Philosophers to debate nature of disease and grief at UB conference

The nation’s two most prominent philosophers of medicine will present their divergent views of health, disease and grieving as part of a three-day conference on bioethics and the philosophy of medicine to be held July 30 to Aug. 1 at UB.

The third annual PANTC conference, to be held in Park Hall on the North Campus, is free and open to the public, and includes complimentary breakfast and lunch.

Jerome Wakefield, professor of social work at New York University and the Conceptual Foundations of Psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine, and Christopher Boorse professor of philosophy at the University of Delaware, will discuss their own and offer critiques of the other’s theory of disease beginning at 1:30 p.m. July 31 as the first of two keynote presentations.

Wakefield and Boorse will have a second keynote debate on grief and pathology to close the conference at 1:30 p.m. Aug. 1.

A complete schedule of the conference presentations is available online.

“We usually have different keynoters each year,” says David Hershenov, chair of the Department of Philosophy, College of Arts and Sciences. “But Boorse had so much fun at last year’s conference he invited himself back this year.”

Boorse is a naturalist about health and disease, Hershenov says.

He defines disease — or his preferred term, pathology — broadly to include any absence of health or abnormal function that compromises survival or reproduction. His influential bio-statistical theory (BST) determines normal function based on statistical reference classes, asking what is typical for people of a specific age and gender.

Boorse’s contributions to the theory of disease are so well-respected that The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy in a 2014 issue said that “philosophers of medicine must now either work within Boorse’s theory or explain why not.”

For the PANTC conference, that task will fall to Wakefield, whose Harmful Dysfunction Analysis (HDA) argues that a disease implies dysfunction, but also must cause harm to the individual.

According to HDA, someone like Mary Mallon, history’s Typhoid Mary, did not have a disease since she was an asymptomatic carrier of the bacteria that caused typhoid fever in others.

For their second keynote on grieving, Boorse and Wakefield will debate whether the grieving process is a pathology or a normal function.

Boorse sees grief as a wound, but Wakefield believes normal grief, like that which follows the death of a loved one, is a properly functioning healing mechanism. Wakefield’s view is contrary to the American Psychiatric Association, which in 2013 controversially dropped the bereavement exclusion from depression-like symptoms that sometimes accompany grief.

That exclusion, effective in 2013, immediately pathologized thousands of people who previously did not have a disorder.

Talks from other participants during the conference will begin at 10 a.m. July 30 and include such subjects as abortion, the emotion ontology and defining death for the purpose of organ procurement.

The PANTC conference is presented annually by Plato’s Academy, North Tonawanda Campus, a philosophy reading group comprised of Western New York graduate students and professors.