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This interdisciplinary monograph in philosophy of medicine examines models of explanation in health science and their relation with current medical trends, such as personalized and person-centered medicine. Medicine has provided challenging case studies for the general philosophy of science that have prompted rethinking of a wide range of philosophical notions - such as scientific law, theory and evidence - and contributed to the elaboration of pluralistic approaches to modeling, causality and explanation. The health sciences have increasingly recognized the role of philosophy of medicine as both a field of conceptual and methodological reflection, capable of addressing practical issues, and hence relevant for a proper understanding of the construction of medical knowledge, modeling practices, therapeutic strategies and preventive decisions.
'Explaining Disease' contains various case studies in medicine to describe the assumptions underpinning the construction of explanatory models of diseases. It shows the impact different explanatory strategies can have on practical matters, which in turn affect clinical evaluation and therapy and public health decisions. The book concludes with a few open-ended reflections to foster more thorough consideration of the role of philosophy of medicine can play its dialogue with the health sciences.
List of contents
Introduction.- Chapter 1: Explananda, explanantia, and explanatory relations.- Chapter 2: Varieties of causal explanation.- Chapter 3: What mechanisms can and cannot do.- Chapter 4: Functions and functional explanations.- Chapter 5: What role for non-causal explanations?Chapter 6: Modeling diseases, explaining the diseased.- Chapter 7: Describing, classifying and explaining.- Chapter 8: Will we all be pluralists?.- Chapter 9: A tentative agenda.
About the author
Raffaella Campaner is Full Professor of Philosophy of Science at the Department of Philosophy and Communication Studies of the University of Bologna. She has worked extensively in philosophy of medicine, publishing a number of contributions in journals and collected volumes, as well as a previous monograph (
Philosophy of Medicine. Causality, Evidence and Explanation, 2012). Her research interests include causation, mechanism, scientific explanation and different kinds of pluralism. She is currently working on epistemological issues in modeling complex diseases, and on approaches to explanation of mental disorders.
