Philosophy, medicine and health care – where we have come from and where we are going

The role of philosophy in discussions of clinical practice was once regarded by many as restricted to a very limited version of ‘medical ethics’, one that has been extensively criticized in the pages of this journal and elsewhere for being at once philosophically untenable and practically unhelpful [1–4]. While this uninspiring view of the nature and scope of applied philosophy has by no means been eradicated, over a number of years there has been a resurgence of interest in the philosophy of medicine and health care as an intellectually serious and practically significant enterprise. Controversies about evidence, value, clinical knowledge, judgement, integrity and ethics have required practitioners and policy-makers to confront the epistemic and moral basis of practice, while philosophers have found in these debates ways to invigorate and reframe the investigation of long-standing philosophical 902 problems, about the nature of reasoning, science, knowledge and practice, and the relationships between epistemology and ethics, morals and politics [1,5–7].