Contemporary Philosophy of Medicine
- LAST REVIEWED: 02 September 2022
- LAST MODIFIED: 30 June 2014
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396577-0216
- LAST REVIEWED: 02 September 2022
- LAST MODIFIED: 30 June 2014
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396577-0216
Introduction
Contemporary medicine is fragmented in terms of approaches to what it is or should be, as well as to how it is or should be practiced. Approaches to the nature of medicine range from traditional logical and empirical accounts to humanistic and phenomenological ones, while approaches to its practice range from Evidence-Based Medicine to Patient-Centered Medicine. These approaches often involve different philosophical perspectives. For example, a reductionist perspective is foundational to standard biomedicine, whereas a holistic perspective is foundational to integrative medicine. In the present bibliography, entries on General Overviews, Edited Volumes, professional Journals, and online resources are listed initially, followed by different approaches to medicine’s nature and practice, ranging from the Logic of Medicine to Virtue Medicine. The bibliography concludes with entries on Medical Ontology, including Disease, Health, and Medical Causation, and to Medical Epistemology, including Medical Knowledge and Explanation, Medical Informatics, and Clinical Judgment and Decision Making. Finally, the bioethics and medical ethics literature has not been included, since it constitutes a separate field of scholarship in the philosophy of medicine.
General Overviews
Contemporary philosophy of medicine begins with the publication of Pellegrino and Thomasma 1981, with almost seven hundred citations, according to Google Scholar—impressive for a non-bioethical book. Since its publication, the frequency of introductory expositions has increased considerably—at least four within the past five years. The entries in this section represent not only general overviews of the discipline but also views from particular philosophical perspectives and with specific agendas. Culver and Gert 1982 utilizes philosophy to examine issues in medicine and psychiatry, while van der Steen and Thung 1988 provides a philosophical analysis of clinical practice. Wulff, et al. 1990 is a general introduction to philosophy of medicine. Tauber 1999 introduces philosophical issues in medicine from a personal perspective, especially using Levinas’s distinction between Self and Other. Johansson and Lynøe 2008 and Lee 2012 use philosophy of science to frame and construct a philosophy of medicine. Finally, Fagot-Largeault 2010 employs Georges Canguilhem’s work to explore ontological, epistemological, and ethical issues arising in medical care.
Culver, Charles M., and Bernard Gert. Philosophy in Medicine: Conceptual and Ethical Issues in Medicine and Psychiatry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.
NNNThe authors cover a number of topics facing the practice of medicine. The first topic involves rationality in medicine with respect to the philosophical analysis of medical concepts, including the concept of death. The topic of paternalistic medicine is discussed and even defended, within limited circumstances. Other topics include the nature of medical competence and of malady and illness.
Fagot-Largeault, Anne. Médecine et Philosophie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010.
NNNThe author, drawing on Georges Canguilhem’s Le Normal et le Pathologique (1943), discusses metaphysical commitments of modern medicine, such as the nature of disease and its etiology, epistemological questions with respect to the normal and pathological, and ethical challenges facing modern medical practice.
Johansson, Ingvar, and Niels Lynøe. Medicine and Philosophy: A Twenty-First Century Introduction. Frankfurt: Ontos, 2008.
NNNThe authors frame the book in terms of the philosophy of science, initially discussing the notion of scientific fact, argument, knowledge, and progress. They then introduce a number of topics contextualized with respect to a clinical paradigm that envisions the patient in terms of mechanism. Finally, they discuss topics such as placebo and nocebo phenomena, including both clinical and research ethics.
Lee, Keekok. The Philosophical Foundations of Modern Medicine. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
NNNThe author first covers topics in the philosophy of science, including reductionism, mechanism, and theoretical biology. Next, he discusses the patient as mechanism as well as the technological developments to diagnose and treat diseases. Finally, she covers nosology and the monogenetic conception of disease, and then proceeds to disease causation and random control trials.
Pellegrino, Edmund D., and David C. Thomasma. A Philosophical Basis of Medical Practice: Toward a Philosophy and Ethic of the Healing Professions. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.
NNNThe book is a classic in terms of a general overview of philosophical issues involved in contemporary medicine and its practice. The authors discuss initially what constitutes medicine as a profession. They then tackle the moral nature of medicine with respect to individual and social ethics.
Tauber, Alfred I. Confessions of a Medicine Man: An Essay in Popular Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
NNNThe book is partly autobiographical, but also profoundly philosophical in that the author wrestles with substantive metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical issues that face the everyday practice of medicine. To that end, he enlists especially Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy to ground medicine as a moral encounter of Self and Other in which the physician has a fiduciary responsibility to benefit the patient.
van der Steen, Wim J., and P. J. Thung. Faces of Medicine: A Philosophical Study. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer, 1988.
NNNThe authors address the philosophical themes that arise from medicine’s theoretical basis and from its practice. These themes include the relationship between medical science and its daily practice, notions of health and disease, the notion of medical cure, psychosomatic and biopsychosocial medicine, and alternative medicine. The authors also discuss the relationship of values to facts, especially in terms of normativism and naturalism.
Wulff, Henrik R., Stig A. Pedersen, and Raben Rosenberg. Philosophy of Medicine: An Introduction. 2d ed. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1990.
NNNFirst published in 1986, the book is an introductory philosophical analysis of the values that animate and inform medical practice. Topics include the paradigmatic nature of medicine, medical empiricism and realism, medical causality, the mind-body problem, psychiatric naturalism, the nature of disease, medical sociology, and medical ethics. Besides an empirical or a scientific perspective of disease, the authors also approach illness from a hermeneutical perspective.
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Article
- A Priori Knowledge
- Abduction and Explanatory Reasoning
- Ability
- Abortion
- Abstract Objects
- Action
- Addams, Jane
- Adorno, Theodor
- Aesthetic Hedonism
- Aesthetics, Analytic Approaches to
- Aesthetics, Continental
- Aesthetics, Environmental
- Aesthetics, History of
- African Philosophy, Contemporary
- Alexander, Samuel
- Analytic/Synthetic Distinction
- Anarchism, Philosophical
- Animal Rights
- Anscombe, G. E. M.
- Anthropic Principle, The
- Applied Ethics
- Aquinas, Thomas
- Argument Mapping
- Art and Emotion
- Art and Knowledge
- Art and Morality
- Artifacts
- Assertion
- Astell, Mary
- Atheism
- Augustine
- Aurelius, Marcus
- Austin, J. L.
- Autonomy
- Bacon, Francis
- Bayesianism
- Beauty
- Belief
- Bergson, Henri
- Berkeley, George
- Biology, Philosophy of
- Bolzano, Bernard
- Boredom, Philosophy of
- British Idealism
- Buber, Martin
- Buddhist Philosophy
- Burge, Tyler
- Business Ethics
- Camus, Albert
- Canterbury, Anselm of
- Carnap, Rudolf
- Causation
- Cavendish, Margaret
- Certainty
- Chemistry, Philosophy of
- Childhood, Philosophy of
- Chinese Philosophy
- Cognitive Ability
- Cognitive Phenomenology
- Cognitive Science, Philosophy of
- Coherentism
- Color
- Communitarianism
- Computational Science
- Computer Science, Philosophy of
- Comte, Auguste
- Concepts
- Conceptual Role Semantics
- Conditionals
- Confirmation
- Confucius
- Connectionism
- Consciousness
- Constructive Empiricism
- Contemporary Hylomorphism
- Contextualism
- Contrastivism
- Cook Wilson, John
- Cosmology, Philosophy of
- Critical Theory
- Culture and Cognition
- Daoism and Philosophy
- Davidson, Donald
- de Beauvoir, Simone
- de Montaigne, Michel
- Death
- Decision Theory
- Deleuze, Gilles
- Democracy
- Depiction
- Derrida, Jacques
- Descartes, René
- Descartes, René: Sensory Representations
- Descriptions
- Dewey, John
- Dialetheism
- Disability
- Disagreement, Epistemology of
- Disjunctivism
- Dispositions
- Doing and Allowing
- du Châtelet, Emilie
- Dummett, Michael
- Dutch Book Arguments
- Early Modern Philosophy, 1600-1750
- Eastern Orthodox Philosophical Thought
- Education, Philosophy of
- Emotion
- Engineering, Philosophy and Ethics of
- Environmental Philosophy
- Epicurus
- Epistemic Basing Relation
- Epistemic Defeat
- Epistemic Injustice
- Epistemic Justification
- Epistemic Philosophy of Logic
- Epistemology
- Epistemology and Active Externalism
- Epistemology, Bayesian
- Epistemology, Feminist
- Epistemology, Internalism and Externalism in
- Epistemology, Moral
- Epistemology of Education
- Ethical Consequentialism
- Ethical Deontology
- Ethical Intuitionism
- Eugenics and Philosophy
- Events, The Philosophy of
- Evidence
- Evidence-Based Medicine, Philosophy of
- Evidential Support Relation In Epistemology, The
- Evil
- Evolutionary Debunking Arguments in Ethics
- Evolutionary Epistemology
- Experimental Philosophy
- Explanations of Religion
- Extended Mind Thesis, The
- Externalism and Internalism in the Philosophy of Mind
- Faith, Conceptions of
- Fatalism
- Feminist Philosophy
- Feyerabend, Paul
- Fichte, Johann Gottlieb
- Fiction
- Fictionalism
- Fictionalism in the Philosophy of Mathematics
- Film, Philosophy of
- Foot, Philippa
- Foreknowledge
- Forgiveness
- Formal Epistemology
- Foucault, Michel
- Free Will
- Frege, Gottlob
- Gadamer, Hans-Georg
- Geometry, Epistemology of
- God and Possible Worlds
- God, Arguments for the Existence of
- God, The Existence and Attributes of
- Grice, Paul
- Habermas, Jürgen
- Hart, H. L. A.
- Heaven and Hell
- Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Aesthetics
- Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Metaphysics
- Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Philosophy of History
- Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Philosophy of Politics
- Heidegger, Martin: Early Works
- Hermeneutics
- Higher Education, Philosophy of
- History, Philosophy of
- Hobbes, Thomas
- Horkheimer, Max
- Human Rights
- Hume, David: Aesthetics
- Hume, David: Moral and Political Philosophy
- Husserl, Edmund
- Idealizations in Science
- Identity in Physics
- Images
- Imagination
- Imagination and Belief
- Impossible Worlds
- Incommensurability in Science
- Indian Philosophy
- Indispensability of Mathematics
- Inductive Reasoning
- Infinitism
- Instruments in Science
- Intellectual Humility
- Intentionality, Collective
- Intuitions
- James, William
- Japanese Philosophy
- Kant and the Laws of Nature
- Kant, Immanuel: Aesthetics and Teleology
- Kant, Immanuel: Ethics
- Kant, Immanuel: Theoretical Philosophy
- Kierkegaard, Søren
- Knowledge
- Knowledge-first Epistemology
- Knowledge-How
- Kuhn, Thomas S.
- Lacan, Jacques
- Lakatos, Imre
- Langer, Susanne
- Language of Thought
- Language, Philosophy of
- Latin American Philosophy
- Laws of Nature
- Legal Epistemology
- Legal Philosophy
- Legal Positivism
- Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm
- Levinas, Emmanuel
- Lewis, C. I.
- Liberty
- Literature, Philosophy of
- Locke, John
- Locke, John: Identity, Persons, and Personal Identity
- Logic
- Lottery and Preface Paradoxes, The
- Lucretius
- Machiavelli, Niccolò
- Martin Heidegger: Later Works
- Martin Heidegger: Middle Works
- Marx, Karl
- Material Constitution
- Mathematical Explanation
- Mathematical Pluralism
- Mathematical Structuralism
- Mathematics, Ontology of
- Mathematics, Philosophy of
- Mathematics, Visual Thinking in
- McDowell, John
- McTaggart, John
- Meaning of Life, The
- Mechanisms in Science
- Medically Assisted Dying
- Medicine, Contemporary Philosophy of
- Medieval Logic
- Medieval Philosophy
- Memory
- Mental Causation
- Mereology
- Merleau-Ponty, Maurice
- Meta-epistemological Skepticism
- Metaepistemology
- Metaethics
- Metametaphysics
- Metaphilosophy
- Metaphor
- Metaphysical Grounding
- Metaphysics, Contemporary
- Metaphysics, Feminist
- Midgley, Mary
- Mill, John Stuart
- Mind, Metaphysics of
- Modal Epistemology
- Modality
- Models and Theories in Science
- Modularity
- Montesquieu
- Moore, G. E.
- Moral Contractualism
- Moral Naturalism and Nonnaturalism
- Moral Responsibility
- Multiculturalism
- Murdoch, Iris
- Music, Analytic Philosophy of
- Nationalism
- Natural Kinds
- Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mathematics
- Naïve Realism
- Neo-Confucianism
- Neuroscience, Philosophy of
- Nietzsche, Friedrich
- Nonexistent Objects
- Normative Ethics
- Normative Foundations, Philosophy of Law:
- Normativity and Social Explanation
- Objectivity
- Occasionalism
- Olfaction
- Ontological Dependence
- Ontology of Art
- Ordinary Objects
- Other Minds
- Pacifism
- Pain
- Panpsychism
- Paradoxes
- Particularism in Ethics
- Pascal, Blaise
- Paternalism
- Patriotism
- Peirce, Charles Sanders
- Perception, Cognition, Action
- Perception, The Problem of
- Perfectionism
- Persistence
- Personal Identity
- Phenomenal Concepts
- Phenomenal Conservatism
- Phenomenology
- Philosophy for Children
- Photography, Analytic Philosophy of
- Physicalism
- Physicalism and Metaphysical Naturalism
- Physics, Experiments in
- Plato
- Plotinus
- Political Epistemology
- Political Obligation
- Political Philosophy
- Popper, Karl
- Pornography and Objectification, Analytic Approaches to
- Practical Knowledge
- Practical Moral Skepticism
- Practical Reason
- Pragmatics
- Pragmatism
- Probabilistic Representations of Belief
- Probability, Interpretations of
- Problem of Divine Hiddenness, The
- Problem of Evil, The
- Propositions
- Psychology, Philosophy of
- Punishment
- Pyrrhonism
- Qualia
- Quietism
- Quine, W. V. O.
- Race
- Racist Jokes
- Rationalism
- Rationality
- Rawls, John: Moral and Political Philosophy
- Realism and Anti-Realism
- Realization
- Reasons in Epistemology
- Reductionism in Biology
- Reference, Theory of
- Reid, Thomas
- Relativism
- Reliabilism
- Religion, Philosophy of
- Religious Belief, Epistemology of
- Religious Experience
- Religious Pluralism
- Ricoeur, Paul
- Rights
- Risk, Philosophy of
- Rorty, Richard
- Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
- Rule-Following
- Russell, Bertrand
- Ryle, Gilbert
- Sartre, Jean-Paul
- Schopenhauer, Arthur
- Science and Religion
- Science, Theoretical Virtues in
- Scientific Explanation
- Scientific Progress
- Scientific Realism
- Scientific Representation
- Scientific Revolutions
- Scotus, Duns
- Self-Knowledge
- Sellars, Wilfrid
- Semantic Externalism
- Semantic Minimalism
- Semiotics
- Seneca
- Senses, The
- Sensitivity Principle in Epistemology
- Singular Thought
- Situated Cognition
- Situationism and Virtue Theory
- Skepticism, Contemporary
- Skepticism, History of
- Slurs, Pejoratives, and Hate Speech
- Smith, Adam: Moral and Political Philosophy
- Social Aspects of Scientific Knowledge
- Social Epistemology
- Social Identity
- Sounds and Auditory Perception
- Space and Time
- Speech Acts
- Spinoza, Baruch
- Stebbing, Susan
- Strawson, P. F.
- Structural Realism
- Suicide
- Supererogation
- Supervenience
- Tarski, Alfred
- Technology, Philosophy of
- Testimony, Epistemology of
- Theoretical Terms in Science
- Thomas Aquinas' Philosophy of Religion
- Thought Experiments
- Time and Tense
- Time Travel
- Toleration
- Torture
- Transcendental Arguments
- Tropes
- Trust
- Truth
- Truth and the Aim of Belief
- Truthmaking
- Turing Test
- Two-Dimensional Semantics
- Understanding
- Uniqueness and Permissiveness in Epistemology
- Utilitarianism
- Vagueness
- Value of Knowledge
- Vienna Circle
- Virtue Epistemology
- Virtue Ethics
- Virtues, Epistemic
- Virtues, Intellectual
- Voluntarism, Doxastic
- War
- Weakness of Will
- Weil, Simone
- Well-Being
- William of Ockham
- Williams, Bernard
- Wisdom
- Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Early Works
- Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Later Works
- Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Middle Works
- Wollstonecraft, Mary