We’ve all been sick at some time – from the annoyance of suffering through a cold, through to life-changing chronic illnesses that some of us must learn to live with. Through our intimate familiarity with such illnesses and their consequences, it’s easy to think that understanding illness would be simple. But as it turns out, it is much more difficult to specify precisely what illness is than we might have thought. Medical researchers and philosophers of medicine have developed various different frameworks that help us to talk about illness, but these frameworks often have significant limitations.

Juliette Ferry-Danini, who works on Philosophy of Medicine at Sorbonne University in Paris, is one of these researchers. Her research critically appraises humanistic frameworks for understanding illness. She joined us on BioViews to talk about her recent paper, entitled ‘Should phenomenological approaches to illness be wary of naturalism?’ 

You can read more about Philosophy of Medicine and about Phenomenology at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries. You can follow Juliette Ferry-Danini’s research here, or follow her on Twitter @FerryDanini.

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