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  1. Defining and Defending Personhood: Lessons from the Disease Debate.Peter H. Schwartz - 2024 - American Journal of Bioethics 24 (1):41-43.
    Blumenthal-Barby (2024) presents strong arguments that bioethicists should stop using the concept “personhood.” She points out that “person,” meaning an entity with full moral rights, is defined in...
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  • ‘Are mental disorders brain disorders?’ is a question of conceptual choice.Elisabetta Lalumera - 2023 - Philosophical Psychology 1 (3):1-13.
    This contribution focuses on what type of question “Are mental disorders brain disorders?” is and what task Anneli Jefferson performs in her book with the same title. I distinguish between conceptual engineering and conceptual choice, the former involving the individuation of an adequate concept for a specific goal, and the latter involving the normative problem of whether we should employ the concept at hand. I contend that Anneli Jefferson’s book is a work of conceptual engineering, which is valuable in and (...)
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  • 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 (...)
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  • 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 (...)
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  • Harm and the concept of medical disorder.Neil Feit - 2017 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 38 (5):367-385.
    According to Jerome Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction analysis of medical disorder, the inability of some internal part or mechanism to perform its natural function is necessary, but not sufficient, for disorder. HDA also requires that the part dysfunction be harmful to the individual. I consider several problems for HDA’s harm criterion in this article. Other accounts on which harm is necessary for disorder will suffer from all or almost all of these problems. Comparative accounts of harm imply that one is harmed (...)
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  • 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 (...)
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  • Medicine, Morality, and Mortality: The Challenges of Moral Diversity.Mark J. Cherry - 2015 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 40 (5):473-483.
    This issue of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy assesses the deep and abiding tensions that exist among the competing epistemic perspectives that bear on medicine and morality. Concepts of health and disease, as well as the theoretical framing of medical ethics and health care policy, intersect with an overlapping set of culturally situated communities, striving to understand and manipulate the world in ways that each finds explanatory, appropriate, or otherwise befitting. The articles explore the complexities of framing public health (...)
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  • The Disease Loophole: Index Terms and Their Role in Disease Misclassification.Alex N. Roberts - forthcoming - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy.
    The definitions of disease proffered by philosophers and medical actors typically require that a state of ill health be linked to some known bodily dysfunction before it is classified as a disease. I argue that such definitions of disease are not fully implementable in current medical discourse and practice. Adhering to the definitions would require that medical actors keep close track of the current state of knowledge on the causes and mechanisms of particular illnesses. Yet, unaddressed problems in medical terminology (...)
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  • The concept of disease in the time of COVID-19.Maria Cristina Amoretti & Elisabetta Lalumera - 2020 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 41 (5):203-221.
    Philosophers of medicine have formulated different accounts of the concept of disease. Which concept of disease one assumes has implications for what conditions count as diseases and, by extension, who may be regarded as having a disease and for who may be accorded the social privileges and personal responsibilities associated with being sick. In this article, we consider an ideal diagnostic test for coronavirus disease 2019 infection with respect to four groups of people—positive and asymptomatic; positive and symptomatic; negative; and (...)
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  • Conceptual Clarity in Clinical Bioethical Analysis.J. Clint Parker - 2020 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 45 (1):1-15.
    Conceptual clarity is essential when engaging in dialogue to avoid unnecessary disagreement and to promote mutual understanding. In this issue devoted to clinical bioethics, the authors exemplify the virtue of careful conceptual analysis as they explore complex clinical questions regarding the essential nature of medicine, the boundaries of killing and letting die, the meaning of irreversibility in definitions of death, the argument for a right to try experimental medications, the ethical borders in complex medical billing, and the definition and modeling (...)
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  • Philosophical analyses of scientific concepts: A critical appraisal.Daniel Mark Kraemer - 2018 - Philosophy Compass 13 (9):e12513.
    Philosophical analyses of scientific concepts are legion. However, this literature is replete with methodological errors that have largely gone unnoticed. Five distinct projects are conflated which has led to faulty inferences, ambiguities, and mischaracterizations. There has also been some recent enthusiasm for approaches that attempt to rectify problematic scientific concepts but the motivations for these approaches are questionable. I am hopeful that by bringing these various issues to light that it will lead practitioners to be more explicit about their aims (...)
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  • The Concept and Conceptions of Personhood: The Fallacy of Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby’s Argument.Hon-Lam Li - 2024 - American Journal of Bioethics 24 (1):43-45.
    Ethics is frequently concerned with how to resolve clashes between competing claims from claimants of different kinds. The idea of moral status is crucial to understanding how (1) competing claims...
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  • 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 (...)
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  • Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing for “Non-Medical” Traits: Ensuring Consistency in Ethical Decision-Making.Hilary Bowman-Smart, Christopher Gyngell, Cara Mand, David J. Amor, Martin B. Delatycki & Julian Savulescu - 2021 - American Journal of Bioethics 23 (3):3-20.
    The scope of noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) could expand in the future to include detailed analysis of the fetal genome. This will allow for the testing for virtually any trait with a genetic contribution, including “non-medical” traits. Here we discuss the potential use of NIPT for these traits. We outline a scenario which highlights possible inconsistencies with ethical decision-making. We then discuss the case against permitting these uses. The objections include practical problems; increasing inequities; increasing the burden of choice; negative (...)
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  • The harmful-dysfunction account of disorder, individual versus social values, and the interpersonal variability of harm challenge.Antoine C. Dussault - 2021 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 24 (3):453-467.
    This paper presents the interpersonal variability of harm challenge to Jerome Wakefield’s harmful-dysfunction account (HDA) of disorder. This challenge stems from the seeming fact that what promotes well-being or is harmful to someone varies much more across individuals than what is intuitively healthy or disordered. This makes it at least prima facie difficult to see how judgments about health and disorder could, as harm-requiring accounts of disorder like the HDA maintain, be based on, or closely linked to, judgments about well-being (...)
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  • The Ends of Medicine and the Experience of Patients.D. Robert MacDougall - 2020 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 45 (2):129-144.
    The ends of medicine are sometimes construed simply as promotion of health, treatment and prevention of disease, and alleviation of pain. Practitioners might agree that this simple formulation captures much of what medical practice is about. But while the ends of medicine may seem simple or even obvious, the essays in this issue demonstrate the wide variety of philosophical questions and issues associated with the ends of medicine. They raise questions about how to characterize terms like “health” and “disease”; whether (...)
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  • Galen's Wounds: Dissolutions and the Theoretical Structure of Galen's Disease Taxonomy.Luis Alejandro Salas - 2019 - Classical Antiquity 38 (2):275-297.
    Galen conceives of wounds, fractures, and similar conditions as belonging to one of the highest genera in his taxonomy of disease. This classification is puzzling, as much from an ancient Greco-Roman perspective as from a contemporary one. In what sense are wounds and other injuries diseases? The classification appears more perplexing in light of Galen's method of conceptual analysis, which takes ordinary language use as a starting point. What, then, motivated Galen's departure from common Greek conceptions of disease? This article (...)
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  • A New Approach to Defining Disease.Mary Jean Walker & Wendy A. Rogers - 2018 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 43 (4):402-420.
    In this paper, we examine recent critiques of the debate about defining disease, which claim that its use of conceptual analysis embeds the problematic assumption that the concept is classically structured. These critiques suggest, instead, developing plural stipulative definitions. Although we substantially agree with these critiques, we resist their implication that no general definition of “disease” is possible. We offer an alternative, inductive argument that disease cannot be classically defined and that the best explanation for this is that the concept (...)
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  • 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, (...)
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  • Christopher Boorse and the Philosophy of Medicine.Thomas Schramme - 2014 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 39 (6):565-571.
    In 2012, the symposium "Christopher Boorse and the Philosophy of Medicine" was held at the University of Hamburg. The initial ideas presented at this event, which celebrated Chris's contribution to the development of what is now a vibrant area of research, especially to the theory of disease, form the core of the papers published in this issue. Similarly to what Robert Nozick once said about John Rawls's work, it can be demanded that philosophers of medicine must now either work within (...)
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  • 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 (...)
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  • 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, (...)
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  • Normality in medicine: a critical review.Marisa Catita, Artur Águas & Pedro Morgado - 2020 - Philosophy, Ethics and Humanities in Medicine 15 (1):1-6.
    What is considered normal determines clinical practice in medicine and has implications at an individual level, doctor-patient relationship and health care policies. With the increase in medical information and technical abilities it is urgent to have a clear concept of normality in medicine so that crucial discussions can be held with unequivocal terms.The different meanings for normality were analyzed throughout the literature and grouped according to their relevance in the academic community in models, namely the Biostatistical Theory (BST), Health, Ideal, (...)
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  • Philosophical investigations of socioeconomic health inequalities.Beatrijs Haverkamp - unknown
    The strong correlation between people’s socioeconomic position and health within high income countries is a well-documented fact. A person’s occupation, income and education level tell us a lot about that person’s prospects on a long and healthy life, such that we can speak of a ‘social gradient in health’, or a ‘socioeconomic health gap’. This association is often perceived to be unjust. Therefore, it is generally thought that governments should aim to reduce socioeconomic health inequalities. However, this idea needs ethical (...)
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  • 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 (...)
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  • 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 (...)
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  • Diseases are Not Adaptations and Neither are Their Causes.Paul E. Griffiths & John Matthewson - 2020 - Biological Theory 15 (3):136-142.
    In a recent article in this journal, Zachary Ardern criticizes our view that the most promising candidate for a naturalized criterion of disease is the "selected effects" account of biological function and dysfunction. Here we reply to Ardern’s criticisms and, more generally, clarify the relationship between adaptation and dysfunction in the evolution of health and disease.
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  • (1 other version)Against the generalised theory of function.Harriet Fagerberg - 2022 - Biology and Philosophy 37 (4):1-25.
    Justin Garson has recently advanced a Generalised Selected Effects Theory of biological proper function. According to Garson, his theory spells trouble for the Dysfunction Account of Disorder. This paper argues that Garson’s critique of the Dysfunction Account from the Generalised Theory fails, and that we should reject the Generalised Theory outright. I first show that the Generalised Theory does not, as Garson asserts, imply that neurally selected disorders are not dysfunctional. Rather, it implies that they are both functional and dysfunctional. (...)
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  • The Dynamics of Disease: Toward a Processual Theory of Health.Thor Hennelund Nielsen - 2024 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 49 (3):271-282.
    The following article presents preliminary reflections on a processual theory of health and disease. It does this by steering the discussion more toward an ontology of organisms rather than conceptual analysis of the semantic content of the terms “health” and “disease.” In the first section, four meta-theoretical assumptions of the traditional debate are identified and alternative approaches to the problems are presented. Afterwards, the view that health and disease are constituted by a dynamic relation between demands imposed on an organism (...)
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  • The function of the heart is not obvious.Nicholas Binney - 2018 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 68-69 (C):56-69.
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  • The Emergence of a New Human Superorganism After Organ Transplantation.Prasad G. V. Ramesh - 2017 - Dissertation, University of Waterloo
    The biological human being is an emergent human superorganism consisting of the human organism physiologically integrated with other organisms. The persistence of a superorganism in space and time requires communication among its organisms. This communication occurs through immune processes at the biological boundaries of these organisms. Immune processes also repair disrupted boundaries, with this repair resulting in either health or disease processes depending on how the boundaries are restored. Health, disease, and biological personal identity all emerge from the mode of (...)
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