Alien Experience

As cancer treatment has evolved toward precision medicine, psychosocial research and practices for cancer patients and their family members have also raised awareness of the need for a personalized, patient-focused, family-oriented approach in the Psycho-Oncology field. Gender in Psycho-Oncology is the first book of its kind to provide comprehensive views on the role of gender in the adjustment of the individual and the patient-caregiver pair when dealingwith cancer. The text explores the significant role of gender in diverse pairings of genders between the patient and the caregiver. It also highlights the importance of age, generation, and socio-cultural characteristics; the illness trajectory and lifespan trajectory of the individual and the patient-caregiverpair; and an ongoing sociocultural movement that is changing social role expectations based on gender. Offering both fundamental and practical information, Gender in Psycho-Oncology is an ideal book for healthcare practitioners from a spectrum of disciplines in the Psycho-Oncology field.If I were a better human being, that person's voice wouldn't sound so shrill to me. Many of us may have had such thoughts. They give voice to the worrying intuition that if we were less affected by sexism and racism, or better at keeping our tempers, our fellow humans would look and sound differently to us. In Alien Experience, Maura Tumulty argues that we should take this sense of unease seriously. It is as philosophically significant as ourunease over desires or fears that we disown. Making sense of this unease requires us to re-think the relation between experiences and standing commitments; to re-consider what we mean by self-control; and to attend to empirical questions about perception, attention, and tacit cognition.In taking up these issues, Alien Experience illuminates and questions a significant assumption that underlies debates in the philosophy of mind, moral psychology, and ethics: While we may be answerable (morally, ethically, legally) for our attitudes and emotions, we are not answerable in any interesting way for our perceptions and sensations. Tumulty argues that this assumption leads to a flattened view of the ways experiences are related to agency. Recognizing that we can bealienated from our experiences helps us appreciate distinctive opportunities for self-improvement.