Description

FCT Project PTDC/FIL/64863/2006 The specificity of medicine within the field of knowledge appears, from the very beginning, in the way it relates both to its history and to local traditions. As a matter of fact, the extraordinary progress of medicine since the beginning of the 19th century – to which the foundation of the Hospital is not extraneous – does not make traditional medical procedures and views out of interest. Unlike other modes of knowledge, the bond between tradition and innovation is congenital to modern science, there lying a point of affinity between philosophy and medicine. This affinity is even closer concerning the immanent problematicity of medical knowledge and its exercise. A doctor deals with the meaning of anomalous phaenomena that disturb the normal course of nature, that is to say, the self-fulfillment of the affected being. Are such phaenomena intrinsically intelligible or are they impervious to the natural order? Is such affection, which emerges in a unique way, an isolated phaenomenon or an individual case that demonstrates a regular order in the dynamics of physis? Is nature able to cure such affection through its regenerating power or is the intervention of an exterior agent necessary in order to improve and restore nature? To what extent does an exterior environment influence the states, and above all the pathological states, of the subject? What kind of relationship is established between the affected part, the organism in its globality, and the whole being of the patient? Does the quality of the doctor-patient relationship contribute to the efficacy of the medical act? What is the “right” behavior of a doctor towards a patient? To what extent and in which manner does the illness affect the identity of its bearer? What is the human and cultural meaning of “being ill”? How does the experience of the self assimilate and integrate it? How do technique and nature adjust themselves? Is the perfect doctor a prudent man, with an accurate sense of measure, who knows to distinguish the possible and the impossible, or someone who trusts in the endless progress of technology and art? Does illness accompany necessarily the course of human existence or can it be eradicated by modifying the predispositions since the formation of the embryo? To sum up, medicine raises questions of intelligibility regarding the status of medical knowledge, the necessity of contingence of pathologies, as well as the ways of connecting the local and the global, the individual and the universal, order and disorder. These are typical philosophical questions, and therefore they must be subject to a philosophical scrutiny.

Research Team

Adelino Cardoso, Adriana Veríssimo Serrão, Leonel Ribeiro dos Santos, Maria Luísa Ribeiro Ferreira, Pedro Calafate, Filipa Afonso, José Miranda Justo, Manuel Silvério Marques.

Publications

Events