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"Medicine and Metaphysics" to be topic of conference
By SUE WUETCHER
Reporter Editor
The Department of Philosophy, College of Arts and Sciences, will bring together some of the most prominent figures in the philosophy of medicine to address questions pertaining to the beginning and end of human life, the nature of classification in medicine and definitions of health and sickness during a conference entitled "Medicine and Metaphysics," to be held Saturday and Sunday in the Center for Inquiry, 3965 Rensch Road, adjacent to the UB North Campus.
In addition to the Department of Philosophy, the conference will be sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Julian Park Chair in Philosophy. It has been organized by a reviewing committee consisting of Randall Dipert, C.S. Peirce Professor of American Philosophy; David Hershenov, assistant professor of philosophy, and Barry Smith, SUNY Distinguished Professor, Department of Philosophy, and director of the Buffalo Center for Ontological Research.
Conference participants will examine such topics as when and how the human organism begins and ceases to exist, are diseases natural kinds, is health a statistical matter and is ill health a matter of malfunction, and if so, what do we mean by "function."
Among those presenting at the conference will be Christopher Boorse of the University of Delaware, who Hershenov calls "the most prominent philosopher of medicine."
"Virtually any work on the concepts of health and disease begins by addressing his seminal papers on the subject," Hershenov notes. "There is literally hardly an article written on the concepts of disease and health where the authors don't try to distinguish their account from Boorse's."
The "unofficial" keynote speaker of the conference, Boorse will deliver a paper on "Four Recent Accounts of Health," which will be followed by a roundtable discussion of his work. Another paper during that session, "Demarcating Dysfunction" by Peter H. Schwartz of Boston University, will examine Boorse's work on disease, Hershenov adds.
Another notable speaker will be Alfonso Gomez Lobo of Georgetown University, a member of President Bush's bioethics committee who is very influential in debates about stem-cell research and cloning, Hershenov points out. Two of the articles in the session on the origins of the human organism—one by Gomez Lobo and another by Rose Koch, a student in the UB Department of Philosophy—criticize Barry Smith's well known article that argues that "we come into existence 16 days after fertilization," he says.
"The third session of the conference obviously has bearing on the questions of stem-cell research and abortion. If Smith is right that we are not identical to anything in the woman's womb for 16 days after fertilization, then stem-cell research, which destroys the pre-16-day embryo, would not destroy an individual," he said.
The fourth session of the conference, which deals with death, will feature papers by prominent philosophers John Martin Fischer of the University of California, Riverside, and Jeff McMahan of Rutgers University that deal with the claims of the ancient philosophers Epicurus and Lucretius that death is not bad for us because we must exist to be harmed, Hershenov says.
For further information about the conference, contact the Department of Philosophy at 645-2444.