BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE.
When freely available, you can download the publication by clicking on the image on the left
|
Clinical Reasoning: Knowledge, Uncertainty, and Values in Health Care
Fellow: Daniele Chiffi overview
Overview: This book offers a philosophically-based, yet clinically-oriented perspective on current medical reasoning aiming at 1) identifying important forms of uncertainty permeating current clinical reasoning and practice 2) promoting the application of an abductive methodology in the health context in order to deal with those clinical uncertainties 3) bridging the gap between biomedical knowledge, clinical practice, and research and values in both clinical and philosophical literature. With a clear philosophical emphasis, the book investigates themes lying at the border between several disciplines, such as medicine, nursing, logic, epistemology, and philosophy of science; but also ethics, epidemiology, and statistics. At the same time, it critically discusses and compares several professional approaches to clinical practice such as the one of medical doctors, nurses and other clinical practitioners, showing the need for developing a unified framework of reasoning, which merges methods and resources from many different clinical but also non-clinical disciplines. In particular, this book shows how to leverage nursing knowledge and practice, which has been considerably neglected so far, to further shape the interdisciplinary nature of clinical reasoning. Furthermore, a thorough philosophical investigation on the values involved in health care is provided, based on both the clinical and philosophical literature. The book concludes by proposing an integrative approach to health and disease going beyond the so-called “classical biomedical model of care”. |
|
Whose purposes? Biological teleology and intentionality
Fellow: Javier González de Prado Salas Abstract & keywords
Abstract: Teleosemantic theories aspire to develop a naturalistic account of intentional agency and thought by appeal to biological teleology. In particular, most versions of teleosemantics study the emergence of intentionality in terms of biological purposes introduced by Darwinian evolution. The aim of this paper is to argue that the sorts of biological purposes identified by these evolutionary approaches do not allow for a satisfactory account of intentionality. More precisely, I claim that such biological purposes should be attributed to reproductive chains or lineages, rather than to individual traits or organisms, whereas the purposes underlying intentional agency and thought are typically attributed to individuals. In the last part of the paper I suggest that related difficulties are also faced, despite appearances, by accounts of intentionality relying on alternative organizational approaches to biological teleology. Keywords: Teleosemantics, Teleology, Intentionality, Biological purposes, Etiological-evolutionary account, Organizational account |
|
On the Normativity of the Immune System
Fellow: Amin T. Turki abstract & keywords
Abstract: In the 1940s, Georges Canguilhem has established the concept of biological normativity on the level of the organism in his key work on ‘‘The Normal and the Pathological’’. We would like to present a contemporary analysis of Canguilhem’s work, set it in context with more recent results from the field of complexity and immunology, and evaluate the problematic whether normativity is a genuine capacity of the organism. Based on Canguilhem’s conditions of the definition of biological normativity, we show that the immune system as one of the complex systems of the living equally shares the capacity to be normative. We will then conclude that normativity can also be conceptually independently displayed on the level of complex systems of the living. Keywords: Immunological Theory, Concepts in medicine, Georges Canguilhem, Epistemology, Immunology, Normal and pathological |