Miriam Solomon

Miriam Solomon is Professor of Philosophy and Department Chair in the Department of Philosophy at Temple University. She is also an Affiliated Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies in the College of Liberal Arts, and an Affiliated Professor in the Center for Bioethics, Urban Health, and Policy at Temple University School of Medicine. Solomon serves on the Temple University Hospital Ethics Committee and is a Fellow of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Her research and teaching interests are in philosophy of science, philosophy of medicine, history of science, epistemology, feminist philosophy, biomedical ethics, and philosophy of food.

Solomon is a graduate of Cambridge University (BA in Natural Sciences, 1979) and Harvard University (PhD in Philosophy, 1986). She is the author of Social Empiricism (MIT Press, 2001). Her second book, Making Medical Knowledge (Oxford University Press, 2015) explores the epistemological strengths and weaknesses of evidence-based medicine, medical consensus conferences, narrative medicine and translational medicine. She is the editor or co-editor of special journal issues as well as The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Medicine (2017), and author of papers in epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of medicine and biomedical ethics.

During her Guggenheim Fellowship term, taken in conjunction with a sabbatical from Temple University, Solomon will be a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and a Visiting Scholar at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University. Her project, Evidence and Values in the DSM 5.x, uses tools from recent philosophy of science, science studies, and social epistemology to make recommendations for how to improve the ongoing process of revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM).

Profile photograph by Todd Rothstein