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http://dspace.mediu.edu.my:8181/xmlui/handle/123456789/4133| Title: | “Of the Virus Party”: Ecofeminist Perspectives on Dissent in AIDS Science. |
| Keywords: | allopathic medicine biosphere ecofeminism Gaia hypothesis holistic health res cogitans res extensa superorganism scientific paradigm scientific revolution thought collective thought style. |
| Issue Date: | 30-May-2013 |
| Publisher: | Rima I.T |
| Description: | My analysis of the controversies in AIDS science demonstrates that due to the influence of the allopathic scientific collective, the course of mainstream research about the disease has been overdetermined. During the disease’s early outbreaks, allopathic medicine dominated medical discourse. As a result, AIDS science focused on infectious rather than environmental and ecological causes. Later, this focus caused controversies voiced by dissenters from a more holistic perspective. I argue that persisting uncertainties in the etiology of AIDS challenge conventional understandings of this disease. In an ecofeminist perspective, these challenges can be seen as signs of an important shift in the philosophy of health. Thomas Kuhn would describe this shift as harbinger of a “scientific revolution,” resulting from a new “scientific paradigm” struggling to get center stage. If, as ecofeminists claim, the Earth is an animated being and not a Cartesian res extensa, humans are particles of the larger superorganism environmentalists often call Gaia. In this perspective, AIDS is an illness of the biosphere that affects its human particles. This planetary illness denotes toxicity in Gaia’s body, including its air, soil, and waters. If so, AIDS reads as an environmental disease, not an infectious one. This hypothesis is based on a holistic philosophy of health, which is the major current challenge to allopathic philosophy. In his article, I argue that AIDS can be situated at the interstice between cause and effect in the paradigm change, where the collision of two modes of thinking produces new perspectives. |
| URI: | http://koha.mediu.edu.my:8181/jspui/handle/123456789/4133 |
| Other Identifiers: | http://www.nobleworld.biz/images/ARTL1.pdf http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=openurl&genre=article&issn=14497751&date=2004&volume=1&issue=1&spage=1 |
| Appears in Collections: | General Works |
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