Full Description
This volume inaugurates a series concerning philosophy and medicine. There are few, if any, areas of social concern so pervasive as medicine and yet as underexamined by philosophy. But the claim to precedence of the Proceedings of the First Trans-Disciplinary Symposium on Philos ophy and Medicine must be qualified. Claims to be "first" are notorious in the history of scientific as well as humanistic investigation and the claim that the First Trans-Disciplinary Symposium on Philosophy and Medicine has no precedent is not meant to be put in bald form. The editors clearly do not maintain that philosophers and physicians have not heretofore discussed matters of mutual concern, nor that individual philosophers and physicians have never taken up problems and concepts in medicine which are themselves at the boundary or interface of these two disciplines - concepts like "matter," "disease," "psyche. " Surely there have been books published on the logic and philosophy of medi 1 cine. But the formalization of issues and concepts in medicine has not received, at least in this century, sustained interest by professional phi losophers. Groups of philosophers have not engaged medicine in order to explicate its philosophical presuppositions and to sort out the various concepts which appear in medicine. The scope of such an effort takes the philosopher beyond problems and issues which today are subsumed under the rubric "medical ethics.
Contents
Section I / Value and Explanation: Historical Roots.- Some Basic Explanations of Disease: An Historian's Viewpoint.- Diseases Versus Healths: Some Legacies in the Philosophies of Modern Medical Science.- Section II / Philosophy of Science in Transition to a Philosophy of Medicine.- Concepts of Function and Mechanism in Medicine and Medical Science (Hommage à Claude Bernard).- Organs, Organisms and Disease: Human Ontology and Medical Practice.- Comments on "Concepts of Function and Mechanism in Medicine and Medical Science" and "Organs, Organisms and Disease".- Section III / Ethics and Medicine.- How Virtues Become Vices: Values, Medicine and Social Context.- Moral Philosophy and Medical Perplexity: Comments on "How Virtues Become Vices".- Section IV / Concepts in Medical Theory.- The Concepts of Health and Disease.- On Disease: Theories of Disease and the Ascription of Disease: Comments on "The Concepts of Health and Disease".- Section V / Body and Self: Phenomenological Perspectives.- Context and Reflexivity: The Genealogy of Self.- Comments on "Context and Reflexivity".- The Lived-Body as Catalytic Agent: Reaction at the Interface of Medicine and Philosophy.- Comments on "The Lived-Body as Catalytic Agent".- Section VI / The Role of Philosophy in the Biomedical Sciences: Contribution or Intrusion?.- Round-Table Discussion.- Notes on Contributors.
