Chloé de Canson

Harriet Fagerberg, Reactive Natural Kinds and Varieties of Dependence - PhilArchive This paper asks when a natural disease kind is truly 'reactive' and when it is merely associated with a corresponding social kind. I begin with a permissive account of real kinds ...

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!

Chloé de Canson, Diseases as Homeostatic Property Clusters - PhilPapers Several philosophers have recently drawn on property cluster accounts of natural kinds to argue that individual diseases form natural kinds. According to them, diseases have a super-explanatory proper...

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”

🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍

"Invisible Illness" could have been transgressive. Instead, it minimizes Long COVID. Written by Shielding Cournoyer - February 13, 2026 The book fails to convey the severity of infection-associated chronic conditions, demands for treatment, or importance of infection prevention.

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) …

Solving Long COVID: How Decades of HIV Research Paved the Way Discover how UCSF is leading the charge in Long COVID research, uncovering key findings that advance our understanding of the condition. UCSF researchers have adapted innovative tools and methodologie...

“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

A man has committed suicide in St. Paul's which I allow is inexcusably sloppy of him but it has caused a delicious fuss and fluster among the shovel hats. The Cathedral will have to be re-consecrated, they fear, but perhaps they may be able with their highly developed muscles of evasion to wash out the stain of blood by an "Act of Reconciliation!" I can never accustom

January 21st How picturesque and instructive of the Duke of Bedford33 to commit suicide at this moment of frozen misery, showing his destitution, before the affluence of the slums, of that apparently inextinguishable animal appetite for simple respiration, without which all power and splendour are inoperative against the canker of weariness. It makes it a more perfect whole, that,

Alice James’s diary entries on the suicides of random people

Oatly banned from using word ‘milk’ to market plant-based products in UK Supreme court makes ruling after Swedish firm’s long-running battle with trade association Dairy UK

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”,

a strange, living richness. But it also puts before me what I was tremendously conscious of in her lifetime—that the extraordinary' intensity of her will and personality really would have made the equal, the reciprocal life of a "well" person—in the usual world-almost impossible to her—so that her disastrous, her tragic health was in a manner the only solution for her of the practical problem of life-as it suppressed the element of equality, reciprocity, etc.

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”

You must also remember that a woman, by nature, needs much less to feed upon than a man, a few emotions and she is satisfied; so when I am gone, pray don't think of me simply as a creature who might have been something else, had neurotic science been born. Notwithstanding the poverty of my outside experience, I have always had a significance for myself, and every chance to stumble along my straight and narrow little path, and to worship at the feet of my Deity, and what more can a human soul ask for?

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

After having written about the PLRC in my paper on lay science (philpapers.org/rec/CANTEG), and after a collaboration which resulted in a little paper in the Lancet Infectious Diseases (doi.org/10.1016/S147..., it’s an honour to become part of the contributor team. I look forward to it!

They have tirelessly advocated for better and more research funding for long COVID. Last year, they put together this exceptional fact sheet for LC awareness day, which I heartily recommend to everyone patientresearchcovid19.com/2025-long-co...