De Caro, Mario

Annali dell'Istituto Superiore di Sanità

E
d
it
o
r
ia
l
89
Ann Ist Super Sanità 2015  |  Vol. 51, No. 2: 89
DOI: 10.4415/ANN_15_02_01
Editorial
Medicine and philosophy: 
back to the antiquity
Mario De Caro
Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Rome, Italy and Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA
In the antiquity, and through the Middle Ages to the 
Renaissance, the connection between medicine and phi-
losophy was very tight: Galenus, Avicenna, Paracelsus, 
Cardanus were, at the same time, famous physicians 
and philosophers. They investigated the human body 
from a perspective that was naturalistic and vitalistic, 
by using now-obsolete notions like final causes, virtues, 
humors and fluids. However, in the XVII century, after 
the victory of the so-called “iatromechanic medicine” 
(that is, a medicine that was based on a mechanistic 
view of human anatomy and functions), things changed 
dramatically and medicine got much closer to the natu-
ral sciences than to philosophy. So, how is it possible 
that today many scholars are revitalizing the connection 
between medicine and philosophy? 
There are three main answers to this question. The 
first, the most obvious, is that with its portentous prog-
ress, medicine continuously raises new deep ethical di-
lemmas. What are the moral limits of the application of 
genetic engineering to human embryos? Is it acceptable 
to map people’s genome and use publicly the resulting 
data? What are the ethical boundaries of neurosurgery? 
What are the fairest ways of allocating organs for trans-
plantation? And so on. Bioethics, neuroethics, medical 
ethics are only some of the new flourishing disciplines 
that deal with the many moral issues raised by medicine. 
The second reason of the contemporary return of in-
terest for the relationship between medicine and phi-
losophy is epistemological, i.e., it concerns the ways 
in which medicine can give us knowledge and under-
standing. In what sense, if any, for example, is medi-
cine a natural science like chemistry, geology, or biol-
ogy? Should doctors be more concentrated on specific 
organic dysfunctions or on the holistic condition of the 
organism? Other important epistemological questions 
regarding medicine include the clinical value of popu-
lation statistics, blind experiments, placebo-controlled 
studied, and randomization.
The third reason of why medicine is getting closer to 
philosophy again is the growing attention that today is 
given to medical ontology, that is, to the investigation 
of what exactly the entities and processes described, 
explained, and predicted by medicine are. To make a 
couple of controversial examples, does the narcissistic 
personality disorder have a uniform physiological cor-
respondent in different patients? And is the dynamic or 
Freudian unconscious a real entity? 
To make a more general example, many studies in 
cognitive neuroscience state today that between a de-
terminate conscious phenomenon (like pain, anxiety, or 
the sense of self-control), on the one hand, and such-
and-such neurological processes, on the other hand, 
there are interesting statistical correlations. Well, what 
is the meaning of these correlations? Are the mental 
phenomena and the corresponding neural processes 
just the same thing, described from two different points 
of view? Or the mental level is just apparent but does 
not have any reality? Or is there a bottom-up (or even a 
top-down) relation of causation between the two levels? 
And also in this case the list of questions could continue 
indefinitely. 
Today the huge progress of medicine raises big ethi-
cal, epistemological, and ontological questions that 
obviously interest philosophers – at least those with a 
naturalistic orientation, i.e. those who believe that phi-
losophy should not be pursued in disconnection with 
science. In turn, medicine can get interesting method-
ological and conceptual inputs from the best studies in 
philosophy of medicine. 
The close relation between medicine and philosophy 
is back. At least in this sense, we are back to the antiq-
uity. 


Medicine and philosophy: back to the antiquity

http://www.annali-iss.eu/article/download/180/103

Medicine and philosophy: back to the antiquity

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Annali dell'Istituto Superiore di Sanità