Philosophy of Molecular Medicine ─ Foundational Issues in Research and Practice

Despite its prominence in scientific research, molecular medicine has not received sufficient attention by the philosophical community. Philosophy of Molecular Medicine: Foundational Issues in Theory and Practice aims at a systematic investigation of a number of foundational issues in the field of molecular medicine. The volume is organized around four broad modules focusing, respectively, on the following key aspects: What are the nature, scope and limits of molecular medicine? How does it provide explanations? How does it represent and model phenomena of interest? How does it infer new knowledge from data and experiments? The essays collected here, authored by prominent scientists and philosophers of science, focus on a handful of mainstream topics in the philosophical literature, such as causation, explanation, modeling, and scientific inference. These previously unpublished contributions shed new light on these traditional topics by integrating them with problems, methods, and results from three prominent areas of contemporary biomedical science: basic research, translational and clinical research, and clinical practice.

Giovanni Boniolo (degree in Physics and in Philosophy) is Professor of Philosophy of Science and Medical Humanities, at the Universita di Ferrara and Anne Boyksen Fellowship, at the Institute for Advanced Study, Technische Universitat Munchen. He is Member or chair of several ethics committees both at Italian and European level. His research interests are public and individual bioethical decision-making; foundations of biomedical research and clinical practice. He is Series Editor of Springer Briefs on Ethical and Legal Issues in Biomedicine and Technology. He has published 13 books (plus 12 books edited) and about 200 research articles.

Marco J. Nathan (Ph.D. 2012, Columbia University) is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver. His research mostly focuses on the philosophy of science, with particular emphasis on molecular biology, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and economics. His work has been published in various philosophical and scientific journals, including Nous, Philosophy of Science, British Journal for Philosophy of Science, Nephrology Dialysis and Transplantation, Biology and Philosophy, and Synthese.