Call for Papers: Bioethics and Philosophical Health - JECP
Submission Deadline: Thursday, 31 December 2026
Contemporary bioethics has developed sophisticated tools for ethical decision-making. Yet it often operates within assumptions that reduce life to physiological viability. Ethical questions are frequently treated as matters of procedure and consent. Meanwhile, patients and clinicians face questions that exceed these frameworks. What makes a life worth living? How does illness disrupt or reveal meaning? What forms of care support not just survival but existential coherence? These questions call for a deeper engagement between bioethics and the philosophy of existence.
Despite growing interest in person-centred care, conceptual tools for clinical evaluation remain limited. Frameworks for assessing philosophical sense-making and existential orientation are underdeveloped. The Philosophical Health perspective addresses this gap by going beyond physical and psychological health. It asks how we cultivate meaningful lives through bodily experience, self-understanding, relational belonging, engagement with possibility, purposeful action, and philosophical reflection. The concept draws on the ancient tradition of bios philosophikos. It proposes that healthcare should attend not only to pathology but to the philosophical dimensions of human existence.
This special issue creates space for exploring how philosophical health can deepen bioethical inquiry as an embodied ethics of the good life. It challenges reductive assumptions and fosters practices that support purpose and meaning in lives, even when disrupted by health challenges. We welcome transdisciplinary contributions from philosophers, bioethicists, clinicians, medical humanists, and social scientists. Topics include how philosophical frameworks enrich clinical practice, how healthcare shapes existential experience, how the 4E cognitive approach may inform bioethical theory, and how dialogical methodologies can be integrated into institutional contexts. The issue aims to rediscover bioethics as a genuinely philosophical and existential enterprise, that is as bios ethikos.
Topics of interest for this call for papers include but are not restricted to:
- Philosophical frameworks for enriching or transforming bioethical practice and clinical evaluation;
- Philosophical dimensions of clinical encounters: embodiment, selfhood, temporality, and meaning-making;
- Critiques of the reduction of ethical deliberation to procedure, regulation, or risk management;
- How healthcare practices shape or constrain the philosophical dimensions of human existence;
- The 4E cognitive approach (embodied, extended, enactive, embedded) applied to bioethical theory and practice;
- Integration of philosophical inquiry and dialogical methods into clinical or institutional contexts;
- Empirical and conceptual engagement with the Philosophical Health methodology, including SMILE_PH;
- Cross-cultural and planetary perspectives on philosophical health and the good life;
- Methodological innovations in clinical philosophy, philosophical counselling, and reflective practice.
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Dr Luis de Miranda
Associated Researcher, Centre for Research Ethics and Bioethics,
My source: Philos-L "The Liverpool List" is run by the Department of Philosophy, University of Liverpool https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/philosophy/philos-l/ Messages to the list are archived at http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/archives/philos-l.html. Follow the list on Twitter @PhilosL. Follow the Department of Philosophy @LiverpoolPhilos
orcid.org/0000-0002-0192-8965
