Explaining Disease: Philosophical Reflections on Medical Research and Clinical Practice

Raffaella Campaner is Full Professor of Philosophy of Science at the Department of Philosophy and Communication Studies of the University of Bologna. She has worked extensively in philosophy of medicine, publishing a number of contributions in journals and collected volumes, as well as a previous monograph (Philosophy of Medicine. Causality, Evidence and Explanation, 2012). Her research interests include causation, mechanism, scientific explanation and different kinds of pluralism. She is currently working on epistemological issues in modeling complex diseases, and on approaches to explanation of mental disorders.

• Introduction.- Chapter 1: Explananda, explanantia, and explanatory relations.- Chapter 2: Varieties of causal explanation.- Chapter 3: What mechanisms can and cannot do.- Chapter 4: Functions and functional explanations.- Chapter 5: What role for non-causal explanations?Chapter 6: Modeling diseases, explaining the diseased.- Chapter 7: Describing, classifying and explaining.- Chapter 8: Will we all be pluralists?.- Chapter 9: A tentative agenda.