The International Philosophy of Medicine Reading Group is now well into its third season. The group is truly international and interdisciplinary (yes, there are medical doctors and philosophers!), with participants from different research backgrounds and at different career stages. Like last Spring, we are not working through a single monograph, but reading and discussing a variety of recent papers.

You can choose to join either the Wednesday meeting, 5pm UK time, or the Thursday meeting, 10.05am UK time, depending on what works best for you and your time zone. Feel free to drop into the sessions whenever you can — there is no commitment to attend the whole series.

Here’s the calendar.

• Week 1 Weds 22 Oct, Thurs 23 Oct
  Maung, H. H. (2025). The Disunity of Disease. Philosophy of Medicine, 6(1).
• Week 2 Weds 29 Oct, Thurs 30 Oct
  Larcher, Vic. (2025) Children are not small adults: Significance of biological and cognitive development in medical practice. Handbook of the philosophy of medicine. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2025. 435-457.
• Week 3 Weds 5 Nov, Thurs 6 Nov
  Hucklenbroich, Peter (2025) Medical theory and its notions of definition and explanation. Handbook of the Philosophy of Medicine. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2025. 1041-1049.
• Week 4 Weds 12 Nov, Thurs 13 Nov
  Wiggleton-Little J. (2025) Pain Dismissal and the Limits of Epistemic Injustice. Hypatia. Published online 2025:1-17.
• Week 5 Weds 19 Nov, Thurs 20 Nov
  De Marco, Gabriel, et al. “What makes a medical intervention invasive?.” Journal of medical ethics 50.4 (2024): 226-233.
• Week 6 Weds 26 Nov, Thurs 27 Nov
  Brock, Dan, ‘Quality of Life Measures in Health Care and Medical Ethics’, in Martha Nussbaum, and Amartya Sen (eds), The Quality of Life (Oxford, 1993; online edn, Oxford Academic, 1 Nov. 2003)
• Week 7 Weds 3 Dec, Thurs 4 Dec
• Al-Juhany, A. (2025). Why We Should Not Characterize Aging as a Disease. Philosophy of Medicine, 6(1). 
• Week 8 Weds 10 Dec , Thurs 11 Dec
• Glackin, S. (2025). Externalist Medicine and Externalist Biology. Philosophy of Medicine, 6(1).

We meet on Teams. If you would like to receive weekly reminders, email Sarah Wietens and join the Google group (if you haven’t already).

This is an open international reading group, hosted by the Centre but open to all, for bringing together people with interests in philosophy of medicine construed broadly to include epidemiology, public health, biomedical science, and so on. If you would like to join, please request membership of the google group and you’ll be able to access the meeting link there: https://groups.google.com/g/philmed-rg/

Each week there will be two online meetings of the group to discuss the same text, one on Wednesday night at 5pm UK time (BST), one on Thursday morning at 9 am UK time (BST), in hopes of accommodating group members in a variety of time zones. There is no need to attend all meetings – please come when you can.

This term we will be tackling an exciting new text: Leah M. McClimans’ “Patient-centered measurement: Ethics, Epistemology, and Dialogue in Contemporary Medicine” published by OUP last year: https://academic.oup.com/book/56467

Weds 5 Feb and Thurs 6 Feb: McClimans, Leah M. Patient-centered measurement: Ethics, Epistemology, and Dialogue in Contemporary Medicine. Oxford University Press, 2024. Introduction and Chapter 1 (48 pages)

Weds 12 Feb and Thurs 13 Feb: McClimans, Leah M. Patient-centered measurement: Ethics, Epistemology, and Dialogue in Contemporary Medicine. Oxford University Press, 2024. Chapter 2 (26 pages)

Weds 19 Feb and Thurs 20 Feb: McClimans, Leah M. Patient-centered measurement: Ethics, Epistemology, and Dialogue in Contemporary Medicine. Oxford University Press, 2024. Chapter 3 (34 pages)

Weds 26 Feb and Thurs 27 Feb: McClimans, Leah M. Patient-centered measurement: Ethics, Epistemology, and Dialogue in Contemporary Medicine. Oxford University Press, 2024. Chapter 4 (36 pages)

Weds 5 March and Thurs 6 March: McClimans, Leah M. Patient-centered measurement: Ethics, Epistemology, and Dialogue in Contemporary Medicine. Oxford University Press, 2024. Chapter 5 (33 pages)

Weds 12 March  and Thurs 13 March: McClimans, Leah M. Patient-centered measurement: Ethics, Epistemology, and Dialogue in Contemporary Medicine. Oxford University Press, 2024. Chapter 6 and Conclusion (37 pages)

Weds 19 March and Thurs 20 March: TBD

If you have any difficulty accessing the text, please email cpemph@durham.ac.uk for assistance.

Any enquiries, please get in touch. And to join, it’s https://groups.google.com/g/philmed-rg/