Pat McConville - ’Phenomenology and Artificial Hearts: Three scales of temporal change’

Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Pat McConville, Monash Bioethics Centre, Monash University. 

Pat McConville 'Phenomenology and Artificial Hearts: Three scales of temporal change' 

Abstract: Heart failure is a widespread and increasingly common disease. Its symptoms can be dramatic and debilitating. Serious heart failure is also incurable and represents a clear example of the kinds of serious illness and disability discussed by phenomenologists of health and illness. The gold standard treatment for end-stage heart failure is heart transplant. Increasingly, however, patients are offered artificial hearts – either Ventricular Assist Devices (VADs) or Total Artificial Hearts (TAHs) – as either a bridge-to-transplant or as a final or “destination therapy”. Artificial hearts supplement or replace the organic heart and perform the heart's blood-pumping function, or what might be described as in Albert Borgmann's “device paradigm” as the commodity of circulation. However, while they can provide this life-saving function, artificial hearts also generate both obvious and subtle phenomenological changes in their bearers. Incorporating a mechanical heart with both interior and exterior features is challenging. Artificial hearts produce and draw attention to new representations of otherwise felt or interocepted visceral states, and might interrupt pre-device motor intentionalities. Devices detach circulation from ordinary cardiac rhythms, while machine routines mark out new temporalities. In this paper, I introduce artificial hearts and why phenomenology is useful for considering them, then focus in on the three scales – short-, medium-, and long-term – of temporal change they may generate. 

Bio: Pat McConville is a doctoral candidate in philosophical bioethics at the Monash Bioethics Centre, Monash University, Australia. He principally draws on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to explore the phenomenology of medical devices, particularly artificial hearts. He has also published on phenomenology and congenital illness, phenomenology and reverse triage, and phenomenology and the aesthetics of the early arcade game Asteroids. 

This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project. 

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