About this topic
Summary

Philosophical debate about disease includes examination of how to define disease and how to distinguish it from health, the relation of physiological disease and mental illness, and theoretical work on nosology, diagnosis, and epidemiology. Philosophy of medicine literature examines these topics in connection to debates about medicalisation, clinical reasoning, and conceptual change associated with social shifts and new technologies. Bio- and public health ethics literature has examined connections to a range of practical and ethical implications of these theoretical matters, as well as ethical issues connected to specific diseases.

Key works

Introductions

Related

Contents
4349 found
Order:
1 — 50 / 4349
Material to categorize
  1. Developmental Programming, Evolution, and Animal Welfare: A Case for Evolutionary Veterinary Science.Walter Veit & Heather Browning - 2021 - Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 1.
    The conditions animals experience during the early developmental stages of their lives can have critical ongoing effects on their future health, welfare, and proper development. In this paper we draw on evolutionary theory to improve our understanding of the processes of developmental programming, particularly Predictive Adaptive Responses (PAR) that serve to match offspring phenotype with predicted future environmental conditions. When these predictions fail, a mismatch occurs between offspring phenotype and the environment, which can have long-lasting health and welfare effects. Examples (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  2. Charité, mon amour.Andrej Poleev - 2020
    Wie jedes Krankenhaus hat Charité ihre Geschichte, die mit dem Erlaß des preußischen Königs Friedrich I. vom 14. November 1709 zur Gründung von Lazareth-Häusern anfing, um der Ausbreitung der Pest entgegenzuwirken, wozu es allerdings in Berlin nie gekommen ist. Am 9. Januar 1727 verfügte König Friedrich Wilhelm I. die Umwandlung des vor dem Spandowischen Tor errichteten Lazareth in ein Hospital und nannte es „das Haus die Charité“ nach dem Vorbild von Hôpital de la Charité in Paris. -/- Das Wort und (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  3. Malaria diagnosis and the Plasmodium life cycle: the BFO perspective.Werner Ceusters & Barry Smith - 2010 - In Interdisciplinary Ontology. Proceedings of the Third Interdisciplinary Ontology Meeting. Tokyo: Keio University Press. pp. 25-34.
    Definitive diagnosis of malaria requires the demonstration through laboratory tests of the presence within the patient of malaria parasites or their components. Since malaria parasites can be present even in the absence of malaria manifestations, and since symptoms of malaria can be manifested even in the absence of malaria parasites, malaria diagnosis raises important issues for the adequate understanding of disease, etiology and diagnosis. One approach to the resolution of these issues adopts a realist view, according to which the needed (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  4. Constructing a lattice of Infectious Disease Ontologies from a Staphylococcus aureus isolate repository.Albert Goldfain, Lindsay G. Cowell & Barry Smith - 2012 - In Proceeedings of the Third International Conference on Biomedical Ontology (CEUR 897).
    A repository of clinically associated Staphylococcus aureus (Sa) isolates is used to semi‐automatically generate a set of application ontologies for specific subfamilies of Sa‐related disease. Each such application ontology is compatible with the Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) and uses resources from the Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry. The set of application ontologies forms a lattice structure beneath the IDO‐Core and IDO‐extension reference ontologies. We show how this lattice can be used to define a strategy for the construction of a new (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  5. A plant disease extension of the Infectious Disease Ontology.Ramona Walls, Barry Smith, Elser Justin, Goldfain Albert, W. Stevenson Dennis & Pankaj Jaiswal - 2012 - In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Biomedical Ontology (CEUR 897). pp. 1-5.
    Plants from a handful of species provide the primary source of food for all people, yet this source is vulnerable to multiple stressors, such as disease, drought, and nutrient deficiency. With rapid population growth and climate uncertainty, the need to produce crops that can tolerate or resist plant stressors is more crucial than ever. Traditional plant breeding methods may not be sufficient to overcome this challenge, and methods such as highOthroughput sequencing and automated scoring of phenotypes can provide significant new (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  6. Bridging the gap between medical and bioinformatics: An ontological case study in colon carcinoma.Anand Kumar, Yum Lina Yip, Barry Smith & Pierre Grenon - 2006 - Computers in Biology and Medicine 36 (7):694--711.
    Ontological principles are needed in order to bridge the gap between medical and biological information in a robust and computable fashion. This is essential in order to draw inferences across the levels of granularity which span medicine and biology, an example of which include the understanding of the roles of tumor markers in the development and progress of carcinoma. Such information integration is also important for the integration of genomics information with the information contained in the electronic patient records in (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  7. The Neurological Disease Ontology.Mark Jensen, Alexander P. Cox, Naveed Chaudhry, Marcus Ng, Donat Sule, William Duncan, Patrick Ray, Bianca Weinstock-Guttman, Barry Smith, Alan Ruttenberg, Kinga Szigeti & Alexander D. Diehl - 2013 - Journal of Biomedical Semantics 4 (42):42.
    We are developing the Neurological Disease Ontology (ND) to provide a framework to enable representation of aspects of neurological diseases that are relevant to their treatment and study. ND is a representational tool that addresses the need for unambiguous annotation, storage, and retrieval of data associated with the treatment and study of neurological diseases. ND is being developed in compliance with the Open Biomedical Ontology Foundry principles and builds upon the paradigm established by the Ontology for General Medical Science (OGMS) (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  8. Towards an Ontological Representation of Resistance: The Case of MRSA.Albert Goldfain, Barry Smith & Lindsay G. Cowell - 2011 - Journal of Biomedical Informatics 44 (1):35-41.
    This paper addresses a family of issues surrounding the biological phenomenon of resistance and its representation in realist ontologies. The treatments of resistance terms in various existing ontologies are examined and found to be either overly narrow, internally inconsistent, or otherwise problematic. We propose a more coherent characterization of resistance in terms of what we shall call blocking dispositions, which are collections of mutually coordinated dispositions which are of such a sort that they cannot undergo simultaneous realization within a single (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  9. A strategy for improving and integrating biomedical ontologies.Cornelius Rosse, Anand Kumar, Jose L. V. Mejino, Daniel L. Cook, Landon T. Detwiler & Barry Smith - 2005 - In Proceedings of the Annual Symposium of the American Medical Informatics Association. AMIA. pp. 639-643.
    The integration of biomedical terminologies is indispensable to the process of information integration. When terminologies are linked merely through the alignment of their leaf terms, however, differences in context and ontological structure are ignored. Making use of the SNAP and SPAN ontologies, we show how three reference domain ontologies can be integrated at a higher level, through what we shall call the OBR framework (for: Ontology of Biomedical Reality). OBR is designed to facilitate inference across the boundaries of domain ontologies (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
The Concept of Disease
  1. Correction to: Experimental philosophy of medicine and the concepts of health and disease.Walter Veit - 2023 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 44 (1):99-100.
  2. Osteoporosis and risk of fracture: reference class problems are real.Nicholas Binney - 2022 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 43 (5):375-400.
    Elselijn Kingma argues that Christopher Boorse’s biostatistical theory does not show how the reference classes it uses—namely, age groups of a sex of a species—are objective and naturalistic. Boorse has replied that this objection is of no concern, because there are no examples of clinicians’ choosing to use reference classes other than the ones he suggests. Boorse argues that clinicians use the reference classes they do because these reflect the natural classes of organisms to which their patients belong. Drawing on (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  3. Prolonged grief as a disease?Ronja Lutz, Cornelia Eibauer & Andreas Frewer - 2022 - Ethik in der Medizin 34 (4):609-626.
    Definition of the problem The eleventh version of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), which became effective in 2022, has raised a number of issues associated with medical ethics. Arguments In this context the paper explores the normative view of grief as a disease. ICD-11 contains the new diagnosis of “prolonged grief disorder” with a definition that fails to aid its clear distinction from the normal course of grief. The article discusses the philosophical and ethical implications of this diagnosis and (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  4. Critique and Refinement of the Wakefieldian Concept of Disorder: An Improvement of the Harmful Dysfunction Analysis.Emmanuel Smith - 2022 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 47 (4):530-539.
    One way in which bioethicists can benefit the medical community is by clarifying the concept of disorder. Since insurance companies refer to the DSM for whether a patient should receive assistance, one must consider the consequences of one’s concept of disorder for who should be provided with care. I offer a refinement of Jerome Wakefield’s hybrid concept of disorder, the harmful dysfunction analysis. I criticize both the factual component and the value component of Wakefield’s account and suggest how they might (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  5. Mental Disorder, Meaning-making, and Religious Engagement.Kate Finley - 2023 - Theologica 7 (1).
    Meaning-making plays a central role in how we deal with experiences of suffering, including those due to mental disorder. And for many, religious beliefs, experiences, and practices (hereafter, religious engagement) play a central role in informing this meaning-making. However, a crucial facet of the relationship between experiences of mental disorder and religious engagement remains underexplored—namely the potentially positive effects of mental disorder on religious engagement (e.g. experiences of bipolar disorder increasing sense of God’s presence). In what follows, I will present (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  6. Own-world and Common World in Schizophrenia: Towards a Theory of Anthropological Proportions.Kasper Møller Nielsen - forthcoming - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences:1-21.
    The conceptual pair of own-world and common world constitutes an archaic pair, originally introduced by Heraclitus. More than two millennia after its introduction, Binswanger picked up this conceptual pair in the attempt to understand existence and mental disorder. Ever since, this conceptual pair has been part of the conceptualization of schizophrenia in phenomenological psychopathology. However, the concepts of ídios kósmos and koinós kósmos have seldomly been elaborated and expanded upon, and certain unclarities rest within the literature. This paper resolves some (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  7. The six most essential questions in psychiatric diagnosis: A pluralogue part 2: Issues of conservatism and pragmatism in psychiatric diagnosis.Phillips James, Frances Allen, A. Cerullo Michael, Chardavoyne John, S. Decker Hannah, B. First Michael, Ghaemi Nassir, Greenberg Gary, C. Hinderliter Andrew, A. Kinghorn Warren, G. LoBello Steven, B. Martin Elliott, L. Mishara Aaron, Paris Joel, M. Pierre Joseph, W. Pies Ronald, A. Pincus Harold, Porter Douglas, Pouncey Claire, A. Schwartz Michael, Szasz Thomas, C. Wakefield Jerome, G. Waterman, Whooley Owen & Zachar Peter - 2012 - Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 7 (1):8.
    In face of the multiple controversies surrounding the DSM process in general and the development of DSM-5 in particular, we have organized a discussion around what we consider six essential questions in further work on the DSM. The six questions involve: 1) the nature of a mental disorder; 2) the definition of mental disorder; 3) the issue of whether, in the current state of psychiatric science, DSM-5 should assume a cautious, conservative posture or an assertive, transformative posture; 4) the role (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  8. From psychiatric kinds to harmful symptoms.Christophe Gauld - 2022 - Synthese 200 (6):1-25.
    Much research in the philosophy of psychiatry has been devoted to the characterization of the normal and the pathological. In this article, we identify and deconstruct two postulates that have held sway in the philosophy of psychiatry. The first postulate concerns the belief that clinicians would benefit from conceiving of psychiatric disorders as stable entities with clear boundaries. By relying on a symptom-based approach, we support a conception of psychiatric disorders whose symptoms are the products of many activated mechanisms in (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  9. Causation and Causal Selection in the Biopsychosocial Model of Health and Disease.Hane Htut Maung - 2021 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 17 (2):5-27.
    In The Biopsychosocial Model of Health and Disease, Derek Bolton and Grant Gillett argue that a defensible updated version of the biopsychosocial model requires a metaphysically adequate account of disease causation that can accommodate biological, psychological, and social factors. This present paper offers a philosophical critique of their account of biopsychosocial causation. I argue that their account relies on claims about the normativity and the semantic content of biological information that are metaphysically contentious. Moreover, I suggest that these claims are (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  10. Health and disease are dynamic complex-adaptive states implications for practice and research.Joachim P. Sturmberg - 2021 - Frontiers in Psychiatry 12 (29).
    Interoception, the ability to convey one's overall physiological state, allows people to describe their health along an experiential continuum, from excellent, very good, good, fair to poor. Each health state reflects a distinct pattern of one's overall function. This assay provides a new frame of understanding health and disease as complex-adaptive system states of the person as-a-whole. It firstly describes how complex patterns can emerge from simple equations. It then discusses how clinical medicine in certain domains has started to explore (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  11. 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. 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, such (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  12. New Approach to Disease, Risk, and Boundaries Based on Emergent Probability.Patrick Daly - 2022 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 47 (3):457-481.
    The status of risk factors and disease remains a disputed question in the theory and practice of medicine and healthcare, and so does the related question of delineating disease boundaries. I present a framework based on Bernard Lonergan’s account of emergent probability for differentiating (1) generically distinct levels of systematic function within organisms and between organisms and their environments and (2) the methods of functional, genetic, and statistical investigation. I then argue on this basis that it is possible to understand (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  13. Mental Disorder and Suicide: What’s the Connection?Hane Htut Maung - 2022 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 47 (3):345-367.
    This paper offers a philosophical analysis of the connection between mental disorder and suicide risk. In contemporary psychiatry, it is commonly suggested that this connection is a causal connection that has been established through empirical discovery. Herein, I examine the extent to which this claim can be sustained. I argue that the connection between mental disorder and increased suicide risk is not wholly causal but is partly conceptual. This in part relates to the way suicidality is built into the definitions (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  14. Using medical history to study disease concepts in the present: Lessons from Georges Canguilhem.Nicholas Binney - 2021 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 40:67-89.
    Even though medics in the present day may think that clinical pathology is derived from normal physiology, I argue here that this is not necessarily the case. Historically, physiology may have been derived from clinical pathology. After deriving physiological knowledge like this, medics can reverse the conceptual priority, to make believe that physiological knowledge is at the foundation of medical practice. This implies that supposedly objective physiological knowledge can be influenced by the evaluative judgements made to define practical concepts of (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  15. Correction to: Ethnomedical Specialists and their Supernatural Theories of Disease.Aaron D. Lightner, Cynthiann Heckelsmiller & Edward H. Hagen - 2022 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (2):523-523.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  16. Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Seeking Natural Kinds in a Controversial Diagnosis.Paul Kenneth Pfeilschiefter - unknown
    Posttraumatic stress disorder is a debilitating condition that results from the experience of a traumatic event. Natural kinds are mind-independent entities found in nature and are the objects of scientific inquiry. It is common to deny that PTSD is a natural kind, but extant denials assume a thesis of natural kinds that can be called “essentialism”. According to essentialism, many entities are not natural kinds that one would expect should be natural kinds. The homeostatic cluster view of natural kinds offers (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  17. How to Be a Naturalist and a Social Constructivist about Diseases.Brandon A. Conley & Shane N. Glackin - 2021 - Philosophy of Medicine 2 (1).
    Debates about the concept of disease have traditionally been framed as a competition between two conflicting approaches: naturalism, on the one hand, and normativism or social constructivism, on the other. In this article, we lay the groundwork for a naturalistic form of social constructivism by dissociating the presumed link between value-free conceptions of disease and a broadly naturalistic approach; offering a naturalistic argument for a form of social constructivism; and suggesting avenues that strike us as especially promising for filling in (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  18. Historical Epidemiology and the Single Pathogen Model of Epidemic Disease.James L. A. Webb - 2022 - Centaurus 64 (1):197-206.
    Pre-existing medical conditions and co-infections are common to all human populations, although the natures of the pre-existing conditions and the types of co-infections vary. For these reasons, among others, the arrival of a highly infectious pathogenic agent may differentially affect the disease burden in different sub-populations, as a function of varying combinations of endemic disease, chronic disease, genetic or epigenetic vulnerabilities, compromised immunological status, and socially determined risk exposure. The disease burden may also vary considerably by age cohort and socio-economic (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  19. Nosological Diagnosis, Theories of Categorization, and Argumentations by Analogy.Francesco Gagliardi - 2022 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 47 (2):311-330.
    The nosological diagnosis is a particular type of nontheoretical diagnosis consisting of identifying the disease that afflicts the patient without explaining the underlying etiopathological mechanisms. Its origins are within the essentialist point of view on the nature of diseases, which dates back at least to 18th-century taxonomy studies. In this article, we propose a model of nosological diagnosis as a two-phase process composed of the categorization of inductive inferences and argumentations by analogy. In the inductive phase, disease entities are identified (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  20. How an Addiction Ontology Can Unify Competing Conceptualizations of Addiction.Robert M. Kelly, Robert West & Janna Hastings - forthcoming - In Nick Heather, Matt Field, Anthony Moss & Sally Satel (eds.), Evaluating the Brain Disease Model of Addiction. New York, NY, USA:
    Disagreement about the nature of ‘addiction’, such as whether it is a brain disease, arises in part because the label is applied to a wide range of phenomena. This creates conceptual and definitional confusions and misunderstandings, often leading to researchers talking past one another. Ontologies have been successfully implemented in other fields to help solve these problems by creating unifying frameworks that can accommodate divergence while clarifying the basis for it. We argue that ontologies can help transform the way we (...)
    Remove from this list  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  21. Del Castigo Divino Al Diagnóstico: La Concepción de la Enfermedad En Sófocles E Hipócrates.Joaquín Fortanet Fernández - 2022 - Agora 41 (2).
    Este texto analiza el cambio en la noción de enfermedad que se produjo en el siglo V a.c. a través de la comparación entre _nosos, insania y peste_ en las tragedias de Sófocles con el nuevo proceso diagnóstico que se pone en marcha con el establecimiento del corpus hipocrático. Analizando las causas, la cura y el ser de la enfermedad en el Filoctetes, el Ayax y Edipo Rey, podremos observar las distancias con respecto a la concepción técnica y racional del (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  22. Pathological Withdrawal Syndrome: A New Kind of Depression?Katelynn V. Healy - 2022 - Inquiries Journal.
    Marion Godman makes the argument that Pathological Withdrawal Syndrome (PWS) makes the case for psychiatric disorders as a natural kind. Godman argues that we can classify kinds according to their shared ‘grounding’, but we need not know what the grounding is to know that the natural is a natural kind. However, I argue that Godman erroneously classifies PWS as its own natural kind when it is in fact a variant of depression, which is its own natural kind. Cooper highlights culture-bound (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  23. Holism and Reductionism in the Illness/Disease Debate.Marco Buzzoni, Luigi Tesio & Michael T. Stuart - 2022 - In Shyam Wuppuluri & Ian Stewart (eds.), From Electrons to Elephants and Elections. Springer. pp. 743-778.
    In the last decades it has become clear that medicine must find some way to combine its scientific and humanistic sides. In other words, an adequate notion of medicine requires an integrative position that mediates between the analytic-reductionist and the normative-holistic tendencies we find therein. This is especially important as these different styles of reasoning separate “illness” (something perceived and managed by the whole individual in concert with their environment) and “disease” (a “mechanical failure” of a biological element within the (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  24. Survival, Reproduction, and Functional Efficiency.Bengt Autzen - 2019 - Philosophy of Science 86 (5):1157-1167.
    The article examines the relationship between a trait’s effect on survival and reproduction and the notion of functional efficiency underlying the biostatistical theory of health. BST faces the problem of how to measure a trait’s joint effect on survival and reproduction in its account of function. If one measures the joint effect by means of the biological notion of fitness, examples such as the hereditary breast and ovarian cancer syndrome do not count as a disorder. If one does not invoke (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  25. Normalita a normativita.Martin Haloun - unknown
    Martin Haloun Normality and Normativity Annotation: The thesis Normality and Normativity is concerned with the problems of the relation of normal and abnormal. The analysis of the expression 'normal' is the introduction of the topic followed by the demonstration that there are multiple meanings of the normal that do not always coincide. During the description of the aspects of norm and normal the fundamental relations between facts and prescriptions will have to be taken into account. The full meaning of the (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  26. Virtue and Disease: Narrative Accounts of Orthorexia Nervosa.Lauren A. Wynne, Gareen Hamalian & Neve Durrwachter - 2021 - In Simona Stano & Amy Bentley (eds.), Food for Thought: Nourishment, Culture, Meaning. Springer Verlag. pp. 171-182.
    Orthorexia nervosaOrthorexia nervosa is most frequently described as a fixation with healthy eating. Although orthorexia nervosaOrthorexia nervosa has yet to be added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and much debate persists as to its prevalence and criteria for its diagnosis, many mental healthHealth clinicians have observed the growing prevalence of the condition. However, the contemporary imperative in the United States to “care for” one’s body through foodFood, which includes the employment of nutritional knowledge and often the (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  27. 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 (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  28. The Place of the Experience of Illness in the Understanding of Disease: Medical Discourse and Subjectivity.Amanda Barros Pereira Palmeira & Rodrigo Barros Gewehr - 2021 - In Joaquim Braga & Mário Santiago de Carvalho (eds.), Philosophy of Care. New Approaches to Vulnerability, Otherness and Therapy. Advancing Global Bioethics, Vol. 16. Springer. pp. 333-346.
    Recent discussions about medical discourse seek to demonstrate the apparent and progressive oblivion of the subject as well as the notion of subjectivity in the development of modern medicine - in its foundations in clinical practice and basic theoretical framework. As a result, they show that medicine has evolved in the understanding of the disease, while still keeping the experience of suffering as a blind spot. The response is to carry out countless attempts to restore subjectivity in the therapeutic process (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  29. Some Issues Concerning the Concept of Mental Illness.Cristian Marques - 2022 - Studies in Social Sciences Review 2 (3):186-194.
    Our main objective is to locate and analyze some philosophical issues about the concept of mental illness and the manner it is used, especially in contemporary psychiatry. It is even difficult to find a standard meaning in the main psychiatric textbooks; and, when there is some exposition of the concept, it is sparse, uncritical and vague. As an immediate consequence of these issues, practical guidelines and protocols for the clinic arise, which become almost “automatic”, unreflective behaviors, practices translated as health (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  30. 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 (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  31. Defending Social Objectivity for "Mental Disorder".Anne-Marie Gagné-Julien - 2021 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 28 (4):381-384.
    First, I want to thank PPP for the privilege of having my work read and commented on by esteemed colleagues. In this response, I briefly review some of the key issues that they have raised. These issues include 1) the usefulness of a definition of mental disorder for North American psychiatry, 2) the absence of a concrete criterion to address the demarcation problem, 3) the place and role of values in such a demarcation, and 4) the worries of over-inclusiveness, problematic (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  32. Function, Dysfunction, and the Concept of Mental Disorder.Jonathan Y. Tsou - 2021 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 28 (4):371-375.
    Naturalistic accounts of mental disorder aim to identify an objective basis for attributions of mental disorder. This goal is important for demarcating genuine mental disorders from artificial or socially constructed disorders. The articulation of a demarcation criterion provides a means for assuring that attributions of 'mental disorder' are not merely pathologizing different forms of social deviance. The most influential naturalistic and hybrid definitions of mental disorder identify biological dysfunction as the objective basis of mental disorders: genuine mental...
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  33. A Universal Definition of Mental Disorder: Neither Necessary nor Desirable.G. Scott Waterman - 2021 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 28 (4):377-379.
    Psychiatry's relation to the rest of medicine is ambivalent. Its legitimacy as a specialty is often conceived as being closely linked to its fidelity to the fundamental paradigms of medicine, especially the centrality of diagnosis and the association of diagnosis with treatment indications. However, as Gagné-Julien notes, a major impetus behind the quest for a solution to the demarcation problem in psychiatry is "growing concerns regarding over-medicalization". Although it could appear that these two considerations point in opposite directions, both arguably (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  34. Dysfunction and the Definition of Mental Disorder in the DSM.Anne-Marie Gagné-Julien - 2021 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 28 (4):353-370.
  35. Psychological Injury is Not New and Not Normal.Claire Pouncey - 2021 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 28 (4):347-348.
    In "On the Concept of 'Psychiatric Disorder,'" Miriam Solomon strives to resolve the tension between thinking of bereavement as a normal reaction to loss, and recognizing that its most extreme forms look very much like major depressive episodes and benefit from psychiatric treatment. To do this, she introduces the idea that a condition can be both normal and a mental disorder, or in other words, that some mental disorders are normal. Although I very much like the idea that some mental (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  36. Who Owns the Concept of Psychiatric Disorder?Miriam Solomon - 2021 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 28 (4):349-351.
    About ten years ago, I participated in a consensus process on migraine nomenclature. Participants used a modified Delphi technique to explore their views about what migraine is. Candidate concepts included an illness, disease, syndrome, condition, disorder, or susceptibility. Initially, there was a wide range of views about which concept best fits our concept of migraine. Migraine—in common with many psychiatric disorders—is poorly understood by neuroscience. On scientific grounds, participants thought that "susceptibility" and "syndrome" describes our current knowledge well. However, participants (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  37. On the Concept of "Psychiatric Disorder": Incorporating Psychological Injury.Miriam Solomon - 2021 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 28 (4):329-339.
  38. Can One and the Same Instance of Grief Be Both Normal and Disordered?Jerome C. Wakefield - 2021 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 28 (4):341-346.
    Miriam solomon resuscitates a famous proposal of George Engel's to classify normal grief as a medical disorder. She has two main arguments justifying such a reclassification, one based on Engel's "wound analogy" and another a "Humpty Dumpty"-type argument that 'disorder' is a technical term that we can redefine any way we please. I consider them in turn.Solomon says: "I suggest that we allow a concept of "psychological injury" that is analogous to the concept of physical injury." Of course, we already (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  39. The Limits of Community for A Theory of Recognition.Audra L. Goodnight - 2021 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 28 (4):319-322.
    Should madness be recognized as grounds for identity? Should society recognize and validate madness as diversity, be it psychological, behavioral, or emotional? To answer these questions, we might turn to medical consensus about which mental, behavioral, or emotional states count as mental illness. Unfortunately, the criteria for determining which mental health phenomena fall within the boundary of mental illness remain open to debate, creating what is known as "the boundary problem." Common approaches to resolving the boundary problem include naturalism, a (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  40. Values Constitute the Boundaries in Between the Rules of Nature and Social Recognition.Werdie van Staden - 2021 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 28 (4):315-317.
    The boundary problem on defining the conceptual scope and limits of a mental disorder may be tackled at either side of the boundary. On one side, philosophers and philosophically minded clinicians tried clarifying the concept of mental disorder and its related concepts of mental illness and dysfunction in their use and definition. On the other side, Mohammed Rashed's article gives a substantive and refreshing account of this neglected side in terms of social recognition. Thereby the boundary is clarified from the (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  41. Experimental philosophy of medicine and the concepts of health and disease.Walter Veit - 2020 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 42 (3):169-186.
    If one had to identify the biggest change within the philosophical tradition in the twenty-first century, it would certainly be the rapid rise of experimental philosophy to address differences in intuitions about concepts. It is, therefore, surprising that the philosophy of medicine has so far not drawn on the tools of experimental philosophy in the context of a particular conceptual debate that has overshadowed all others in the field: the long-standing dispute between so-called naturalists and normativists about the concepts of (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
1 — 50 / 4349