PhD – Philosophy of Science in Pratice – France

We invite applications for a fully funded three-year PhD position in philosophy of science in practice. The position is offered within the framework of the MSCA Doctoral Network TRANSCEND, an EU-funded research network dedicated to advancing translational research for complex medical conditions. The consortium brings together eleven international university partners and seeks to cultivate a new generation of scholars with a “biomedicophilosophical” approach—integrating conceptual rigor from the philosophy of science with the latest developments in biomedical research.

The successful candidate will pursue a doctoral project as part of the “Focusing on Patient Outcomes” work package. This research strand emphasizes both the integration of patient-reported outcomes (PROs) and the consideration of complex data (including psychological and social factors) to improve personalized treatment. At the same time, it calls for critical philosophical reflection on the conceptual and methodological challenges involved in (re-)classifying medical conditions.

The position will be primarily hosted at Université Bordeaux Montaigne (UBM), under the supervision of Steeves Demazeux, with Lara Keuck (Institute for Studies of Science, University of Bielefeld, Germany) serving as co-supervisor. The PhD dissertation may be written in either French or English (if submitted in English, an extended and detailed summary in French will be required prior to the defense).

The project: 

Objectives: Each understanding of disease has a historical context, and these understandings still influence contemporary studies and clinical work. Making these connections and differences tangible, enables a more reflective approach to our current view of disease, and how these influence future perspectives. The medical history of autism, from the invention of the term by Bleuler in 1911, is fairly well documented (see for example Hochmann 2009 or Evans 2017). Yet it seems that medical history itself is not immune to the public controversies surrounding the recognition of autism, and then Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), as a distinct pathological entity since the 1980s. Moreover, alongside or in counterpoint to current scientific theories, the medical history of autism is an arena that tends to play a more or less indirect role in the development of clinical research or therapeutic strategies. From the first clinical descriptions of children with autism in the 1940s by Kanner and Asperger, through the influential psychoanalytic models of the 1960s and 1970s, the cognitive models of the 1980s (Frith 1989), to the current genetic, neuroscientific and environmental models of ASD, the way in which the history of autism is told, the way in which the clinical condition is framed in a historical narrative, and the way in which the personal experiences of patients are reported has changed profoundly. Over the past decade, the neurodiversity debate has received considerable academic and public attention and has influenced revisionist accounts of the history of autism. (See Silberman 2014 or Donvan & Zucker 2016). Drawing on Ian Hacking’s reflections on looping effects (1999) and, more recently, Nick Haslam’s work on concept creep (Haslam 2016; Haslam et al. 2021), the aim of this PhD is to develop a philosophical investigation of the interplay between clinical histories, social representations and scientific understanding.

Expected Results: One aim of the project will be to renew the methods and goals of the philosophy of science and, in particular, of historical epistemology in the field of medical historiography. Basic research in medicine claims to be objective and thus aims to be independent of ideology and narratives of the past. Yet it is inescapable that both scientists and patients are influenced by stereotypes, old cultural underpinnings and new moral demands. At the interface between the philosophy of science and the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), and in a fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration between philosophers and scientists involved in the TRANSCEND doctoral network, this PhD project aims to gain a better understanding of the subtle dynamics between current basic research and medical history through the specific study of ASD.