Kenneth F. Schaffner, MD, PhD

  • Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of History and Philosophy of Science

Kenneth F. Schaffner is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of History and Philosophy of Science.  Before returning to Pittsburgh to rejoin the faculty of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, he was University Professor of Medical Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at the George Washington University. He has published extensively in philosophical and medical journals on ethical and conceptual issues in science and medicine. Dr. Schaffner, who was trained both in philosophy (PhD) and in medicine (MD), has been a Guggenheim Fellow, is a Fellow of both the Hastings Center and the American Association of the Advancement of Science, and is a former Editor-in-Chief of Philosophy of Science (1975-80). His recent work has been on ethical and philosophical issues in human behavioral and psychiatric genetics.  His most recent book is Behaving: What's Genetic, What's Not, and Why Should We Care?, Oxford University Press, 2016.