Leemon McHenry (born 1956), is a bioethicist and a lecturer in philosophy at California State University, Northridge, in the United States. He has taught philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, Old Dominion University, Davidson College, Central Michigan University, Wittenberg University and Loyola Marymount University, and has held visiting research positions at Johns Hopkins University, UCLA and at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in the University of Edinburgh. His research interests center on medical ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of science.
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McHenry received his doctorate from the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, where he was Vans Dunlop Scholar in Logic and Metaphysics studying with Professor Timothy L. S. Sprigge.
Much of McHenry's philosophical work focuses on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and process studies. He has devoted attention to Whitehead's attempt to construct a unified general theory from the revolutionary developments in modern physics. McHenry has argued that Whitehead's event ontology is a more adequate basis for achieving this unification than a traditional substance metaphysics of thinkers such as Aristotle. His papers on this subject investigate the influence of Maxwell's electromagnetic field and Einstein's general theory of relativity on the ontology of events.
In medical ethics he has focused attention on the interplay between medicine and the pharmaceutical industry. He has criticized the corporate take over of medicine and the corrupting influence of the pharmaceutical industry on medicine. This includes dubious claims about chemical imbalance as a marketing ploy for selling antidepressants, industry-sponsored clinical research, ghostwriting for medical journals and direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals. In a broader realm, he has argued that the industry-academic partnerships have worsened university research, created increased opportunities for scientific misconduct, and have failed to protect academic freedom.
McHenry has edited several books, authored chapters of numerous academic texts, served as the philosophy review editor for Process Studies (ISBN 0791455734), and participated in the State University of New York's series in philosophy, which brings together the world’s leading contemporary process and analytic philosophers. He has written articles and reviews for Process Studies, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Journal of Medical Ethics,The Review of Metaphysics,Mind, and The American Rationalist.
In 2007 he became the literary executor to the late Professor Timothy Sprigge.
In 1995, McHenry was denied tenure at Wittenberg University. The administration overruled the positive judgment of the faculty (teaching, research and service) on the basis that the chair of the department needed to be replaced and the only way to do so was to use McHenry's position to hire a new chair from outside the department. This decision led to the censure of the Wittenberg administration by the (APA) American Philosophical Association and caused a major overhaul of the tenure process at Wittenberg. The APA argued that this decision introduced a fourth ad hoc criterion for tenure that was previously unannounced, entirely novel and not applied uniformly to all candidates for tenure. The (AAUP) American Association of University Professors declined to impose censure on Wittenberg.