Medicine between humanism and mechanism

2008

This paper develops the themes of a lecture given in the context of the course on "Il pensiero della cura: i fondamenti del pensiero clinico", organized by "Medicina e persona" at the Circolo Culturale di Milano, October 12, 2006.

This focus is the result of a selection of the papers presented at the colloquium “Philosophy and Medicine”, which took place in Turin in January 2016. The purpose of the workshop, organized by the University of Turin and the Research Group LabOnt, was to discuss and explore some of the major views about the relationship between philosophy and medicine, and the ethical aspects of clinical practice. This volume collects the contributions of Cristiana Amoretti, Maurizio Balistreri, Francesca Ervas, Elisabetta Lalumera, Marcello Montibeller, Lucia Morra, Maria Grazia Rossi, Pietro Salis, and Vera Tripodi, who were speakers at the conference. The papers are unified by a number of cross-cutting themes and take their position within the different areas of the current theoretical- moral debate within the field termed “philosophy of medicine”.

The International Journal of the Humanities: Annual Review, 2013

Abstract The often-emphasized tension between the singularity of the patient and technical–scientific reproducibility in medicine cannot be resolved without a discussion of the epistemological and methodological status of the human sciences. On the one hand, the rules concerning human action are analogous to the scientific laws of nature. They are de facto sufficiently stable to allow predictions and explanations similar to those of experimental sciences. From this point of view, it is only a trivial truth, but still a methodological irrelevancy, that the patient and the doctor–patient relationship represent an ontologically irreproducible reality. On the other hand, however, one can never exclude that one can fail in the application of ‘‘laws’’ of the human sciences to the individual patient, for such laws are by no means wholly separated from a patient’s personal-hermeneutic mediation, and can at any time be revoked by becoming aware of them. This requires a synergistic collaboration of clinical and statistical methods, and shows a methodologically relevant sense in which one cannot disregard the singularity of the patient. The reason for the crucial role of the patient’s singularity in medicine is every individual patient’s capacity to revoke, in principle, routines and quasi-automatisms, even though the personal mediation by the patient’s consciousness de facto changes them in such a small degree that predictions and explanations modeled in experimental science remain possible.

ABSTRACT. All the powerful influences exerted by the subjective-interpersonal dimension on the organic or technical-functional dimension of sickness and health do not make an intersubjective test concerning medical therapeutic results impossible. These influences are not arbitrary; on the contrary, they obey “laws” that are de facto sufficiently stable to allow predictions and explanations similar to those of experimental sciences. While, in this respect, the rules concerning human action are analogous to the scientific laws of nature, they can at any time be revoked by becoming aware of them. Law-like and reproducible regularities in the sciences of man are by no means separated from a patient’s personal-hermeneutic mediation. This makes it possible for human beings to modify, improve or sometimes even entirely (or better almost entirely) suspend these psychological, sociological, ethnological, medical, regularities. For this reason the sciences of man including medicine are under the obligation of constantly inspecting the continuing validity of the rules on which their predictions and explanations are based, namely by indirect, statistical methods. This requires a synergistic collaboration of extra-clinical and clinical tests through which medicine can obtain a good level of intersubjective testability.

Classification, disease and evidence. New essays in the philosophy of medicine, 2014

Philosophy of Science, 2022

Is philosophy of medicine a subfield of philosophy of science? Of philosophy of biology? Should it overlap with bioethics? Or is it its own field like philosophy of technology or philosophy of law? Should we worry about the reliability of medical knowledge? With such questions in mind, I briefly review three books in the philosophy of medicine: an introductory survey by R. Paul Thompson and Ross E.G. Upshur, a philosophical critique of medicine by Jacob Stegenga, and a breast cancer survivor's bid for philosophical consolation by Mary Ann Cutter. To philosophers of science, Thompson and Upshur's and Stegenga's contributions will be recognizable as an application of the tools of philosophy of science to medicine. Cutter's book comes from a different tradition, traceable to the philosophy of medicine of Tristram Engelhardt. Thus, while the nature and reliability of medical knowledge takes up most of this review, the issue of demarcation-what philosophy of medicine is and how it relates to philosophy of science, bioethics, and perhaps social and political philosophy-is raised just by virtue of the variety in the books reviewed. In my view, philosophy of medicine should be aware of its relationship to these other fields of philosophy and draw upon them. Thompson and Upshur's Philosophy of Medicine: An Introduction goes well beyond offering a survey of issues in the field. Distinguishing between bench medicine (experimental research and model-building closely allied to biology, chemistry, and physics) and clinical medicine (13), their core thesis-introduced early with contrasting capsule summaries of James Lind's 1753 discovery of the cure for scurvy (6) and Victor Bolie's 1960 glucose-insulin model (7)-is that the mathematical and mechanistic

2011

Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic and Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological In a period spanning roughly from the 18th century to the middle of the 19th medicine underwent a radical development making medicine a science of the individual in a way radically different from the past. The paper describes this development and its impacts through a reading of Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic and Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological. The paper argues that the development in medicine – from nosology to pathology – changed the conditions of possibility for medical experience. It changed the way medicine conceives of itself and its object with the effect that the world achieved a new objectivity and obligatory character for us. The paper goes beyond Foucault by elaborating how the changes in medicine pointed towards a new general ontology, a new understanding of life and death, as well as a new form of normativity and human existence. On the threshold of the 19th century man thus began to establish a new relationship to himself.

Ηλίας Βαβούρας, ‘The medical science as philosophyof the human nature’, άρθρο στο διεθνές επιστημονικό περιοδικό, Dia-noesis: A journal of philosophy, τ.5 σ. 85-96, Εκδόσεις Ρώμη, Απρίλιος 2018.

The scientific approach of human nature as a key factor in the perpetual human truth and its association with the condition of the domination and the subjection, specifically its association with the political problem, was the starting point and the effort of medical science. Medical science has been the research onset of human nature. Man as a living being is distinguished by a constant and unaltered nature that is the same beyond the changing circumstances of the times and the socio-political variations. Human nature has an ideal natural state, and the excess or lack of the correctness signifies the existence of the disease that medicine is trying to eliminate by restoring natural correctness. The objective of medicine is to prevent and treat the morbid deviation from physical correctness, which is clearly not subjective, apparent or relevant but defined by objective, scientific and rational parameters. The universality and the objectivity of T