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Evidence based medicine and evidence based public healthIn Maria Lasonen-Aarnio & Clayton Littlejohn (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evidence, Routledge. 2019.
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13Publisher Correction to: The core business of medicine: A defence of the best available intervention thesisSynthese 202 (3): 1-1. 2023.
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14The core business of medicine: a defence of the best available intervention thesisSynthese 201 (6). 2023.Philosophy of Medicine has for a long time been preoccupied with analyzing the concepts of health, disease and illness. Relatively speaking, the concept of medicine itself has received very little attention. This paper is a contribution to the relatively neglected debate about the nature of medicine. Building on the work of Alex Broadbent (Broadbent, 2018a, b), Chadwin Harris (Harris, 2018) and Thaddeus Metz (Metz, 2018), in this paper I question the persuasiveness of Broadbent’s account of the …Read more
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25Practicing Afrocentric Ethical TeachingTeaching Philosophy 43 (2): 179-199. 2020.Slowly, we are gaining a deeper understanding of the persisting psychological trauma experienced by students at colonial universities, and beginning to recognize that the Eurocentric curricula and pedagogies must change if students such as the “born-frees” in post-Apartheid South Africa are to flourish. In this article, I present a sub-Saharan African concept of “the ethical teacher,” and use this to ground a “ubiquitous action-reaction” teaching model. I use these concepts to develop a decoloni…Read more
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311Is the Humean defeated by induction?Philosophical Studies 162 (2): 319-332. 2013.Many necessitarians about cause and law (Armstrong 1983; Mumford 2004; Bird 2007) have argued that Humeans are unable to justify their inductive inferences, as Humean laws are nothing but the sum of their instances. In this paper I argue against these necessitarian claims. I show that Armstrong is committed to the explanatory value of Humean laws (in the form of universally quantified statements), and that contra Armstrong, brute regularities often do have genuine explanatory value. I finish wit…Read more
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1351The Ultimate Argument Against Dispositional Monist Accounts of LawsAnalysis 72 (4): 714-722. 2012.Bird argues that Armstrong’s necessitarian conception of physical modality and laws of nature generates a vicious regress with respect to necessitation. We show that precisely the same regress afflicts Bird’s dispositional-monist theory, and indeed, related views, such as that of Mumford & Anjum. We argue that dispositional monism is basically Armstrongian necessitarianism modified to allow for a thesis about property identity
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28Causation in Population Health Informatics and Data ScienceSpringer Verlag. 2018.This book covers the overlap between informatics, computer science, philosophy of causation, and causal inference in epidemiology and population health research. Key concepts covered include how data are generated and interpreted, and how and why concepts in health informatics and the philosophy of science should be integrated in a systems-thinking approach. Furthermore, a formal epistemology for the health sciences and public health is suggested. Causation in Population Health Informatics and D…Read more
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16Determinism and sporting prowess: A response to Mumford and AnjumSouth African Journal of Philosophy 36 (2): 217-222. 2017.
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26In this paper I untangle a recent debate in the philosophy of epidemiology, focusing in particular on the Potential Outcomes Approach to causation. As the POA strategy includes the quantification of ‘contrary-to-fact’ outcomes, it is unsurprising that it has been likened to the counterfactual analysis of causation briefly proposed by David Hume, and later developed by David Lewis. However, I contend that this has led to much confusion. Miguel Hernan and Sarah Taubman have recently argued that me…Read more
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675Dispositions and the principle of least action revisitedAnalysis 75 (3): 386-395. 2015.Some time ago, Joel Katzav and Brian Ellis debated the compatibility of dispositional essentialism with the principle of least action. Surprisingly, very little has been said on the matter since, even by the most naturalistically inclined metaphysicians. Here, we revisit the Katzav–Ellis arguments of 2004–05. We outline the two problems for the dispositionalist identified Katzav in his 2004 , and claim they are not as problematic for the dispositional essentialist at it first seems – but not for…Read more
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24Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum, Getting Causes from Powers. Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 32 (5): 407-409. 2012.
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1101On the classification of diseasesTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 35 (4): 251-269. 2014.Identifying the necessary and sufficient conditions for individuating and classifying diseases is a matter of great importance in the fields of law, ethics, epidemiology, and of course, medicine. In this paper, I first propose a means of achieving this goal, ensuring that no two distinct disease-types could correctly be ascribed to the same disease-token. I then posit a metaphysical ontology of diseases—that is, I give an account of what a disease is. This is essential to providing the most effe…Read more