Meaning and Medicine. A Reader in the Philosophy of Health Care
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Author(s): J. Lindemann Nelson and H. Lindemann Nelson (Eds)
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415919150
Format: hardback
398pp
Price: £40.00
Review Date: 31 May 2000
Review: This collection of essays by philosophers and other scholars who are working on health care issues focus on five themes, four of which correspond to familiar distinctions within philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and social philosophy. The essays show philosophers analysing basic features of health care's own conceptual structure and considering implications of health care theory and practice for our own conceptual structures. They examine whether 'disease' and 'disability' names features of reality independently of the attitudes that humans take of such things. They examine the impact of new knowledge about the human genome on traditional questions of freedom and responsibility. They weigh epistemological features of ongoing debates about scientific generalizations and particular perceptions should best be