Jonathan Fuller

  • Assistant Professor • Lecture Series Coordinator

My main research interests are in the philosophy of medicine. My research currently has two strands: disease and biomedicine, and epidemiology and evidence-based medicine. I have studied the metaphysics, classification, and epidemiological modeling of diseases. I have also done research on causal inference, external validity, meta-research, and the relationship between population data and individuals in clinical research and epidemiology. I have further research interests in the philosophy of psychiatry and in clinical reasoning. I have recently written on epidemics and the COVID-19 pandemic for both philosophical and general audiences. I am currently working on an NIH/NLM-funded book project, tentatively titled The New Modern Medicine, that analyzes distinctive problems in scientific medicine around the turn of the twenty-first century. Finally, I have training in medicine and medical education and am interested in how philosophy can enhance medical education and practice. 

Selected Courses 

  • Philosophy of Medicine
  • Philosophy of Psychiatry 
  • Morality and Medicine 
  • Mind and Medicine 
  • Development of Scientific Medicine 

Education & Training

  • MD, University of Toronto, 2019
  • PhD, University of Toronto, 2016

Representative Publications

  • ​Fuller, J. Epidemics from the population perspective. Philosophy of Science (forthcoming). 
  • Fuller, J. What are the COVID-19 models modeling (philosophically speaking)? History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 2021;43: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-021-00407-5. 
  • Fuller, J. The myth and fallacy of simple extrapolation in medicine. Synthese 2021; 198: 2919–2939. 
  • Fuller, J. Epidemiologic evidence: use at your ‘own risk’? Philosophy of Science 2020;  87:1119–1129. 
  • Fuller, J. The confounding question of confounding causes in randomized trials. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2019; 70:901–926. 
  • Fuller, J. Meta-research evidence for evaluating therapies. Philosophy of Science 2018; 85:767-780. 
  • Fuller, J. Universal etiology, multifactorial diseases, and the constitutive model of disease classification. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 2018; 67: 8-15. 
  • Fuller, J. What are chronic diseases? Synthese 2018; 195: 3197–3220. 
  • Fuller, J. The new medical model: a renewed challenge for biomedicine. Canadian Medical Association Journal 2017; 189(17): E640-E641.  
  • Fuller, J. and L.J. Flores. The Risk GP Model: the standard model of prediction in medicine. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 2015; 54: 49-61.