Philosophy of Medicine. Causality, Evidence and Explanation

Philosophy of science and medicine continue to interact in ongoing attempts to devise different models, clarify notions like explanation, causation and evidence in the medical context, and tackle the relations between describing, explaining, predicting and intervening. On these and related topics conceptual and methodological investigations into diseases and medical research and practice are demanding far-reaching philosophical reflections and questioning available philosophical notions such as theory, generalization and mechanism. This volume illustrates some of the ways in which philosophy of science and medicine are mutually helping and challenging each other, referring to specific medical fields that have only recently become a focus for philosophy of science, such as cancer studies, epidemiology and psychiatry. Within a pluralistic epistemological framework, examples taken from the biomedical sciences and clinical practice are analyzed in some detail with recent conceptual tools from the philosophy of science, to shed some light on medical causation, evidence and models of explanation.