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Is There a Philosophy of Medicine?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr.
H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr.*
Affiliation:
University of Texas Medical Branch
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Extract

As a part of a symposium on philosophy and medicine in May, 1974, Jerome Shaffer, Marx Wartofsky, and Edmund Pellegrino engaged in a discussion concerning the possibility of a philosophy of medicine. In his remarks, Shaffer argued that what has gone under the term ‘philosophy of medicine’ properly belongs within the philosophy of science, moral philosophy, and, perhaps, the philosophy of mind, and hence, that “there is nothing left for the Philosophy of Medicine to do” ([36], p. 218). Shaffer wanted to debunk the thesis that there are issues such as the status of concepts of health or disease which are unique to medicine and which would, therefore, constitute a special conceptual domain for a philosophy of medicine. According to Shaffer, “What for an organism is normal and abnormal, well-formed and malformed, healthy and unhealthy, non-pathological and physiological … [is] part and parcel of the theory and laws of biology”([36], p. 216).

Type
Part II. What Does Philosophy of Medicine Have to Do with Philosophy of Science?
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1976 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1976 , 1976 , pp. 94 - 108
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

I am grateful to Edmund Erde, Laurence McCullough, and John Moskop for their many suggestions and helpful criticisms of earlier drafts of this paper.

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