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  1. Defining 'health' and 'disease'.Marc Ereshefsky - 2009 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 40 (3):221-227.
    How should we define ‘health’ and ‘disease’? There are three main positions in the literature. Naturalists desire value-free definitions based on scientific theories. Normativists believe that our uses of ‘health’ and ‘disease’ reflect value judgments. Hybrid theorists offer definitions containing both normativist and naturalist elements. This paper discusses the problems with these views and offers an alternative approach to the debate over ‘health’ and ‘disease’. Instead of trying to find the correct definitions of ‘health’ and ‘disease’ we should explicitly talk (...)
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  • (1 other version)Complexity of the concept of disease as shown through rival theoretical frameworks.Bjørn Hofmann - 2001 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 22 (3):211-236.
    The concept of disease has been the subject ofa vast, vivid and versatile debate. Categoriessuch as ``realist'', ``nominalist'', ``ontologist'',``physiologist'', ``normativist'' and``descriptivist'' have been applied to classifydisease concepts. These categories refer tounderlying theoretical frameworks of thedebate. The objective of this review is toanalyse these frameworks. It is argued that thecategories applied in the debate refer toprofound philosophical issues, and that thecomplexity of the debate reflects thecomplexity of the concept itself: disease is acomplex concept, and does not easily lenditself to definition.
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  • Health and environment from adaptation to adaptivity: a situated relational account.Laura Menatti, Leonardo Bich & Cristian Saborido - 2022 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 44 (3):1-28.
    The definitions and conceptualizations of health, and the management of healthcare have been challenged by the current global scenarios (e.g., new diseases, new geographical distribution of diseases, effects of climate change on health, etc.) and by the ongoing scholarship in humanities and science. In this paper we question the mainstream definition of health adopted by the WHO—‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’ (WHO in Preamble to the constitution of (...)
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  • Philosopher sur les concepts de santé : de l’ Essai de Georges Canguilhem au débat anglo-américain.Élodie Giroux - 2013 - Dialogue 52 (4):673-693.
    This article presents a comparative analysis between Georges Canguilhem’sEssay on Some Problems Concerning the Normal and the Pathological, published in 1943 and the English language debate that started in the 1970s between the naturalists and the normativists. Seemingly, this comparison illustrates the opposition between the French historical epistemology and the Anglo-American philosophy of sciences. However, I put into perspective what is generally considered an opposition between the two traditions by analyzing certain conceptual similarities.
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  • Objectivity, Scientificity, and the Dualist Epistemology of Medicine.Thomas V. Cunningham - 2014 - In P. Huneman (ed.), Classification, Disease, and Evidence. Dordrecht: Springer Science + Business. pp. 01-17.
    This paper considers the view that medicine is both “science” and “art.” It is argued that on this view certain clinical knowledge – of patients’ histories, values, and preferences, and how to integrate them in decision-making – cannot be scientific knowledge. However, by drawing on recent work in philosophy of science it is argued that progress in gaining such knowledge has been achieved by the accumulation of what should be understood as “scientific” knowledge. I claim there are varying degrees of (...)
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  • Public health.Dean Rickles - 2011 - In Fred Gifford (ed.), Philosophy of Medicine. Boston: Elsevier.
    Public health involves the application of a wide variety of scientific and non-scientific disciplines to the very practical problems of improving population health and preventing disease. Public health has received surprisingly little attention from philosophers of science. In this chapter we consider some neglected but important philosophical aspects of the science of public health.
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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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  • Is Aging a Disease? The Theoretical Definition of Aging in the Light of the Philosophy of Medicine.Cristian Saborido & Pablo García-Barranquero - 2022 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 47 (6):770-783.
    In the philosophical debate on aging, it is common to raise the question of the theoretical definition of aging in terms of its possible characterization as a disease. Understanding aging as a disease seems to imply its medicalization, which has important practical consequences. In this paper, we analyze the question of whether aging is a disease by appealing to the concept of disease in the philosophy of medicine. As a result of this analysis, we argue that a pragmatist approach to (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Factory Model of Disease.Neil E. Williams - 2007 - The Monist 90 (4):555-584.
    The aim of the paper is to give an ontologically informed account of disease that can aid in the construction of disease ontologies. The paper begins by distinguishing cases of diseases from what are purely structural abnormalities, referred to as ‘disorders’. The paper then presents a causal model apt for the understanding of disease that distinguishes diseases from both their causes and their potential effects. The analysis of disease defended treats disease in terms of distortions of standard cellular network processes, (...)
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  • 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 (...)
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  • Health and autonomy.Jukka Varelius - 2004 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 8 (2):221-230.
    Individual autonomy is a prominent value in Western medicine and medical ethics, and there it is often accepted that the only way to pay proper respect to autonomy is to let the patients themselves determine what is good for them. Adopting this approach has, however, given rise to some unwanted results, thus motivating a quest for an objective conception of health. Unfortunately, the purportedly objective conceptions of health have failed in objectivity, and if a conception of health is not acceptable (...)
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  • Health and well-being.Jason Raibley - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 165 (2):469-489.
    Eudaimonistic theorists of welfare have recently attacked conative accounts of welfare. Such accounts, it is claimed, are unable to classify states normally associated with physical and emotional health as non-instrumentally good and states associated with physical and psychological damage as non-instrumentally bad. However, leading eudaimonistic theories such as the self-fulfillment theory and developmentalism have problems of their own. Furthermore, conative theorists can respond to this challenge by dispositionalizing their theories, i.e., by saying that it is not merely the realization of (...)
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  • Biodiversity? Yes, But What Kind? A Critical Reassessment in Light of a Challenge from Microbial Ecology.Nicolae Morar - 2019 - Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 32 (2):201-218.
    Biodiversity has become one of the most important conservation values that drive our ecological management and directly inform our environmental policy. This paper highlights the dangers of strategically appropriating concepts from ecological sciences and also of uncritically inserting them into conservation debates as unqualified normative landmarks. Here, I marshal evidence from a cutting-edge research program in microbial ecology, which shows that if species richness is our major normative target, then we are faced with extraordinary ethical implications. This example challenges our (...)
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  • One Body: Responses to Critics.Alexander R. Pruss - 2015 - Roczniki Filozoficzne 63 (3):155-175.
    In this article I respond to a number of powerful criticisms of my book One Body.
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  • (1 other version)On the nature of mental disorder: towards an objectivist account.Panagiotis Oulis - 2012 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 33 (5):343-357.
    According to the predominant view within contemporary philosophy of psychiatry, mental disorders involve essentially personal and societal values, and thus, the concept of mental disorder cannot, even in principle, be elucidated in a thoroughly objective manner. Several arguments have been adduced in support of this impossibility thesis. My critical examination of two master arguments advanced to this effect by Derek Bolton and Jerome Wakefield, respectively, raises serious doubts about their soundness. Furthermore, I articulate an alternative, thoroughly objective, though in part (...)
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  • Grounded Disease: Constructing the Social from the Biological in Medicine.Shane N. Glackin - 2019 - Philosophical Quarterly 69 (275):258-276.
    Social Constructivism about the disease concept has generally been taken to ignore the fundamental biological reality underlying diseases, as well as to fall foul of several apparently compelling objections. In this paper, I explain how the metaphysical relation of grounding can be used to tie a socially constructed account of diseases and their classification to their underlying biological and behavioural states. I then generalize the position by disambiguating several varieties of normativism, including a particularly strong ‘placeholder’ version of social constructivism, (...)
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  • New life sciences innovation and distributive justice: rawlsian goods versus senian capabilities.Theo Papaioannou - 2013 - Life Sciences, Society and Policy 9 (1):1-13.
    The successful decoding of human genome and subsequent advances in new life sciences innovation create technological presuppositions of a new possibility of justice i.e. the just distribution of both social and natural goods. Although Rawlsians attempt to expand their theory to include this new possibility, they fail to provide plausible metrics of social justice in the genomics and post-genomics era. By contrast, Senians seem to succeed to do so through their index of basic capabilities. This paper explores what might be (...)
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  • Centre for Bioethics.Catherine McDonald - unknown
    My interest is in the application of Rawls’ principles of distributive justice to the allocation of health care. In developing an interpretation of those principles I encountered the problem I present below. Although this issue is problematic for Rawlsian theories, it also has implications for any distributive theory that measures the impact of health care distribution via the mechanism of incremental movements in health or its absence.
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  • (2 other versions)The concept of health and disease.József Kovács - 1998 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 1 (1):31-39.
    Examining the naturalist and normativist concepts of health and disease this article starts with analysing the view of C. Boorse. It rejects Boorse's account of health as species-typical functioning, giving a critique of his view based on evolutionary theory of contemporary biology. Then it gives a short overview of the normativist theories of health, which can be objectivist and subjectivist theories. Rejecting the objectivist theories as philosophically untenable, it turns to the subjectivist theories of Gert and Culver, and to the (...)
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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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  • Conceptualizing a Quality Plan for Healthcare: A Philosophical Reflection on the Relevance of the Health Profession to Society.S. Mehrdad Mohammadi, S. Farzad Mohammadi & Jerris R. Hedges - 2007 - Health Care Analysis 15 (4):337-361.
    Today, health systems around the world are under pressure to create greater value for patients and society [81, p. 1, 119]; increasing access, improving client orientation and responsiveness, reducing medical errors and safety, restraining utilization via managed care, and implementing priority allocation of resources for high-burden health problems are examples of strategies towards this end. The quality paradigm by virtue of its strategic consumer focus and its methods for achieving operational excellence has proved an effective approach for creating higher value (...)
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