Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. Mental health promotion and the positive concept of health: Navigating dilemmas.Somogy Varga, Martin Marchmann, Paldam Folker Anna & Büter Anke - 2024 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 105.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The biopsychosocial model: Its use and abuse.Alex Roberts - 2023 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 26 (3):367-384.
    The biopsychosocial model (BPSM) is increasingly influential in medical research and practice. Several philosophers and scholars of health have criticized the BPSM for lacking meaningful scientific content. This article extends those critiques by showing how the BPSM’s epistemic weaknesses have led to certain problems in medical discourse. Despite its lack of content, many researchers have mistaken the BPSM for a scientific model with explanatory power. This misapprehension has placed researchers in an implicit bind. There is an expectation that applications of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • (1 other version)Mechanistic Explanations and Teleological Functions.Andrew Rubner - forthcoming - The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    This paper defines and defends a notion of teleological function which is fit to figure in explanations concerning how organic systems, and the items which compose them, are able to perform certain activities, such as surviving and reproducing or pumping blood. According to this notion, a teleological function of an item (such as the heart) is a typical way in which items of that type contribute to some containing system's ability to do some activity. An account of what it is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction analysis of disorder and the problem of defining harm to nonsentient organisms.Antoine C. Dussault - 2021 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 42 (5):211-231.
    This paper criticizes Jerome Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction analysis of disorder by arguing that the conceptual linkage it establishes between the medical concepts of health and disorder and the prudential notions of well-being and harm makes the account inapplicable to nonsentient organisms, such as plants, fungi, and many invertebrate animals. Drawing on a previous formulation of this criticism by Christopher Boorse, and noting that Wakefield could avoid it if he adopted a partly biofunction-based account of interests like that often advocated in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Wherein is the concept of disease normative? From weak normativity to value-conscious naturalism.M. Cristina Amoretti & Elisabetta Lalumera - 2021 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 25 (1):1-14.
    In this paper we focus on some new normativist positions and compare them with traditional ones. In so doing, we claim that if normative judgments are involved in determining whether a condition is a disease only in the sense identified by new normativisms, then disease is normative only in a weak sense, which must be distinguished from the strong sense advocated by traditional normativisms. Specifically, we argue that weak and strong normativity are different to the point that one ‘normativist’ label (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Philosophy of Psychiatry.Jonathan Y. Tsou - 2021 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    Jonathan Y. Tsou examines and defends positions on central issues in philosophy of psychiatry. The positions defended assume a naturalistic and realist perspective and are framed against skeptical perspectives on biological psychiatry. Issues addressed include the reality of mental disorders; mechanistic and disease explanations of abnormal behavior; definitions of mental disorder; natural and artificial kinds in psychiatry; biological essentialism and the projectability of psychiatric categories; looping effects and the stability of mental disorders; psychiatric classification; and the validity of the DSM's (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • Biological normativity: a new hope for naturalism?Walter Veit - 2021 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 24 (2):291-301.
    Since Boorse [Philos Sci 44(4):542–573, 1977] published his paper “Health as a theoretical concept” one of the most lively debates within philosophy of medicine has been on the question of whether health and disease are in some sense ‘objective’ and ‘value-free’ or ‘subjective’ and ‘value-laden’. Due to the apparent ‘failure’ of pure naturalist, constructivist, or normativist accounts, much in the recent literature has appealed to more conciliatory approaches or so-called ‘hybrid accounts’ of health and disease. A recent paper by Matthewson (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  • The Concept of Disorder Revisited: Robustly Value-Laden Despite Change.I.—Rachel Cooper - 2020 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 94 (1):141-161.
    Our concept of disorder is changing. This causes problems for projects of descriptive conceptual analysis. Conceptual change means that a criterion that was necessary for a condition to be a disorder at one time may cease to be necessary a relatively short time later. Nevertheless, some conceptually based claims will be fairly robust. In particular, the claim that no adequate account of disorder can appeal only to biological facts can be maintained for the foreseeable future. This is because our current (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  • (1 other version)The overdiagnosis of what? On the relationship between the concepts of overdiagnosis, disease, and diagnosis.Bjørn Hofmann - 2017 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 20 (4):453-464.
    Overdiagnosis and disease are related concepts. Widened conceptions of disease increase overdiagnosis and vice versa. This is partly because there is a close and complex relationship between disease and overdiagnosis. In order to address the problems with overdiagnosis, we may benefit from a closer understanding this relationship. Accordingly, the objective of this article is to elucidate the relationship between disease and overdiagnosis. To do so, the article starts with scrutinizing how overdiagnosis can explain the expansion of the concept of disease. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • The Line-drawing Problem in Disease Definition.Wendy A. Rogers & Mary Jean Walker - 2017 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 42 (4):405-423.
    Biological dysfunction is regarded, in many accounts, as necessary and perhaps sufficient for disease. But although disease is conceptualized as all-or-nothing, biological functions often differ by degree. A tension is created by attempting to use a continuous variable as the basis for a categorical definition, raising questions about how we are to pinpoint the boundary between health and disease. This is the line-drawing problem. In this paper, we show how the line-drawing problem arises within “dysfunction-requiring” accounts of disease, such as (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   29 citations  
  • A Lockean argument for universal access to health care.Daniel M. Hausman - 2011 - Social Philosophy and Policy 28 (2):166-191.
    This essay defends the controversial and indeed counterintuitive claim that there is a good argument to be made from a Lockean perspective for government action to guarantee access to health care. The essay maintains that this argument is in some regards more robust than the well-known argument in defense of universal health care spelled out by Norman Daniels, which this essay also examines in some detail. Locke's view that government should protect people's lives, property, and freedom–where freedom is understood as (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Schizophrenia and the Dysfunctional Brain.Justin Garson - 2010 - Journal of Cognitive Science 11:215-246.
    Scientists, philosophers, and even the lay public commonly accept that schizophrenia stems from a biological or internal ‘dysfunction.’ However, this assessment is typically accompanied neither by well-defined criteria for determining that something is dysfunctional nor empirical evidence that schizophrenia satisfies those criteria. In the following, a concept of biological function is developed and applied to a neurobiological model of schizophrenia. It concludes that current evidence does not warrant the claim that schizophrenia stems from a biological dysfunction, and, in fact, that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • A Critical Overview of Biological Functions.Justin Garson - 2016 - Dordrecht: Springer.
    This book is a critical survey of and guidebook to the literature on biological functions. It ties in with current debates and developments, and at the same time, it looks back on the state of discourse in naturalized teleology prior to the 1970s. It also presents three significant new proposals. First, it describes the generalized selected effects theory, which is one version of the selected effects theory, maintaining that the function of a trait consists in the activity that led to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   73 citations  
  • (1 other version)Defining disease in the context of overdiagnosis.Mary Jean Walker & Wendy Rogers - 2017 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 20 (2):269-280.
    Recently, concerns have been raised about the phenomenon of ‘overdiagnosis’, the diagnosis of a condition that is not causing harm, and will not come to cause harm. Along with practical, ethical, and scientific questions, overdiagnosis raises questions about our concept of disease. In this paper, we analyse overdiagnosis as an epistemic problem and show how it challenges many existing accounts of disease. In particular, it raises ques- tions about conceptual links drawn between disease and dysfunction, harm, and risk. We argue (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Evolution, Dysfunction, and Disease: A Reappraisal.Paul E. Griffiths & John Matthewson - 2018 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69 (2):301-327.
    Some ‘naturalist’ accounts of disease employ a biostatistical account of dysfunction, whilst others use a ‘selected effect’ account. Several recent authors have argued that the biostatistical account offers the best hope for a naturalist account of disease. We show that the selected effect account survives the criticisms levelled by these authors relatively unscathed, and has significant advantages over the BST. Moreover, unlike the BST, it has a strong theoretical rationale and can provide substantive reasons to decide difficult cases. This is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   37 citations  
  • Naturalism, Interpretation, and Mental Disorder.Somogy Varga - 2015 - New York, NY, United States of America: Oxford University Press UK.
    The Philosophy of Psychiatry is a unique area of research because the nature of the subject matter leads to quite distinct methodological issues. Naturalism, Interpretation, and Mental Disorder is an original new work focusing on the challenges we face when trying to interpret and understand mental illness. The book integrates a hermeneutical perspective, and shows how such an approach can reveal important facts about historical sources in psychiatry and the nature of dialogue in the therapeutic encounter. In addition, the book (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • Effectiveness of medical interventions.Jacob Stegenga - 2015 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 54:34-44.
    To be effective, a medical intervention must improve one's health by targeting a disease. The concept of disease, though, is controversial. Among the leading accounts of disease-naturalism, normativism, hybridism, and eliminativism-I defend a version of hybridism. A hybrid account of disease holds that for a state to be a disease that state must both (i) have a constitutive causal basis and (ii) cause harm. The dual requirement of hybridism entails that a medical intervention, to be deemed effective, must target either (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • Biological pathology from an organizational perspective.Cristian Saborido & Alvaro Moreno - 2015 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 36 (1):83-95.
    In contrast to the “normativist” view, “naturalist” theorists claim that the concept of health refers to natural or normal states and propose different characterizations of healthy and diseased conditions that are meant to be objectivist and biologically grounded. In this article, we examine the core concept of these naturalist accounts of disease, i.e., the concept of biological malfunction, and develop a new formulation of the notion of malfunction following the recent organizational approach to functions in the philosophy of biology. We (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • Reframing the Disease Debate and Defending the Biostatistical Theory.Peter H. Schwartz - 2014 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 39 (6):572-589.
    Similarly to other accounts of disease, Christopher Boorse’s Biostatistical Theory (BST) is generally presented and considered as conceptual analysis, that is, as making claims about the meaning of currently used concepts. But conceptual analysis has been convincingly critiqued as relying on problematic assumptions about the existence, meaning, and use of concepts. Because of these problems, accounts of disease and health should be evaluated not as claims about current meaning, I argue, but instead as proposals about how to define and use (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   35 citations  
  • Why Health Matters to Justice: A Capability Theory Perspective.Lasse Nielsen - 2015 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 18 (2):403-415.
    The capability approach, originated by Amartya Sen is among the most comprehensive and influential accounts of justice that applies to issues of health and health care. However, although health is always presumed as an important capability in Sen’s works, he never manages to fully explain why health is distinctively valuable. This paper provides an explanation. It does this by firstly laying out the general capability-based argument for health justice. It then discusses two recent attempts to justify why health is distinctively (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Disease, Dysfunction, and Synthetic Biology.Sune Holm - 2014 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 39 (4):329-345.
    Theorists analyzing the concept of disease on the basis of the notion of dysfunction consider disease to be dysfunction requiring. More specifically, dysfunction-requiring theories of disease claim that for an individual to be diseased certain biological facts about it must be the case. Disease is not wholly a matter of evaluative attitudes. In this paper, I consider the dysfunction-requiring component of Wakefield’s hybrid account of disease in light of the artifactual organisms envisioned by current research in synthetic biology. In particular, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Health as a Property of Engineered Living Systems.Sune Holm - 2013 - Bioethics 27 (8):419-425.
    This article considers naturalistic analyses of the concepts of health and disease in light of the possibility of constructing novel living systems. The article begins by introducing the vision of synthetic biology as the application of engineering principles to the construction of biological systems, the main analyses of the concepts of health and disease, and the standard theories of function in artefacts and organisms. The article then suggests that reflection on the possibility of artefactual organisms amounts to a challenge to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Rethinking Health: Healthy or Healthier than?S. Andrew Schroeder - 2013 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (1):131-159.
    Theorists of health have, to this point, focused exclusively on trying to define a state—health—that an organism might be in. I argue that they have overlooked the possibility of a comparativist theory of health, which would begin by defining a relation—healthier than—that holds between two organisms or two possible states of the same organism. I show that a comparativist approach to health has a number of attractive features, and has important implications for philosophers of medicine, bioethicists, health economists, and policy (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  • Is an Overdose of Paracetamol Bad for One’s Health?Daniel M. Hausman - 2011 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 62 (3):657-668.
    1 Overview of the problem2 Situationally Specific Normal Functioning and Capacities3 Kingma’s Criticism4 How Normal Responses can be Pathological5 Too Many Pathologies?6 Conclusions.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   35 citations  
  • Institutionalized Intolerance of ADHD: Sources and Consequences.Susan C. C. Hawthorne - 2010 - Hypatia 25 (3):504 - 526.
    Diagnosable individuals, caregivers, and clinicians typically embrace a biological conception of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), finding that medical treatment is beneficial. Scientists study ADHD phenomenology, interventions to ease symptoms, and underlying mechanisms, often with an aim of helping diagnosed people. Yet current understanding of ADHD, jointly influenced by science and society, has an unintended downside. Scientific and social influences have embedded negative values in the ADHD concept, and have simultaneously dichotomized ADHD diagnosable from non-diagnosable individuals. In social settings insistent on certain (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Paracetamol, poison, and polio: Why Boorse's account of function fails to distinguish health and disease.Elselijn Kingma - 2010 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 61 (2):241-264.
    Christopher Boorse's Bio Statistical Theory (BST) defines health as the absence of disease, and disease as the adverse departure from normal species functioning. This paper presents a two-pronged problem for this account. First I demonstrate that, in order to accurately account for dynamic physiological functions, Boorse's account of normal function needs to be modified to index functions against situations. I then demonstrate that if functions are indexed against situations, the BST can no longer account for diseases that result from specific (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   79 citations  
  • Categories of health and disease/illness in the philosophy of medicine: biomedical and humanistic models.О. С Гилязова - 2023 - Siberian Journal of Philosophy 21 (2):81-92.
    The categories of health and disease/illness are conceptualized from the perspective of the philosophy of medicine. Philosophical contradictions are revealed, which, fueling the debate between naturalism and normativism, prevent biomedicine from developing a single satisfactory understanding of these categories. The theoretical and practical consequences of such biomedicine features as pathocentrism, identification of health with complete well-being, dichotomy of health and disease in the absence of a clear criterion for their differentiation are analyzed. The role of humanistic approaches to the medicine (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Naturalism, Disease, and Levels of Functional Description.Somogy Varga & David Miguel Gray - 2022 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 47 (3):482-493.
    The paper engages Christopher Boorse’s Bio-Statistical Theory (BST). In its current form, BST runs into a significant challenge. For BST to account for its central tenet—that lower-level part-dysfunction is sufficient for higher-level pathology—it must provide criteria for how to decide which lower-level parts are the ones to be analyzed for health or pathology. As BST is a naturalistic theory, such choices must be based solely on naturalistic considerations. An argument is provided to show that, if BST is to be preserved, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • The Quantitative Problem for Theories of Dysfunction and Disease.Thomas Schramme - 2021 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 17 (2):(SI7)5-30.
    Mnoge biološke funkcije dopuštaju stupnjevanje. Na primjer, lučenje određenog hormona u organizmu može biti na višoj ili nižoj razini, u usporedbi s istim organizmom drugom prilikom ili u usporedbi s drugim organizmima. Koje razine funkcioniranja predstavljaju slučajeve disfunkcije; gdje da povučemo crtu? To je kvantitativni problem za teorije disfunkcije i bolesti. Cilj mi je braniti verziju bioloških teorija disfunkcije kako bih se uhvatio u koštac s ovim problemom. Međutim, također ću dopustiti da evaluativna razmatranja uđu u teoriju bolesti. Moj argument (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • How to Draw the Line Between Health and Disease? Start with Suffering.Bjørn Hofmann - 2021 - Health Care Analysis 29 (2):127-143.
    How can we draw the line between health and disease? This crucial question of demarcation has immense practical implications and has troubled scholars for ages. The question will be addressed in three steps. First, I will present an important contribution by Rogers and Walker who argue forcefully that no line can be drawn between health and disease. However, a closer analysis of their argument reveals that a line-drawing problem for disease-related features does not necessarily imply a line-drawing problem for disease (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Is Psychopathy a Harmful Dysfunction?Marko Jurjako - 2019 - Biology and Philosophy 34 (5):1-23.
    In their paper “Is psychopathy a mental disease?”, Thomas Nadelhoffer and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong argue that according to any plausible account of mental disorder, neural and psychological abnormalities correlated with psychopathy should be regarded as signs of a mental disorder. I oppose this conclusion by arguing that at least on a naturalistically grounded account, such as Wakefield’s ‘Harmful Dysfunction’ view, currently available empirical data and evolutionary considerations indicate that psychopathy is not a mental disorder.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • Health, Disease and Naturalism: Hausman on the Public Value of Health.Elselijn Kingma - 2017 - Public Health Ethics 10 (2):109-121.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Psychopathy: Morally Incapacitated Persons.Heidi Maibom - 2017 - In Thomas Schramme & Steven Edwards (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Medicine. Springer. pp. 1109-1129.
    After describing the disorder of psychopathy, I examine the theories and the evidence concerning the psychopaths’ deficient moral capacities. I first examine whether or not psychopaths can pass tests of moral knowledge. Most of the evidence suggests that they can. If there is a lack of moral understanding, then it has to be due to an incapacity that affects not their declarative knowledge of moral norms, but their deeper understanding of them. I then examine two suggestions: it is their deficient (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Progress in Defining Disease: Improved Approaches and Increased Impact.Peter H. Schwartz - 2017 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 42 (4):485-502.
    In a series of recent papers, I have made three arguments about how to define “disease” and evaluate and apply possible definitions. First, I have argued that definitions should not be seen as traditional conceptual analyses, but instead as proposals about how to define and use the term “disease” in the future. Second, I have pointed out and attempted to address a challenge for dysfunction-requiring accounts of disease that I call the “line-drawing” problem: distinguishing between low-normal functioning and dysfunctioning. Finally, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   20 citations  
  • Biological Criteria of Disease: Four Ways of Going Wrong.John Matthewson & Paul Edmund Griffiths - 2017 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 1 (4).
    We defend a view of the distinction between the normal and the pathological according to which that distinction has an objective, biological component. We accept that there is a normative component to the concept of disease, especially as applied to human beings. Nevertheless, an organism cannot be in a pathological state unless something has gone wrong for that organism from a purely biological point of view. Biology, we argue, recognises two sources of biological normativity, which jointly generate four “ways of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   37 citations  
  • Current Dilemmas in Defining the Boundaries of Disease.Jenny Doust, Mary Jean Walker & Wendy A. Rogers - 2017 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 42 (4):350-366.
    Boorse’s biostatistical theory states that diseases should be defined in ways that reflect disturbances of biological function and that are objective and value free. We use three examples from contemporary medicine that demonstrate the complex issues that arise when defining the boundaries of disease: polycystic ovary syndrome, chronic kidney disease, and myocardial infarction. We argue that the biostatistical theory fails to provide sufficient guidance on where the boundaries of disease should be drawn, contains ambiguities relating to choice of reference class, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  • Concepts and Causes in the Philosophy of Disease.Benjamin Smart - 2015 - London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • (1 other version)Epidemiology and the bio-statistical theory of disease: a challenging perspective.Élodie Giroux - 2015 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 36 (3):175-195.
    Christopher Boorse’s bio-statistical theory of health and disease argues that the central discipline on which theoretical medicine relies is physiology. His theory has been much discussed but little has been said about its focus on physiology or, conversely, about the role that other biomedical disciplines may play in establishing a theoretical concept of health. Since at least the 1950s, epidemiology has gained in strength and legitimacy as an independent medical science that contributes to our knowledge of health and disease. Indeed, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • A Second Rebuttal On Health.Christopher Boorse - 2014 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 39 (6):683-724.
    This essay replies to critics since 1995 of my “biostatistical theory” of health. According to the BST, a pathological condition is a state of statistically species-subnormal biological part-functional ability, relative to sex and age. Theoretical health, the total absence of pathological conditions, is then a value-free scientific notion. Recent critics offer a mixture of old and new objections to this analysis. Some new ones relate to choice of reference class, situation-specificity of function, common diseases and healthy populations, improvements in population (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   122 citations  
  • A verisimilitudinarian analysis of the Linda paradox.Gustavo Cevolani, Vincenzo Crupi & Roberto Festa - 2012 - VII Conference of the Spanish Society for Logic, Methodology and Philosphy of Science.
    The Linda paradox is a key topic in current debates on the rationality of human reasoning and its limitations. We present a novel analysis of this paradox, based on the notion of verisimilitude as studied in the philosophy of science. The comparison with an alternative analysis based on probabilistic confirmation suggests how to overcome some problems of our account by introducing an adequately defined notion of verisimilitudinarian confirmation.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Beyond Conceptual Analysis: Social Objectivity and Conceptual Engineering to Define Disease.Anne-Marie Gagné-Julien - 2024 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 49 (2):147-159.
    In this article, I side with those who argue that the debate about the definition of “disease” should be reoriented from the question “what is disease” to the question of what it should be. However, I ground my argument on the rejection of the naturalist approach to define disease and the adoption of a normativist approach, according to which the concept of disease is normative and value-laden. Based on this normativist approach, I defend two main theses: (1) that conceptual analysis (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Preclinical Disease or Risk Factor? Alzheimer’s Disease as a Case Study of Changing Conceptualizations of Disease.Maartje H. N. Schermer - 2023 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 48 (4):322-334.
    Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) provides an excellent case study to investigate emerging conceptions of health, disease, pre-disease, and risk. Two scientific working groups have recently reconceptualized AD and created a new category of asymptomatic biomarker positive persons, who are either said to have preclinical AD, or to be at risk for AD. This article examines how prominent theories of health and disease would classify this condition: healthy or diseased? Next, the notion of being “at risk”—a state somewhere in-between health and disease—is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Reconsidering harm in psychiatric manuals within an explicationist framework.Mia Biturajac & Marko Jurjako - 2022 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 25:239–249.
    The notion of harm has been a recurring and a significant notion in the characterization of mental disorder. It is present in eminent diagnostic manuals such as DSM and ICD, as well as in the discussion on mental disorders in philosophy of psychiatry. Recent demotion of harm in the definition of mental disorders in DSM-5 shows a general trend towards reducing the significance of harm when thinking about the nature of mental disorders. In this paper, we defend the relevance of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Measuring Health : On the Theoretical Foundations of Health Status Evaluations.Amanda Thorell - 2021 - Dissertation, Stockholm University
    This thesis is about the notions of health and pathology in medical theory. I develop a theory, which defines ‘health’ and ‘pathology’ in a way that solves several problems with earlier suggestions of how to define these terms. I call the theory ‘the disposition profile efficiency theory’, abbreviated ‘the DPE-theory’. According to the DPE-theory, a trait token is healthy, roughly, if and only if all of its dispositions for performing physiological functions are efficient enough. A trait token is pathological, roughly, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Epistemic Authority, Philosophical Explication, and the Bio-Statistical Theory of Disease.Somogy Varga - 2020 - Erkenntnis 85 (4):937-956.
    Christopher Boorse’s Health care ethics: an introduction, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, pp 359–393, 1987; in Humber, Almeder, Totowa What is disease?, Humana Press, New York City, pp 1–134, 1997; J Med Philos, 39:683–724, 2014) Bio-Statistical Theory comprehends diseases in terms of departures from natural norms, which involve an objectively describable deviation from the proper physiological or psychological functioning of parts of the human organism. I argue that while recent revisions and additional considerations shield the BST from a number of issues (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Boorse’s Theory of Disease: (Why) Do Values Matter?Brent M. Kious - 2018 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 43 (4):421-438.
    There has been much debate about whether the concept of disease articulated in Boorse’s biostatistical theory is value-neutral or value-laden. Here, I want to examine whether this debate matters. I suggest that there are two basic respects in which value-ladenness might be important: it could threaten either scientific legitimacy or moral permissibility. I argue that value-ladenness does not threaten the scientific legitimacy of our disease-concept because the concept makes little difference to the formulation and testing of scientific hypotheses. Likewise, even (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Medical Nihilism.Jacob Stegenga - 2018 - Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    Medical nihilism is the view that we should have little confidence in the effectiveness of medical interventions. Jacob Stegenga argues persuasively that this is how we should see modern medicine, and suggests that medical research must be modified, clinical practice should be less aggressive, and regulatory standards should be enhanced.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   59 citations  
  • The Current Status of the Philosophy of Biology.Peter Takacs & Michael Ruse - 2013 - Science & Education 22 (1):5-48.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Functional analysis and the species design.Karen Neander - 2017 - Synthese 194 (4).
    This paper argues that a minimal notion of function and a notion of normal-proper function are used in explaining how bodies and brains operate. Neither is Cummins’ notion, as originally defined, and yet his is often taken to be the clearly relevant notion for such an explanatory context. This paper also explains how adverting to normal-proper functions, even if these are selected functions, can play a significant scientific role in the operational explanations of complex systems that physiologists and neurophysiologists provide, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   29 citations  
  • Valuing Health.Daniel M. Hausman - 2006 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 34 (3):246-274.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations