Topic outline

  • General

    Medicine and the medical sciences raise many conceptual and theoretical challenges. Some are ethical (broadly, what we should and shouldn't do), while other challenges concern fundamental concepts and approaches in medical practice and medical science, such as whether 'racialized medicine' is a good idea or how to decide whether a medical treatment is actually effective. This course is about the latter, non-ethical challenges. We will cover the following topics: the notions of health and disease; the role of sex and race in medicine; the problems raised by genetic determinism and causation; evidence-based medicine and randomized controlled trials; establishing causal claims about diseases; learning from biomedical images; and extrapolating from animal models of human diseases

    Course coordinator Dr Ulrich Stegmann u.stegmann@abdn.ac.uk

    • What skills does this course develop?

      Course aims

       •      To introduce students to the central topics in philosophy of medicine

      •      To provide insight into the nature of philosophical scholarship

      •      To develop essential and transferrable skills: critical reading; identifying, explaining, and evaluating theoretical claims and arguments; presenting claims and arguments both orally and in writing

       Learning outcomes

       •      Knowledge of central topics in philosophy of medicine

      •   Appreciation of the nature of philosophical scholarship

      •   Acquire a range of transferrable skills


      • What is the timetable?

        Teaching will be in the form of lectures and seminars (on the King’s College Campus in Old Aberdeen). The lectures introduce a topic and cover important concepts, ideas, and arguments. Lecture slides are made available on the course website beforehand, enabling you to focus on the content and take notes selectively. You are welcome to ask for clarifications during lectures, but longer discussions will be resumed in the tutorials.

        Tutorials explore the lecture topics in greater depth. To this end you are required to read in advance one compulsory reading for each tutorial.


        • How will I be assessed?

          SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT

          1 x 4000 word essay (80%)

          Tutorial participation (10%)

          Conference presentation and participation (10 %)

          • What do previous students think of this course?

            "I enjoyed the tutorials, workload was at the right level."

             

            "This is an excellent course, one of the best I've taken, I wish more courses were as interesting and interdisciplinary as this one. The amount of in person teaching time is excellent, and the presentation component is also really good. This is one of those courses that will make students better people when they graduate, that is inherently worthwhile."

            • Useful links