Vilius Dranseika and Ivars Neiders co-authored a chapter entitled "Death and Personal Identity: An Empirical Study on Folk Metaphysics" published in "Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Medicine" edited by Kristien Hens and Andreas De Block.

Book description

Although the subdiscipline of philosophy of medicine has only been around for a limited period, people have reflected on the role of doctors, the nature of diseases and death, and the status of medical knowledge for centuries. Long before philosophy of medicine had its own journals and societies, philosophers already thought about the experiences of the sick, the reliability of medical knowledge and technologies, our desire to be healthy, and our fear of pain and death. This volume presents a sample of exciting new ‘naturalistic’ work on these quasi-perennial topics. We call the work presented here naturalistic in that it takes science seriously: It emphasizes the relevance of scientific findings for philosophy and actively explores the possibility that scientific methods (computational tools, experiments, surveys) can be applied in philosophical research. Since the beginning of this century, this type of philosophy is usually referred to as experimental philosophy. This label may be a bit of a misnomer since much of what is done under the umbrella of experimental philosophy does not involve actual experiments. For our volume, we consider experimental philosophy to cover basically all empirical work in philosophy.

All the chapters in this volume examine the potential of experimental philosophy of medicine (XPhiMed). Some authors do that by engaging surveys and vignettes, others by using corpus analysis or simulations, while others offer exciting reflections on how such experimental philosophy touches upon other new developments in philosophy. Of course, not everybody is equally convinced that experimental or empirical philosophy has great potential. To give a somewhat balanced view of the field, this book also contains chapters that are not so passionate about the added value of XPhiMed, and aim to point out problems with its assumptions or goals.

In this introduction, we will first share some reflections about the need for XPhiMed and closely related approaches. We will focus on one of the central debates in philosophy of medicine: the debate over how we should define disease/disorder/illness. Not only is this topic central to the philosophy of medicine in general, but it is also dealt with in many contributions to this volume. Secondly, we will look at how XPhiMed could develop in close contact with the methods and theories of adjacent disciplines, including medical psychology and medical anthropology.

Link to the book