Many complicated social and ethical issues in health care are based on conceptual problems, most prominently on the definitions of health and disease, or on epistemological issues regarding causality or diagnosis. Philosophy is the discipline that deals with such conceptual, metaphysical, epistemological, methodological, and axiological matters. This handbook covers all the central concepts in medicine, such as ageing, death, disease, mental disorder, and well-being. It is an invaluable resource for health care specialists who want to be informed and stay up to date with the relevant discussions, as well as philosophers and ethicists with an interest in medicine, and members of the general public with an interest in health care and related issues. The text also advances these debates and sets the agenda for years to come.
Thomas Schramme is Professor of Philosophy at the Liverpool. He works mainly on theories of health and disease and on philosophical topics in psychiatry. He has also published on health justice.
Mary Jean Walker is Lecturer in philosophy at La Trobe University. Her work in the philosophy of medicine includes contributions to debate on the concept of disease and investigation of the epistemology of personalised medicine. She also has research interests in bioethics, especially emerging technology bioethics and applications of medical phenomenology.