ABSTRACT
Thorne invites us to revisit the body of work known as “nursing theories” and consider them as beginning philosophical projects of their time – attempts to articulate the fundamental ideas that make up nursing thinking and therefore shape practice and action within the discipline. She sees the set of scholars we refer to as “nursing theorists” as thought leaders in their day, striving to conceptualize a profession that was much more than a subset or ally of medicine, and a discipline driven by its own ontology and epistemology to make distinctive contributions to the world of health and health care. If we examine them in the light of today’s more advanced philosophical understandings, we can see the metaparadigm concepts as a depiction of the central foci of concern that continue to evolve in our body of scholarship. The theories may not have served the explicit purpose that their builders supposed they might, but they continue to provide us with tremendous fodder for grappling with the complex set of values, interpretations and interactions that constitute this entity we call nursing.
