Debido al actual auge de la medicina y de la investigación biomédica y farmacéutica, la filosofía de la medicina se ha posicionado rápidamente entre las ramas filosóficas más relevantes e influyentes del mundo. La innovación en tratamientos y técnicas que se han desarrollado han abierto nuevas cuestiones teóricas y éticas. Mientras que los primeros comprenden cuestiones relacionadas con la metafísica y la epistemología de las ciencias de la salud, los segundos atañen a la ética médica. Aunque independientes entre sí, existe (...) un inevitable acercamiento entre ambas perspectivas por el impacto social que implica la salud. La práctica médica está inherentemente imbuida de cuestiones normativas que hacen imposible un análisis epistemológico y metafísico sin atender a las cuestiones morales que inevitablemente surgen en el curso de la investigación. Por el contrario, la reflexión moral sobre cuestiones médicas suele ser infructuosa sin un análisis de los conceptos cruciales involucrados en las ciencias de la salud y una reflexión detallada sobre la práctica médica. Esta dependencia mutua entre cuestiones epistemológicas, metafísicas y morales queda, creemos, claramente ilustrada en los artículos y discusiones contenidos en este número especial de la revista Euphyía. (shrink)

Our philosophical understanding of mental illness is being shaped by neuroscience. However, it has the paradoxical effect of igniting two radically opposed groups of philosophical views. On one side, skepticism and denialism assume that, lacking clear biological mechanisms and etiologies for most mental illnesses, we should infer they are constructions best explained by means of social factors. This is strongly associated with medical nihilism: it considers psychiatry more harmful than benign. On the other side of the divide, naturalism and reductionism (...) are on the look for failures in the biological functioning of the organism whenever a genuine mental illness occurs. Psychiatry as currently practiced, accordingly, exhibits the gaps of an ongoing research programme; a yet to be completed neuroscience would link mental illnesses with identifiable biological mechanisms. Both sides of this divide claim to be fostered by scientific discoveries and advances in neuroscience, when taken at face value. Against this background, we argue instead for a modest view. To that end, we draw attention to some nuances in the scientific realism debate. While contending that neuroscientific theories and models aim to provide true representations of their target systems, and can justifiably claim to have attained some, we argue that our confidence should not be placed beforehand in specific features of these scientific representations. Hence, it would be unwarranted to extract morals for psychiatry from posits (or their absence) in neuroscientific explanations of mental illnesses. To illustrate our position, we examine some recent discoveries in neuroscience concerning bipolar disorder. We conclude by linking our topic to a broader issue in the philosophy of medicine: insofar as psychiatry is a biomedical specialty, its classifications of health and disease are guided by pragmatic concerns, as well as by scientific discoveries. (shrink)

Algunos críticos de la ciencia afirman que es sólo un punto de vista entre otros, sin alguna autoridad epistémica especial. No obstante, en este artículo se defiende que la idea de que la investigación científica involucra una perspectiva o punto de vista no impone una restricción a su ideal de objetividad. Primero se presentan algunas aclaraciones sobre la noción de punto de vista, luego se atiende al concepto de objetividad científica, y por último se enfrentan algunos desafíos que se desprenden (...) de la noción de punto de vista y amenazan rasgos de la objetividad científica vinculados con su autoridad epistémica. -/- Some critics of science claim that it is only a point of view among others, lacking any special epistemic authority. However, this paper contends that conceiving scientific inquiry as something that involves a perspective or a point of view does not pose a constraint on its ideal of objectivity. We first put forward some clarifications on the notion of point of view, followed by some observations on scientific objectivity; finally, we face some of the challenges that rise from the notion of point of view and threaten features of scientific objectivity tied to its epistemic authority.]. (shrink)

Lilian Bermejo-Luque: Giving Reasons. A Linguistic-Pragmatic Approach to Argumentation Theory, Dordrecht: Springer 2011, 209 pp.