Dan Kabat (Lehman College) will be giving a talk on the Black Hole Information Loss Paradox on Wednesday, May 6th. The talk will be held from 4:00-6:00pm in Room 716, Philosophy Hall (Columbia). Hope to see you all there!
Title TBA
Dan Kabat, Lehman College
Abstract TBA
There will be a dinner after the talk. If you are interested, please email nyphilsci@gmail.com as soon as possible so that I can make the reservation for the appropriate number of people (please note that all faculty and grad students are welcome, but only the speaker’s dinner will be covered). If you have any other questions, please email nyphilsci@gmail.com.
Co-Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy and the Workshop on Precision Medicine: Ethics Politics, and Culture
Maël Lemoine (University of Tours): Medicine without Diseases
5:30 pm on Monday, May 9th, Philosophy Hall 716, Columbia University
Philosophers have discussed the definition of the general concept of disease, but have paid less attention to the general concept of a “disease entity”. Whereas the former aims to distinguish healthy from pathological states, the latter aims at a distinction between pathological states. But what would happen to the concept of disease if the concept of disease entities were abandoned? An intuition may be that the demarcation between “health” and “disease” would go unchanged. Yet this would lead to a conflation of both functions, namely, of the health/disease demarcation and the Disease A/Disease Z demarcation. This result is a potential consequence of so-called “precision medicine,” in particular, of theranostic approaches that aim to match disease signatures with treatment signatures while potentially bypassing the step of categorical diagnosis. In this talk I present what I call the three models of disease – the disease entity, disease mechanisms and disease signatures – and demonstrate how health and disease should be distinguished for a naturalist philosopher of medicine applying a disease signature model instead of a disease entity one.