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Tampering with Nature: Experiment and Scientific PracticeDissertation, Boston College. 1995.After the historiographic revolution in science studies of the 1960's, philosophers began to envision science as a product of historical and sociological forces and not as the result of the 'scientific method'. While the importance of experimentation is recognized in recent science studies, the full significance for its roles in scientific practice generally remains overlooked. Therefore, attempts to reconstruct narratives of scientific practice are often incomplete. I propose several features o…Read more
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433 From Paradigm to Disciplinary Matrix and ExemplarIn Vasō Kintē & Theodore Arabatzis (eds.), Kuhn's The structure of scientific revolutions revisited, Routledge. pp. 41. 2012.
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27It is now—at least loosely—acknowledged that most health and clinical outcomes are influenced by different interacting causes. Surprisingly, medical research studies are nearly universally designed to study—usually in a binary way—the effect of a single cause. Recent experiences during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic brought to the forefront that most of our challenges in medicine and healthcare deal with systemic, that is, interdependent and interconnected problems. Understanding these pr…Read more
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22The conceptual foundations of systems medicineNova Science Publishers. 2024.Medicine is facing several significant challenges as the twenty-first century unfolds, which represent barriers or limitations that threaten to cripple the advancement of medicine and its practice. One of the responses to these challenges is the emergence of systems medicine. And one of the more pertinent challenges is identifying and clarifying systems medicine's conceptual and theoretical foundations. The present book represents a sustained effort to examine this challenge and to map the terra…Read more
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1The Evolving Notion and Role of Kuhn’s Incommensurability ThesisIn William J. Devlin & Alisa Bokulich (eds.), Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions - 50 Years On, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, Vol. 311. Springer. 2015.
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12Kuhn, Thomas SInternet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2015.Thomas S. Kuhn Thomas Samuel Kuhn, although trained as a physicist at Harvard University, became an historian and philosopher of science through the support of Harvard’s president, James Conant. In 1962, Kuhn’s renowned The Structure of Scientific Revolutions helped to inaugurate a revolution—the 1960s historiographic revolution—by providing a new image of science. For … Continue reading Kuhn, Thomas S. →.
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16Thomas Kuhn's revolutions: a historical and an evolutionary philosophy of science?Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. 2015.An historical survey of Thomas Kuhn's 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, charting the development of this influential work throughout Kuhn's career and exploring the continuing impact of Kuhn on the philosophy of science.
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37The role of prudent love in the practice of clinical medicineJournal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 17 (5): 877-882. 2011.
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86The nature of light and color: Goethe's “der versuch AlS vermittler” versus Newton's experimentum crucisPerspectives on Science 17 (4). 2009.In the seventeenth century, Newton published his famous experimentum crucis, in which he claimed that light is heterogeneous and is composed of rays with different refrangibilities. Experiments, especially the crucial experiment, were important for justifying Newton’s theory of light, and eventually his theory of color. A century later, Goethe conducted a series of experiments on the nature of color, especially in contradistinction to Newton, and he defended his research with a methodological pr…Read more
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29The discovery of heparin revisited: the peptone connectionPerspectives in Biology and Medicine 39 (4): 610-625. 1995.
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37‘Soup’ vs. ‘Sparks’: Alexander Forbes and the Synaptic Transmission ControversyAnnals of Science 63 (2): 139-156. 2006.During the twentieth century, a controversy raged over the role of electrical forces and chemical substances in synaptic transmission. Although the story of the ‘main’ participants is well documented, the story of ‘lesser’ known participants is seldom told. For example, Alexander Forbes, who was a prominent member of the axonologists, played an active role in the controversy and yet is seldom mentioned in standard accounts of the controversy. During the 1930s, Forbes incorporated chemical substa…Read more
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29Philosophy of Science: The Historical Background. Joseph J. KockelmansIsis 91 (4): 838-838. 2000.
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66Metaphysical presuppositions and scientific practices: Reductionism and organicism in cancer researchInternational Studies in the Philosophy of Science 19 (1). 2005.Metaphysical presuppositions are important for guiding scientific practices and research. The success of twentieth-century biology, for instance, is largely attributable to presupposing that complex biological processes are reducible to elementary components. However, some biologists have challenged the sufficiency of reductionism for investigating complex biological phenomena and have proposed alternative presuppositions like organicism. In this article, contemporary cancer research is used as …Read more
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57Metaphysics of the cognition debate: a plurimodel theory of cognitionPhilosophica 90 (1). 2015.Proponents of the dual-process theory claim that two distinct types of mental faculties or minds are responsible for human cognition. The first is evolutionarily old and not unique to humans but shared with other organisms. Type-1s key feature is autonomy from cognitive capacities; hence, it does not require working memory. Type-2 is evolutionarily recent and thought to be uniquely human. Its key feature is reflective cognitive-decoupling of Type-1 processes, if warranted; and it requires worki…Read more
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101Montgomery, Kathryn, how doctors think: Clinical judgment and the practice of medicineTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 28 (6): 525-530. 2007.
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40Johnson, Lawrence E: A life-centered approach to bioethics: biocentric ethics: Cambridge University Press, New York, 2011, 388 pp, $29.99 , ISBN: 9780521154208 (review)Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 33 (3): 227-231. 2012.
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51Jeremy Howick: The Philosophy of Evidence-Based Medicine (review)Medicine Studies 3 (2): 125-128. 2011.
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9Johnson, James A., Douglas E. Anderson, and Caren C. Rossow. Health Systems thinking: a primer. Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2020. 138 pp. ISBN 9781284167146 (review)Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 43 (5): 429-433. 2022.
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87Ingvar Johansson, Neils Lynøe: Medicine & philosophy: a twenty-first century introduction: Ontos Verlag, Frankfurt, 2008, 475 pp, $54.00 , ISBN 978-3-938793-90-9Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 31 (5): 395-399. 2010.
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48Hemostatic regulation and Whitehead's philosophy of organismActa Biotheoretica 35 (1-2): 123-133. 1986.Biology as a scientific discipline has relied heavily upon advances in chemistry and physics. An inherent danger in this relationship is the reduction of living phenomena to physico-chemical terms. Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism is utilized to examine current methodologies within biology and to evaluate their appropriateness for future research. Hemostatic regulation is employed to illustrate the applications of organistic concepts to biological research. It is concluded that understanding o…Read more
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39Human Origins and Human NatureFaith and Philosophy 26 (5): 566-570. 2009.Both religion and science provide powerful images of human origins and human nature. Often these images are seen as incompatible or irreconcilable, with the religious image generally marginalized vis-à-vis the scientific image. Recent genetic studies into human origins, especially in terms of common cellular features like the mitochondrion from females and the Y-chromosome from males, provide evidence for common ancestors called mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam. The aim of this paper is …Read more
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40Constructing a scientific paper: Howell's prothrombin laboratory notebook and paperInternational Studies in the Philosophy of Science 15 (3). 2001.Scientists generally record their laboratory activities and experimental results in notebooks, from which they construct scientific papers. The Johns Hopkins physiologist William Henry Howell kept a laboratory notebook from 1913 to 1914, in which he recorded experiments on the blood clotting factor prothrombin. In 1914 he published a paper using this notebook, to justify his theory of prothrombin activation. Howell's paper is reconstructed, in terms of its narrative and argument elements, from t…Read more
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47Care and competence in medical practice: Francis Peabody confronts Jason Posner (review)Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 14 (2): 143-153. 2011.In this paper, I discuss the role of care and competence, as well as their relationship to one another, in contemporary medical practice. I distinguish between two types of care. The first type, care1, represents a natural concern that motivates physicians to help or to act on the behalf of patients, i.e. to care about them. However, this care cannot guarantee the correct technical or right ethical action of physicians to meet the bodily and existential needs of patients, i.e. to take care of th…Read more
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111An integrated model of clinical reasoning: dual‐process theory of cognition and metacognitionJournal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 18 (5): 954-961. 2012.
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60Reviews (review)Philosophical Psychology 21 (6). 2008.Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences JON ELSTER Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007484 pages, ISBN: 0521777445 (pbk); $27.99 Explaining Social Be...
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