awake and the beliefs that we entertain when we are dreaming. Again, this is not
sufficient in order to explain how both kinds of beliefs are subjectively distinguish-
able, that is to say, how I can, from my point of view, distinguish a belief that I hold
whilst awake from a belief that I hold while I’m dreaming. Here again, I do not see
what Sosa’s argument for this inference is. For this reason, it is not obvious that
Sosa’s second solution disposes of the problem of dream scepticism.
Sosa does not always present his solutions to epistemological problems step-
by-step. For this reason, it is sometimes difficult to understand his line of thought
in each lecture. I hope nevertheless to have given an accurate account of his main
arguments. His book teems with ideas of great originality and significance for the
philosophical development of virtue epistemology.
Anne Meylan
University of Geneva
Ingvar Johansson and Niels Lynøe, Medicine & Philosophy. A Twenty-First
Century Introduction, Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2008, 475 pp., ISBN 978-3-
938793-90-9.
Medicine is special: it has a complex scientific status and it is not just science. Its
scientific status is complex because it is based on many scientific sources (from
physical to behavioural-social, even though the core is constituted by biological
knowledge) and it involves different kinds of knowledge (knowing that and
knowing how, causal and correlation knowledge, general and singular knowledge).
Medicine is not just science, mainly because it also has an internal constitutive
technical side and, both in research and in clinical activity, a physician cannot
overlook ethical problems.
In highlighting such a wide range of deep questions the authors refer to
substantial and relevant pieces of medical knowledge from a historical perspective,
emphasizing methodological and theoretical aspects, and adopt the philosophical
standpoint of fallibilist epistemological and ontological realism, which is pre-
sented as the golden mean between positivism and social constructivism. It is
surely a ‘reasonable’point of view, which they make very plausible, even though
they do not – in fact they could not – engage in deeper and wider philosophical
justification.
Chapter 1 presents science and philosophy as overlapping disciplines, and
claims that some philosophy is involved in medical science and in medical prac-
tical activity. Chapter 2 deals with the causes of the development of science, by
using the distinctions between evolution and revolution and between internal and
Book Reviews 89
© 2009 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2009 Editorial Board of dialectica.