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In Explaining Cancer, Anya Plutynski addresses a variety of philosophical questions that arise in the context of cancer science and medicine. She begins with the following concerns: - How do scientists classify cancer? Do these classifications reflect nature's joints?
- How do cancer scientists identify and classify early stage cancers?
- What does it mean to say that cancer is a genetic disease? What role do genes play in mechanisms for cancer?
- What are the most important environmental causes of cancer, and how do epidemiologists investigate these causes?
- How exactly has our evolutionary history made us vulnerable to cancer? Explaining Cancer uses these questions as an entrée into a family of philosophical debates. It uses case studies of scientific practice to reframe philosophical debates about natural classification in science and medicine, the problem of drawing the line between disease and health, mechanistic reasoning in science, pragmatics and evidence, the roles of models and modeling in science, and the nature of scientific explanation.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: Cancer: Natural, Social and Medical Kind
- Chapter 2: From Disease to Risk
- Chapter 3: Causation, Causal Selection and Causal Parity
- Chapter 4: Evidence and Environmental Epidemiology: A Pragmatic Approach
- Chapter 5: Explaining Cancer from an Evolutionary Perspective
- Chapter 6: Explanation
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Anya Plutynski received her Ph.D. in Philosophy, and her M.A. in Biology, both from the University of Pennsylvania. She currently teaches philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis.
Summary
This book engages several philosophical questions about cancer: What is cancer? Is it one or many? How do cell and molecular biologists, epidemiologists and evolutionary biologists think about and explain cancer?
Additional text
...for those who care about philosophy of science, the book illustrates how cancer can be a rich case study. In addition, the systematic investigation of traditional philosophical debates applied to cancer that Plutynski pursues in this book makes it a great resource for teaching. For those who care about cancer, the book illustrates the need to develop more 'bottom up' philosophical approaches.
