New Books in Philosophy of Medicine

Chekhov's Sakhalin Journey: Doctor, Humanitarian, Writer with Jonathan Cole (Bloomsbury, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Chekhov liked to joke that he was a doctor by profession and merely did literary work in his spare time. Behind the joke lies an intriguing truth. We remember Chekhov as a towering literary figure, but medicine and humanitarian work occupied much of his life and profoundly shaped the way he encountered human suffering.

Nowhere is this more striking than in his remarkable journey across Siberia to Sakhalin Island. Travelling through an immense and unforgiving landscape to investigate conditions in the penal colony, Chekhov undertook an expedition that he would remember as one of the defining experiences of his life. Written by a neuroscientist and practising clinician, Chekhov’s Sakhalin Journey: Doctor, Humanitarian, Writer (Bloomsbury, 2023) follows Chekhov along this extraordinary route, drawing on his own account to reveal the doctor, humanitarian and observer behind the celebrated author. The result is a richer portrait of Chekhov, one that asks us to see his medicine and literature not as competing lives, but as different expressions of the same searching attention to human experience and the determination to not ‘do nothing’ to improve human lives.

Professor Jonathan Cole (MA, MSc, DM, FRCP, FTPS), is a British consultant clinical neurophysiologist, author, and researcher known for combining neuroscience with first-person patient narratives. He serves as a consultant at the University Hospital in Dorset, a visiting professor at Bournemouth University, and has served as the President of the International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology. Inspired by his mentor and friend Oliver Sacks, Cole’s work heavily emphasizes the subjective, lived experience of individuals surviving rare or severe neurological conditions.

Jonathan is one of those rare scientists who combines both the rigor of scientific investigations with literary endeavours and even theatre. I will include both Jonathan’s personal website and his website for his collaborations in theatrical productions.

Dr. Anya Daly is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Ethics in the School of Arts and Society, University of Tasmania. Interdisciplinary collaborations are at the core of Anya’s research interests. She investigates the intersections of phenomenology with philosophy of mind, the philosophy of perception, the philosophy of psychiatry, embodied and social cognition, enactivism, ethics, aesthetics and Buddhist Philosophy.

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In Defence of the Human Being: Foundational Questions of an Embodied Anthropology with Thomas Fuchs (Oxford UP, 2021)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 08:00:00 +0000

At a time when artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and digital technologies increasingly shape our understanding of what it means to be human, Fuchs argues that we need to recover a richer conception of the human person. Rather than viewing ourselves as information-processing systems or collections of neural mechanisms, he develops a philosophical vision centred on embodiment, relationality, and lived experience. The result is a compelling defence of human agency, dignity, and freedom against contemporary forms of reductionism and transhumanism.

Today we'll be discussing In Defence of the Human Being: Foundational Questions of an Embodied Anthropology (Oxford UP, 2021). We discuss central arguments and their implications for philosophy, psychiatry, technology, and the future of human self-understanding.

Prof. Thomas Fuchs holds the Karl Jaspers Professorship for Philosophical Foundations of Psychiatry and is head of the section “Phenomenological Psychopathology and Psychotherapy” at Heidelberg University Psychiatric Hospital. He is also coordinator of the Marsilius Project “Embodiment as a Paradigm of an Evolutionary Cultural Anthropology” as well as research unit leader of the Karl Jaspers Edition. His main scientific interests include phenomenological anthropology and psychopathology on the one hand, and the theory and ethics of psychiatry and neuroscience on the other.

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Healing and the Invention of Metaphor: Towards a Poetics of Illness Experience with Laurence J. Kirmayer (Cambridge UP, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (New Books Network) — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 08:00:00 +0000

It has long been understood that illness is influenced not only by our bodies' physiology, but also language, culture, and meaning. Healing and the Invention of Metaphor: Towards a Poetics of Illness Experience (Cambridge UP, 2025), written by renowned cultural psychiatrist Laurence Kirmayer, explores of the influence of metaphor, narrative, and imagination in experiences of suffering and processes of healing across cultures. It emphasizes how metaphor can open a window to the hidden mechanisms of healing driven by meaning and symbolism, myth and imagination. At the same time, it offers a rigorous critical account of the metaphors embedded in the epistemology and practice of contemporary biomedicine, psychiatry, and psychotherapy. In doing so, it exposes the sociomoral and political dimensions of these dominant approaches to understanding and treating illness.

Laurence J. Kirmayer is Distinguished James McGill Professor and Director of the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University. He directs the Culture & Mental Health Research Unit at the Institute of Community and Family Psychiatry of the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. He is a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and the Royal Society of Canada.

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The New Modern Medicine: Disease, Evidence, and Epidemiological Medicine with Jonathan Fuller

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Jonathan Fuller’s The New Modern Medicine: Disease, Evidence, and Epidemiological Medicine (Oxford UP, 2025) takes the reader on a philosophical tour through scientific medicine, visiting its distinctive problems, particularly problems brought about by the twentieth century fusion of medicine with epidemiology. Drawing on the author’s training in philosophy of medicine, history and philosophy of science, and clinical medicine, the book examines the contours of the ‘epidemiological medicine’ that resulted from this fusion. It dissects several philosophical problems of the new modern medicine while exploring topics such as theories of contagion and cancer, concepts and theories of disease etiology, the nature of chronic diseases and mental disorders, concepts of medical risk, models of medical evidence and medical prediction, the problems of extrapolating from clinical research, therapeutic skepticism, and the future of modern medicine. Expansive, detailed, rigorous, insightful, and refreshingly penetrable, The New Modern Medicine is an ambitious contribution to the philosophy of medicine and to our understanding of scientific medicine. It is available online open access.

This episode is hosted by Alex Broadbent, Professor of Philosophy of Science at Durham University and Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg. He is Director of the Durham-Johannesburg Centre for Philosophy of Epidemiology, Medicine, and Public Health, and co-leads the Measurement Lab in the Institute for Medical Humanities.

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Vanessa Rampton, "Making Medical Progress: History of a Contested Idea" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Answers to the question 'what is medical progress?' have always been contested, and any one response is always bound up with contextual ideas of personhood, society, and health. However, the widely held enthusiasm for medical progress escapes more general critiques of progress as a conceptual category.

From the intersection of intellectual history, philosophy, and the medical humanities, in Making Medical Progress: History of a Contested Idea (Cambridge UP, 2025) Dr. Vanessa Rampton sheds light on the politics of medical progress and how they have downplayed the tensions between individual and social goods. She examines how a shared consensus about its value gives medical progress vast political and economic capital, revealing who benefits, who is left out, and who is harmed by this narrative. From ancient Greece to artificial intelligence, exploring the origins and ethics of different visions of progress offers valuable insight into how we can make them more meaningful in future. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Şerife Tekin, "Reclaiming the Self in Psychiatry: Centering Personal Narrative for a Humanist Science" (Routledge, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Psychiatry’s quest for credibility as a scientific discipline led it to adopt a disorder-label orientation in which mental conditions are categorized in terms of measurable behavioral criteria. In Reclaiming the Self in Psychiatry: Centering personal narrative for a humanist science (Routledge, 2025) Şerife Tekin offers an alternative framework that decenters the label and recenters the self. Tekin argues that how patients try to make sense of their experiences through self-narratives – including self-diagnosed labels – is an essential source of information for tailoring treatment. Tekin, who is associate professor of philosophy at State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate Medical University, proposes the Multitudinous Self (MuSe) model for integrating the patient’s self-perspective back into the psychiatric picture and helping psychiatry itself embrace a more sophisticated notion of scientific objectivity.

25EFLY2 valid 1st April 2025 - 30th September 2025
25EFLY3 valid 1st July 2025 - 31st December 2025

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Anneli Jefferson, "Are Mental Disorders Brain Disorders?" (Routledge, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 4 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

The question of whether mental disorders are disorders of the brain has led to a long-running and controversial dispute within psychiatry, psychology and philosophy of mind and psychology. While recent work in neuroscience frequently tries to identify underlying brain dysfunction in mental disorders, detractors argue that labelling mental disorders as brain disorders is reductive and can result in harmful social effects.

Are Mental Disorders Brain Disorders? (Routledge, 2024) brings a much-needed philosophical perspective to bear on this important question. Anneli Jefferson argues that while there is widespread agreement on paradigmatic cases of brain disorder such as brain cancer, Parkinson's or Alzheimer’s dementia, there is far less clarity on what the general, defining characteristics of brain disorders are. She identifies influential notions of brain disorder and shows why these are problematic. On her own, alternative, account, what counts as dysfunctional at the level of the brain frequently depends on what counts as dysfunctional at the psychological level. On this notion of brain disorder, she argues, many of the consequences people often associate with the brain disorder label do not follow. She also explores the important practical question of how to deal with the fact that many people do draw unlicensed inferences about treatment, personal responsibility or etiology from the information that a condition is a brain disorder or involves brain dysfunction.

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Joel Michael Reynolds, "The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 9 Sep 2022 08:00:00 +0000

The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality (U Minnesota Press, 2022) investigates the exclusion of and discrimination against disabled people across the history of Western moral philosophy. Building on decades of activism and scholarship, Joel Michael Reynolds shows how longstanding views of disability are misguided and unjust, and he lays out a vision of what an anti-ableist moral future requires.

More than 2,000 years ago, Aristotle said: "let there be a law that no deformed child shall live." This idea is alive and well today. During the past century, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. argued that the United States can forcibly sterilize intellectually disabled women and philosopher Peter Singer argued for the right of parents to euthanize certain cognitively disabled infants. The Life Worth Living explores how and why such arguments persist by investigating the exclusion of and discrimination against disabled people across the history of Western moral philosophy.

Joel Michael Reynolds argues that this history demonstrates a fundamental mischaracterization of the meaning of disability, thanks to the conflation of lived experiences of disability with those of pain and suffering. Building on decades of activism and scholarship in the field, Reynolds shows how longstanding views of disability are misguided and unjust, and he lays out a vision of what an anti-ableist moral future requires.

The Life Worth Living is the first sustained examination of disability through the lens of the history of moral philosophy and phenomenology, and it demonstrates how lived experiences of disability demand a far richer account of human flourishing, embodiment, community, and politics in philosophical inquiry and beyond.

Joel Michael Reynolds is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Disability Studies at Georgetown University, Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Senior Bioethics Advisor to The Hastings Center, Faculty Scholar of The Greenwall Foundation, and core faculty in Georgetown’s Disability Studies Program. He is the founder of The Journal of Philosophy of Disability and co-founder of Oxford Studies in Disability, Ethics, and Society from Oxford University Press.

Dr. Reynolds’ work explores the relationship between bodies, values, and society. He is especially concerned with the meaning of disability, the issue of ableism, and how philosophical inquiry into each might improve the lives of people with disabilities and the justness of institutions ranging from medicine to politics. These concerns lead to research across a range of traditions and specialties, including philosophy of disability, applied ethics (especially biomedical ethics, public health ethics, tech/data ethics, and ELSI research in genomics), 20th c. European and American philosophy (with an emphasis on phenomenology and pragmatism as practiced in connection with the history of philosophy), and social epistemology (particularly issues of epistemic injustice as linked to social ontology).

Autumn Wilke works in higher education as an ADA coordinator and diversity officer and is also an author and doctoral candidate with research/topics related to disability and higher education.

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The Future of Delusions: A Discussion with Lisa Bortolotti

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 5 Apr 2022 08:00:00 +0000

The accusation “you’re deluded” is often used as something of a cheap shot intended to silence an opponent in debate. But what is the nature of a delusion and how can we assess rationality and irrationality? In this podcast, Owen Bennett-Jones talks to Professor Lisa Bortolotti who studies the philosophy of psychology and psychiatry at Birmingham University and is the author of among many other things, Delusions and Other Irrational Beliefs (Oxford UP, 2010) and most recently edited Delusions in Context (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Daniel Groll, "Conceiving People: Genetic Knowledge and the Ethics of Sperm and Egg Donation" (Oxford UP, 2021)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 1 Feb 2022 09:00:00 +0000

In the United States, tens of thousands of children are conceived every year with donated gametes. When people decide to create a child with donated gametes, they’ll typically have to make a moral decision about whether the identity of the donor will be available to the resulting person. This quickly raises additional moral and even existential questions about the value of knowing about the circumstances of our own conception.

In Conceiving People: Genetic Knowledge and the Ethics of Sperm and Egg Donation (Oxford UP, 2021) Daniel Groll argues that because donor-conceived persons are likely to develop a significant and worthwhile interest in knowing the identity of their genetic progenitor, their intended parents have an obligation to use a non-anonymous donor.

Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.

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Thomas Pradeu, "Philosophy of Immunology" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 09:00:00 +0000

Vaccines make us wholly or partly immune to disease, such as Covid-19. But what is it to be immune? What is an immune system, and what does it do? In its beginnings, immunology was considered the science of the self/non-self distinction: the immune system comprised the self’s defenses against invading non-self pathogens, and was a sophisticated system possessed only by vertebrates. In Philosophy of Immunology (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Thomas Pradeu explains why these traditional conceptions have been upended over the past 20 years or so. It is now accepted that even single celled organisms have immune systems and that immune systems are also active in many biological activities, including regulation of foreign entities that are not part of the body but are not pathogens either, such as the gut microbiome. Pradeu, who is senior researcher at CNRS and University of Bordeau, defends his view of the individual as an immunologically unified chimera, and speculates about the implications for our understanding of cognition and psychiatric illness in the light of new discoveries of overlap between the immune and nervous systems.

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Nicole Hassoun, "Global Health Impact: Expanding Access to Essential Medicines" (Oxford UP, 2020)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 31 Aug 2020 08:00:00 +0000

Every year nine million people are diagnosed with tuberculosis, every day over 13,400 people are infected with AIDs, and every thirty seconds malaria kills a child. For most of the world, critical medications that treat these deadly diseases are scarce, costly, and growing obsolete, as access to first-line drugs remains out of reach and resistance rates rise. Rather than focusing research and development on creating affordable medicines for these deadly global diseases, pharmaceutical companies instead invest in commercially lucrative products for more affluent customers.

Nicole Hassoun argues that everyone has a human right to health and to access to essential medicines, and she proposes the Global Health Impact (global-health-impact.org/new) system as a means to guarantee those rights. Her proposal directly addresses the pharmaceutical industry's role: it rates pharmaceutical companies based on their medicines' impact on improving global health, rewarding highly-rated medicines with a Global Health Impact label.

Global Health Impact: Expanding Access to Essential Medicines (Oxford University Press, 2020) has three parts. The first makes the case for a human right to health and specifically access to essential medicines. Hassoun defends the argument against recent criticism of these proposed rights. The second section develops the Global Health Impact proposal in detail. The final section explores the proposal's potential applications and effects, considering the empirical evidence that supports it and comparing it to similar ethical labels. Through a thoughtful and interdisciplinary approach to creating new labeling, investment, and licensing strategies, Global Health Impact demands an unwavering commitment to global justice and corporate responsibility.

Nicole Hassoun is Professor of Philosophy at Binghamton University and Visiting Scholar at Cornell University.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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