A philosophy of medicine for the 21st century

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This project aims to develop a new theory of health and disease to accommodate developments in contemporary biology such as the ‘developmental origins of health and disease’, the role of the microbiome in physiology, and the fact that our bodies are sites of evolutionary conflict between multiple genomes, particularly in early life. Present science does not fit with common-sense ideas about the identity and the goals of living systems and the project expects to generate a close collaboration between philosophers and biomedical scientists so that new ideas about health and disease can be fed back into proof-of-principle projects for innovative new approaches to the study of health and disease. The project will conduct methodologically innovative research in the philosophy of medicine, working in close collaboration with biomedical scientists to confront the transformational discoveries about the nature of living systems that have been made in the first years of the current century and to actively shape new forms of enquiry into health that reflect those discoveries. It will make the discipline of philosophy an active participant in the creation of integrative biomedical research.