PHI 240LEC—Philosophy of Medicine: Theory and Practice

This course will investigate some very influential conceptions of health and disease and then apply the theories to some major controversies in medicine. Topics include: conceptions of health and disease, leading naturalist, normativist, and hybrid accounts of disease, and current controversies in medicine (whether medicine is essentially pathocentric, whether mental health practitioners are medicating healthy people, whether ?normal? grief is to be viewed as a pathological condition, whether the disabled should be cured, whether children born with sexual organs of both sexes should be surgically altered, whether health is the key condition to our being autonomous, whether the addicted are diseased, and whether aging is a healthy normal stage).