Reviews for The making of a physician

The average rating for The making of a physician based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-01-16 00:00:00 Alycia Gondocs One of the most important, useful, and well-written books I've ever read. Dr. Murphy covers various classical approaches to logic and applies these to specific clinical situations. In doing so, he deconstructs the very basis of modern western allopathy and also illustrates how logic functions as applied within the scope of one of mankind's foremost professions. I first read this book at the onset of my own professional education and now re-read it cover-to-cover nearly every year or so, and I feel I learn something new and of value each time. As Murphy intended that this book could be used as a text for medical students, he included sets of problems at the end of each chapter germane to the concepts he introduced in that chapter and also included answers to all these problems at the back of the book. The problems and their answers, whether you're reading the book in a classroom context or not, are very entertaining and make you think even more about the material Murphy provides. Some in fact are nearly masterpieces of pedagogy and do a stellar job of demonstrating how, in example logical tautologies appear in clinical diagnostics or how in our social use of language we often run the risk of distorting scientific meaning. Murphy does have his critics, to be sure: some in the mainstream academics of logic and philosophy feel he has not really written a book about "logic" so much as a long thesis on allopathy. There may be truth to this, but I believe he wrote the book'and wrote it well'that he set out to provide: a guide to how logical thought and a lot of the classical foundations of Western philosophy can and should be applied to clinical care. I would recommend this book to any medical student, physician, veterinarian, nurse, clinical researcher or other person interested in an intellectual exploration of modern medicine that never avoids rigor or depth.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-05-11 00:00:00 Peter Maitland Churchland's Engine of Reason is dated, and that's too bad, because I actually think it is one of his more well written pieces, probably even more than Plato's Camera [which I gave 5-stars]. The problem is that the change of material in neuroscience and cognitive science make it hard for writing to stay current for very long now; that's not Churchland's fault, but the way that he structures the book makes it far easier for the content to become obsolete, compared to contemporaries like Dan Dennett. I think that what should be said is that one of the reasons that Engine of Reason has become dated is part of what makes it great as a piece of philosophy: it is current and in touch with the scientific literature that surrounds it. [That isn't to say that other philosophers aren't, but many are more hesitant to bombard readers with scientific content.] Churchland is unabashed about his knowledge of the contemporary literature in the science and, as a result, the book feels almost more like something that would be written for an interdisciplinary audience attempting to talk about the neurosciences than anything in philosophy. This is one thing that I absolutely love about Churchland. The major criticism that will get tossed at Churchland will come down that same line: This doesn't feel like philosophy. That's true. Of course, if you some of the content of the book, you start to understand why. This book is a part of a conversation in philosophy of mind that happened around the time of the publishing, where philosophers raised concerns about the invocation of traditional intuitive concepts that seemed totally inviable for moving the discussion forward, because the concepts themselves were either incoherent, not meaningful, or not supported by the science. Churchland was largely responsible for championing the view that the terms that don't seem to be doing work should take a backseat to the things that can. That is a fight that Churchland seems to have won in the technical literature. Paul Churchland's influence on contemporary philosophy, often as the far wing of a spectrum of people concerned with the ability to talk about consciousness in strictly neural terms, is hard to minimize. He has had a major impact as a philosopher of science, generally, and is one of the best ways into a scientifically literate philosophy of mind. Churchland's attempt to understand a broad array of topics in the field is something that should be admired, and his attempt to bring that technical knowledge into the conversation is something that he shares only with the best in professional philosophy of mind. There are some issues that I take with the literature that don't seem to have gone away from Churchland's writing. He's always very neurocentric. He is incredibly interested in the metaphor of digital computation while acknowledging that the brain is clearly an analogue entity. He limits himself a lot through the use of that approach, which has become something of a standard for him. I do think that for those looking to seriously pursue philosophy of mind, this is a must-read at some point, largely because it fleshes out some of his points about the use of vectors and why they matter. However, I think that Plato's Camera is something to be taken a little more heavily, as it is far more developed in terms of the ideas in philosophy of mind. Also, this really isn't for those just looking for a casual introduction; make sure you have some familiarity with the literature before diving into any of Paul Churchland's work.