Health in the Renaissance

Health ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 141-173
Author(s):  
Guido Giglioni
Keyword(s):  
Human Person ◽  
The Body ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Physical Factors ◽  
New Findings ◽  
Medical Paradigm ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Renaissance Medicine

In the Renaissance medicine was still based largely on the works of Galen, but increasingly the Galenic medical paradigm was tested and modified. This was in part the result of new findings in anatomy, in part the result of new reflection on the nature and sources of health. The humanists pointed to cultural and physical factors to account for the flourishing of the human person, though figures such as Cardano continued to work with the Galenic idea of the six non-naturals. Ficino, Francis Bacon, and others proposed that one could preserve health through a “medicine of the mind” that would be grounded partly in an understanding of the states of the body, in part on the mind’s influence on the body. Consideration was also given to defining just what it means to live a flourishing life.

scholarly journals Catholic Perspectives on Human Biotechnological Enhancement

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-199
Author(s):  
Andrew Pinsent ◽  
Sean Biggins
Keyword(s):  
Human Person ◽  
The Body ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Catholic Faith ◽  
Catholic Culture ◽  
The Mind ◽  
To Receive

Although there is some consonance in the language of transcendence between proponents of the Catholic faith and of human biotechnological enhancement (HBE), their goals are incommensurate. Nevertheless, consistent with the valuation of the body as integral to the human person, Catholic culture has in fact proven to be a fruitful context for developing external therapeutic HBEs. Catholic perspectives on internal HBEs, especially in the context of ‘transhumanism’, are, by contrast, neither clear-cut nor easy to establish. A prerequisite for progress is to understand what is meant by flourishing in a Catholic worldview, the root metaphor of which is second-person relatedness to God, culminating in divine friendship. Hence important measures of success of internal HBEs will include sustaining, or at least not impeding, thoughtful attention and the capacity to receive experiences that can sanctify the mind.

scholarly journals Man is an object and a subject of social and humanitarian sciences

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (86) ◽  
pp. 130-134
Author(s):  
O.V. Ohirko
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Human Person ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
Living Matter ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Spiritual Ability

Philosophical, anthropological and Christian views on a person as a reasonable, free, religious and social person are considered. Theocentric and anthropocentric views are analyzed. Man is three worlds: physical, cognitive, and affective. Man differs from other creatures by having reason and will and natural inclinations. Man is embodied in the spirit and the spiritualized body, and its human spirit is expressed in bodily form. The body and soul of man are not two realities that are separated from one another. The body is a living matter, merged with the soul. The body, having the ability to feed, move, rest, multiply, falls under the laws of matter, that is, in particular, under the law of death. The human soul animates the body, reveals the spiritual ability to think abstractly, to create ideas, assessments, reasoning, make decisions freely. She does not suffer corporal death and can not decompose. In order for a person to live according to his nature, the mind must freely and sincerely seek the truth, and the will must always desire the truth offered as reason by the mind. A person is a person who has his own mind, will and feeling. In view of its dignity, the human person is the center of public life. Man as an image and likeness of God, is able to know, to love the Creator, and to serve Him. Man as a person is a goal in itself and in no case is not only an instrumental instrument. The purpose of human life is to love people and God, to be kind, to know, to speak and to testify the truth.

Jak umiera człowiek?

Etyka ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 115-135
Author(s):  
Zbigniew Szawarski
Keyword(s):  
Terminal Care ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Human Person ◽  
The Body ◽  
Hospital Death ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Communal Life ◽  
Whole Person ◽  
Affirmation Of Life ◽  
The Mind

Human life is a process. It is the process of becoming and ceasing to be a human being and it is a process of becoming and ceasing to be a human person. I accept the distinction between being a human being and being a human person and distinguish further – future, present, and past human persons. The main problem of the paper is when do we become past persons? Having distinguished and presented four distinctive modi of human dying (hospital death, hospice death, nursing home death, and death at home) I concentrate on the problem of good death and ask what are the goods of the dying person. The goods are: life, the good of the mind, the good of the body, the good of the communal life, and (paradoxically) the good of death. The decision who is a terminal patient is a moral one and implies two different strategies with regard to life: the affirmation of life, and the affirmation of death strategy. The first one, based on the concept of respect for human life, ignores the value of human dignity. The second one assumes that we should respect not only human biological life, but the whole human person, and we cannot respect the whole person if we do not respect her freedom of choice and her right to self-respect. Care for the artificially sustained but absolutely personless human life, is not a proper terminal care but rather is post-terminal care, and as such requires other, special justification.

scholarly journals Karol Wojtyla’s Conception of Personhood from the Perspective of Cognitive Sciences

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Mariusz Wojewoda
Keyword(s):  
Human Person ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Body ◽  
Cultural Environment ◽  
Cognitive Sciences ◽  
Individual Traits ◽  
Human Individual ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Scholarly Attention

We use the term “person” when we want to point out that human existence is unrepeatable and unique. The assumption that man is a person constitutes a basis for the belief in the dignity, efficacy, and responsibility of the human individual. Karol Wojtyla built his conception of the person in the context of theological and philosophical discussions. Even though Wojtyła’s conception has been given a great deal of scholarly attention, it is worthwhile to juxtapose it with contemporary anthropological theories that derive from cognitive sciences. Cognitivists usually base their theories on biological and sociological premises. Some conclusions arrived at in the area of the cognitive sciences lead to mind-brain reductionism, a theory in which the human being is regarded as a body endowed with the function of the brain and as an entity whose individual traits are shaped by its social and cultural environment. This position undermines the ideas of free will and the substantial singularity of the human person. However, debates with this position have worked out a non-reductionist alternative, a theory known as emergentism. This theory treats the human mind as a distinct faculty, one which emerges as a phase in the brain’s development. Emergentists base their reasoning on the assumptions that the body is a unity and that the mind is not identical with it. It is my belief that emergentism can be fruitfully applied to the dynamic understanding of the person put forward by Wojtyła in the middle of the 20th century.

The Nature and Care of the Whole Man: Francis Bacon and Some Late Renaissance Contexts

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 130-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
The Body ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
General Science ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Late Renaissance ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Distinct Field

In the early seventeenth century Francis Bacon called for the institution of a distinct field of theoretical and practical knowledge that would deal with the tight interrelationship between the mind and the body of man, which he dubbed “the inquirie tovching hvmane natvre entyre” (Advancement of Learning, Book II). According to Bacon, such knowledge was already in existence, but unfortunately scattered in medical and religious texts. As a remedy, he proposed an integrated and autonomous account that would constitute “one general science concerning the Nature and State of Man” (De augmentis scientiarum, Book IV). Such an account would concern itself with both the nature of the bond (vinculum) between mind and body (ibid.) and with the medical-religious care of man in his entirety. My purpose here is to identify a number of late Renaissance contexts that flagged a comparable type of preoccupation with the nature and care of the ‘whole man’ from a perspective that similarly strove to combine philosophy, medicine and theology.


Ecology of the Brain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Fuchs
Keyword(s):  
Continuous Process ◽  
Human Person ◽  
Living Organism ◽  
The Body ◽  
Lived Body ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Living Being

Overcoming the brain centrism of current neuroscience, Ecology of the Brain develops an ecological and embodied concept of the brain as a mediating or resonance organ. Accordingly, the mind is not a product of the brain: it is an activity of the living being as a whole, which integrates the brain in its superordinate life functions. Similarly, consciousness is not an inner domain located somewhere within the organism, but a continuous process of engaging with the world, which extends to all objects that we are in contact with. The traditional mind–brain problem is thus reformulated as a dual aspect of the living being, conceived both as a lived or subjective body and as a living or objective body. Processes of life and of experiencing life are inseparably linked. Hence, it is not the brain, but the living human person as a whole who feels, thinks, and acts. This concept is elaborated on a broad philosophical, neurobiological, and developmental basis. Based on a phenomenology of the lived body and an enactive concept of the living organism as an autopoietic system, the brain is conceived in this book as a resonance organ, mediating the circular interactions within the body as well as the interactions between the body and the environment. Above all, a person’s relations to others continuously restructure the human brain which thus becomes an organ shaped by social interaction, biography, and culture. This concept is also crucial for a non-reductionist theory of mental disorders, psychiatry, and psychotherapy, which is developed in a special chapter.

scholarly journals Is Medicine Losing its Way? A Firm Foundation for Medicine as a Real Therapeia

2017 ◽  
Vol 84 (3) ◽  
pp. 208-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Willem Jacobus Cardinal Eijk
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Human Person ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Body ◽  
Essential Dimension ◽  
Rapid Progress ◽  
Healthy Human ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
Biomedical Field ◽  
The Mind

Is medicine losing its way? This question may seem to imply a serious warning, one needing a further explanation. What I mean to say by the title of this paper is that we can detect an undeniable shift in medicine in the last forty to fifty years. Medicine used to focus on what we call “health care” in a classical sense, that is, the treatment of people suffering from diseases, injuries or handicaps, or the alleviation of pain and other symptoms. In addition to this, in the last half century, it has begun to offer more and more treatments aiming to perfect the qualities of people who are otherwise healthy. Summary Due to the rapid progress of research in the biomedical field, medicine is already and will ever more be able not only to cure diseases, but also to improve the characteristics of healthy human persons. This seems to be justifiable from the point of view of the contemporary view of man. This considers the mind as the actual human person and the body as an object of which he may dispose as he likes. However, serious and convincing objections exist against this view, because it does not do justice to the fact that we experience ourselves as a unity. Aristotelian-Thomist anthropology explains man as a substantial unity of a spiritual and a material dimension, of body and soul, which implies that the body is an essential dimension of man, participates in his intrinsic dignity and is never to be instrumentalized in order to improve the characteristics of healthy people. Medicine should apply all new medical techniques availed, but remain true health care.

Burnout of the Mind – Burnout of the Body?

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Traunmüller ◽  
Kerstin Gaisbachgrabner ◽  
Helmut Karl Lackner ◽  
Andreas R. Schwerdtfeger
Keyword(s):  
Blood Pressure ◽  
Allostatic Load ◽  
Maslach Burnout Inventory ◽  
The Body ◽  
Lower Percentage ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Urinary Catecholamines ◽  
Morning Cortisol ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Cortisol Increase

Abstract. In the present paper we investigate whether patients with a clinical diagnosis of burnout show physiological signs of burden across multiple physiological systems referred to as allostatic load (AL). Measures of the sympathetic-adrenergic-medullary (SAM) axis and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis were assessed. We examined patients who had been diagnosed with burnout by their physicians (n = 32) and were also identified as burnout patients based on their score in the Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey (MBI-GS) and compared them with a nonclinical control group (n = 19) with regard to indicators of allostatic load (i.e., ambulatory ECG, nocturnal urinary catecholamines, salivary morning cortisol secretion, blood pressure, and waist-to-hip ratio [WHR]). Contrary to expectations, a higher AL index suggesting elevated load in several of the parameters of the HPA and SAM axes was found in the control group but not in the burnout group. The control group showed higher norepinephrine values, higher blood pressure, higher WHR, higher sympathovagal balance, and lower percentage of cortisol increase within the first hour after awakening as compared to the patient group. Burnout was not associated with AL. Results seem to indicate a discrepancy between self-reported burnout symptoms and psychobiological load.

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