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In the heyday of philosophy of science in the last century, special philosophies of science such as philosophy of physics , philosophy of biology , philosophy of mathematics , and others branched from the general philosophy of science. Philosophy of medicine , which has existed since Hippocrates and Galen as casual philosophizing about medical issues, also emerged as a field of scholarly research in the 1920s. It counted, and continues to count, as one of the special philosophies of science. We should be aware, however, that philosophy of medicine is, strictly speaking, neither a philosophy of science nor philosophy of a science. It is in fact philosophia universalis and not confined to medicine as a science or merely to scientific problems and issues in medicine. Beside genuinely metatheoretical concerns such as medical epistemology and medical concept formation, it also inquires into object-theoretical issues such as organism, life, death, suffering, disease, diagnostic-therapeutic methodology, caring and curing, personhood, mind, anthropology, human values, deontics, and so on. In this capacity, it convincingly demonstrates that medicine could serve as a highly fertile ground both for philosophy in general and philosophy of science in particular.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-2260-6_24

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