science which Alice claimed would have allowed her to “be something else” come to fruition.
This demonstrates the banality of the Wessely school’s line of thought, even if as @dianeoleary.bsky.social shows, they have given themselves a rebranding under the moniker of “biopsychosocial” medicine, and the extraordinary clarity of Alice James, who despite her mere “centimetre of observation”,
Even after her death, Henry maintained his vicious assessment of her illness as something she imposed on herself, unconsciously, for what current ME psychologisers have called (alleged) “secondary gains”, and what he called “her only solution to the practical problem of life”
Shortly before her death, she wrote to her other brother William James: “pray don’t think of me simply as a creature who might have been something else, had neurotic science been born … I have always had a significance for myself”
But soon afterwards, her condition worsened permanently and she was never again able to return to the United States. She remained in London until she developed breast cancer (a diagnosis made much more likely by myalgic encephalomyelitis) and died, aged 43
But these passages bear the unmistakable mark of post-exertional malaise, the dangerous and protracted worsening that follows exertion in myalgic encephalomyelitis. At that point in her life, Alice was still well enough that she might have recovered had she been allowed to rest
Alice James told her brother Henry James that, could she have her close friend Katherine Loring “quietly and uninterruptedly for a year to relieve her of all responsibility, she would get well”. Alice was diagnosed with hysteria and Henry cruelly surmised that her illness was a ploy to keep K close
Ooofff that’s rough!! at the start of the quote I thought it was going to denounce the assumption of univocality but oh boy was I wrong
That’s an incredible pair of quotes lmao