A Pragmatic Approach to Conceptualization of Health and Disease

Maartje Schermer studied medicine and philosophy. She is a full professor of Philosophy of Medicine and the head of the section Medical ethics, philosophy and history of medicine at Erasmus MC University Medical Center in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. She is a honorary member of the Dutch Health Council, and former chair of the Dutch Centre for Ethics and Health. Her research has focused on, among others, patient autonomy, ethics of emerging medical technologies, screening, biomarkers and predictive medicine; and on human enhancement and neuro ethics. She has published numerous articles and several edited volumes. Maartje was the project leader of Health and disease as practical concepts, a four year project funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).

Nicholas Binney studied philosophy at the University of Exeter, obtaining his doctoral degree in 2017 with a thesis on the historical contingency of medical knowledge. He previously qualified as a veterinary surgeon at the Royal Veterinary College London in 2006, practicing in the UK and the U.S.A.. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, working on a project exploring “Pragmatic Concepts of Health and Disease”. This project seeks to understand shifting concepts of health and disease encountered in the new millennium, and to develop a pragmatic framework for selecting suitable concepts for use in different medical contexts. Nicholas published many papers in the philosophy of medicine, focusing on the contingency and objectivity of concepts of disease, and on the evaluation of diagnostic practices. He has published papers on the history of sensitivity and specificity in 
Annals of Internal Medicine
, and on how Meno’s paradox manifests in medical practice, when trying to empirically discover the diagnostic tests that are the most accurate of all, in 
Synthese.
 Nicholas has designed and taught courses on critical thinking and the philosophy of medicine at the University of Exeter Medical School, at the University of Oxford, and at the Erasmus University Rotterdam.