ABSTRACT:

The philosophy of medicine has had a long and somewhat problematic history, going back to Hippocrates and Galen. As recently as 30 years ago, bioethicist Arthur Caplan (1992) raised doubts about its existence as a distinct subject matter. These doubts have now been widely allayed. Journal articles, books, companions, and handbooks in the area are quite numerous today. Recently, two single-author introductions to the subject have been published: Alex Broadbent’s Philosophy of Medicine (2019) and Jacob Stegenga’s Care and Cure: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Medicine (2018a). Both authors write from the perspective of analytic philosophy, with an emphasis on issues in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of science as they relate to medicine. One of the issues addressed in both books, medical nihilism, is treated in much more detail in Jacob Stegenga’s Medical Nihilism (2018b), and it will be considered briefly in this essay. After a short overview of the subject, this essay will offer a brief summary of each of the two introductions. The essay concludes with observations about the subject matter itself, as well as suggestions for the two authors.

摘要：

医学哲学的历史悠久且有些问题，可以追溯到希波克拉底和盖伦。就在 30 年前，生物伦理学家 Arthur Caplan (1992) 对其作为一个独特主题的存在提出了质疑。这些疑虑现在已被广泛消除。今天，该地区的期刊文章、书籍、同伴和手册相当多。最近，该主题的两篇单作者介绍已发表：Alex Broadbent 的《医学哲学》（2019 年）和 Jacob Stegenga 的《护理与治疗：医学哲学导论》(2018a)。两位作者都从分析哲学的角度写作，重点关注形而上学、认识论和科学哲学中与医学相关的问题。Jacob Stegenga 的Medical Nihilism (2018b)对这两本书中讨论的问题之一医学虚无主义进行了更详细的讨论，本​​文将对其进行简要讨论。在对该主题进行简短概述之后，本文将对这两个介绍中的每一个进行简要总结。这篇文章的结尾是对主题本身的观察，以及对两位作者的建议。