Introduction to Establishing Medical Reality: Essays in the Metaphysics and Epistemology of Biomedical Science</i (original) (raw)
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2007
Medicine has been a very fruitful source of significant issues for philosophy over the last 30 years. The vast majority of the issues discussed have been normative—they have been problems in morality and political philosophy that now make up the field called bioethics. However, biomedical science presents many other philosophical questions that have gotten relatively little attention, particularly topics in metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of science. This volume focuses on problems in these areas as they surface in biomedical science. Important changes in philosophy make biomedical science an especially interesting area of inquiry. Contemporary philosophy is largely naturalistic in approach—it takes philosophy to be constrained by the results of the natural sciences and able to contribute to the natural sciences as well. Exactly what those constraints and contributions should be is a matter of controversy. What is not controversial is that important questions in philosophy ...
Journal of Science, Humanities and Arts - JOSHA, 2021
The biomedical sciences need philosophy on at least two levels. Firstly, we can find strong arguments that recognize the need for philosophy on a theoretical level, such as the development of scientific theories that in turn can have effects such as the development of new treatments or other medical interventions. However, philosophy, and particularly bioethics, is necessary for the biomedical sciences at the practical level, that is, in the daily practice of science and the achievement of its goals and results. In this work, we will reconstruct some of the arguments that point out the importance of philosophy for science on a theoretical level, and, furthermore, we will argue that these same conceptual tools of philosophy can be useful on a practical level of biomedical sciences too. To this end, we will present four cases from the conceptual research conducted by the BioThera Institute of Philosophy: the enhanced definition of medical innovation as a new non-validated practice, the ethical justification of the duty of States to promote clinical research, the fair play model for the distribution of fair benefits in clinical research, and the ethical model for allocation of extremely scarce resources in times of public health emergency. josha.org
Recent Work in the Philosophy of Medicine: An Essay Review
Philosophy of Science, 2022
Is philosophy of medicine a subfield of philosophy of science? Of philosophy of biology? Should it overlap with bioethics? Or is it its own field like philosophy of technology or philosophy of law? Should we worry about the reliability of medical knowledge? With such questions in mind, I briefly review three books in the philosophy of medicine: an introductory survey by R. Paul Thompson and Ross E.G. Upshur, a philosophical critique of medicine by Jacob Stegenga, and a breast cancer survivor's bid for philosophical consolation by Mary Ann Cutter. To philosophers of science, Thompson and Upshur's and Stegenga's contributions will be recognizable as an application of the tools of philosophy of science to medicine. Cutter's book comes from a different tradition, traceable to the philosophy of medicine of Tristram Engelhardt. Thus, while the nature and reliability of medical knowledge takes up most of this review, the issue of demarcation-what philosophy of medicine is and how it relates to philosophy of science, bioethics, and perhaps social and political philosophy-is raised just by virtue of the variety in the books reviewed. In my view, philosophy of medicine should be aware of its relationship to these other fields of philosophy and draw upon them. Thompson and Upshur's Philosophy of Medicine: An Introduction goes well beyond offering a survey of issues in the field. Distinguishing between bench medicine (experimental research and model-building closely allied to biology, chemistry, and physics) and clinical medicine (13), their core thesis-introduced early with contrasting capsule summaries of James Lind's 1753 discovery of the cure for scurvy (6) and Victor Bolie's 1960 glucose-insulin model (7)-is that the mathematical and mechanistic
A Brief Philosophical Encounter with Science and Medicine
2013
We show a lot of respect for science today. To back up our claims, we tend to appeal to scientific methods. It seems that we all agree that these methods are effective for gaining the truth. We can ask why science has its special status as a supplier of knowledge about our external world and our bodies. Of course, one should not always trust what scientists say. Nonetheless, epistemological justification of scientific claims is really a big project for philosophers of science. Philosophers of science are interested in knowing how science proves what it does claim and why it gives us good reasons to take these claims seriously. These questions are epistemological questions. Epistemology is a branch of philosophy which deals with knowledge claims and justification. Besides epistemological questions, metaphysical and ethical issues in science are worthy of philosophical scrutiny. This paper gives a short survey of these intellectually demanding issues.
For a few decades, the questions raised by biology and medicine have taken a central place in the philosophical reflection at the international scale. The bio-medical sciences have become (once again) a privileged object of study within different research traditions such as historical epistemology and analytic philosophy. If the interest for living beings and for life itself has always been part and parcel of historical epistemology, as is testified by the works of Auguste Comte or Georges Canguilhem, this interest is on the contrary a more recent interest for analytically-oriented philosophy. Against this background, the emergence, since the 1980s, of philosophy of biology is even more remarkable. A particularly relevant aspect of these new researches on biology and medicine is their ambition to intervene as directly as possible in the latest scientific debates. It is as if the development of science – and in particular that of molecular biology and of the theory of evolution – renewed the need to question traditional categories, such as that of “organism”, “individual” and “species”, or of more recent ones, more prominently those of “gene” and “cell”. This particular position of biology is the reason why it is at the crossroad of many areas of research concerning normativity and the status of norms (including meta-ethics), including debates over the respective roles of nature and social forces in defining these norms. It is thereby no surprise that the developments of biology continue to represent new ethical and political challenges for societies. The impressive development of medical and bio-medical technologies only furthers the questioning of everyday notions such as “life”, “health” or “illness”. Moreover, the advancement of neurological research on the brain, specifically for what concerns the cerebral localization of mental functions, continuously challenges the philosophical definitions of the self and of personal identity. The clarification of the conceptual content of these various notions is a primary concern for the public space of contemporary societies. Finally, the identity of the bio-medical sciences is confronted directly with the problem of the possibility of an authentic science of the living. This question has crossed a good part of the history of philosophy, from Kant to Rheinberger and Müller, through Bergson and Canguilhem. The old alternative between mechanism and vitalism demands today to be reworked, especially under the light of the organic perspectives directly connected, according to some, to the emergence of systematic or integrative biology.
Philosophy of biology and medicine
Freedom and Health - Hayek and Flanigan
Freedom in the medical field is a taboo subject because it is contrary to dogma. At a time when liberticidal sentiments are emerging, I thought it would be interesting to return to a pure source of freedom with Hayek's book, The Road to Serfdom, and to compare it with Jessica Flanigan's book, Pharmaceutical Freedom: Why Patients Have a Right to Self Medicate. These two philosophers have a unique vision of freedom that I propose to understand, one in the political field and the other in the medical field.
Establishing medical reality : essays in the metaphysics and epistemology of biomedical science
2007
Acknowledgements 1. Introduction H. Kincaid & J. McKitrick. 2. Normality, Disease and Enhancement T. Benditt. 3. Holistic Theories of Health as Applied to Non-human Living Beings L. Nordenfelt. 4: The Spread of Disease: How to Understand and Resolve a Dispute About the Reality of Disease R. D'Amico. 5. Decision and Discovery in Defining Disease P. Schwartz. 6. Race and Scientific Reduction M. Risjord. 7. Towards an Adequate Account of Genetic Disease K. Smith. 8: Why Disease Persist: An Evolutionary Nosology R. Perlman. 9. Creating Mental Illness in Nondisordered Community Populations A. Horwitz. 10. Gender Identity Disorder J. McKitrick. 11. Clinical Trails as Nomological Machines: Implications for Evidence Based Medicine R. Bluhm. 12. The Social Epistemology of NIH Consensus Conferences M. Solomon. 13. Maternal Agency and the Immunological Paradox of Pregnancy M. Howes. 14. Violence and Public Health J. Kaplan. 15. Take Equipoise Seriously: The Failure of Clinical Equipoise or...