ABSTRACT
Arthur Caplan argued in 1992 that the philosophy of medicine does not exist because there was not an established canon of key textual sources or "a set of distinctive or defining problems". Unification is a common ideal in science; how close can medicine come to a coherent and unified theoretical account? This chapter surveys some of the leading descriptions of medicine that seek to provide an account for grounding both medical science and clinical care. It argues that attempts to ground medicine on singular foundational ideas will likely fail, and that a pluralistic vision of medicine likely best serves to account for the many diverse scientific and humanistic practices relevant to medicine. The chapter discusses approaches that are explicitly based in biology and molecular science, statistical approaches, those oriented to privileging first-person accounts or social processes and those that abjure reliance on orthodox accounts of medical practice or science.
