scholarly journals Posthumanism and the New Ethics of Medical Practice—Epidemiology as the New Deontological Paradigm

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-118
Author(s):  
Timea Vitan ◽  

In the context of the COVID19 pandemic, during last year all public attention has been focused on Medicine. Epidemiology is no longer just one medical specialty among many others, but became the main paradigm and the unique background of medical science. The individual pacient has turned into the collective pacient. Medical policies are not centered on the pacient anymore, but on its social group. In this article I will try to show how the characteristics of medical practice changed since the pandemic began and which are the deontological implications of such changes. With a short introduction on the medical policies proposed by the WHO during the last decades, I wish to underline the recent history of medical practice and its obvious turning point occasioned by the pandemic. Once the new bioethical vantage points are set, I wonder to which extent posthumanist philosophy foresaw this new deontological paradigm. Having Rosi Braidotti`s “The Posthuman” as my starting point, I maintain that medical doctors no longer practice on a humanist background, but with a sort of commitment that goes beyond the individual. However, this is not an antihumansit pledge, because contemporary medical doctors still adhere to certain humanist principles. As it so often happens, we will be left with even more questions. If the pacient is no longer the individual, but the group of individuals, which is the nature of a symptom and how should we decipher its meaning? How would a new medical science look like if we are to build it not on a human but on a posthuman biology?

2018 ◽  
pp. 53-63
Author(s):  
Leonid Kondratyk

Kondratyk L. "Ideas of Civil Religion in the Creative Work of Cyril Methodians". The author is based on the fact that the civil religion is such a sociocultural phenomenon in which, through the prism of a peculiar religious language and specific practices, the necessity of acquiring and establishing a national state is substantiated, which originates in the need of the community to find the sacral in the activity that is inherent in the transcendent, eternally -linear character and which is rooted in the history of the territory. It is proved that the soil on which the ideas of the Cyril and Methodius civil religion originated is Western European romanticism, religiosity, the starting point of which was the idea of religion as the focus of the spiritual world of the individual and community, the idea of the Higher Reason that sets the directions for historical development, Christianity a decisive role in the spiritual and moral and social renewal of mankind, the view of Ukraine as an independent cultural and historical and social force, the influence of creativity T. Shevche gt; The main ideas of the civil religion of the Cyril Methodians are as follows: the messianism of the Ukrainian spirit manifests itself in the ability to unite the Slavs in the best way, because Ukraine is inspired by self-sacrifice with the Christian spirit and has apostolic intercession; Kiev - the capital of the resurrected from the oppression of the Slavs, the city - in which the courts prevail, truth, equality; concepts "temple", "truth", "righteous judgment", "freedom", "brotherhood", "equality", "love", "Kiev", "Kiev mountains" - the basic concepts-symbols of the Ukrainian civil religion; in the Ukrainian community with the need to coincide Christian values and moral standards, which dominate it.


Author(s):  
Richard K. Neumann

Education for a professional career differs fundamentally from other forms of education. A physician, for example, must know more than medical science. To be competent, medical doctors must know how to practice medicine, which Donald Schön called knowing-in-action. At times, professional schools have been stepchildren in universities because they taught skills as well as pure knowledge. In other eras, a medical school or a law school might be one of a university’s crown jewels. Differing degrees of acceptance in universities seem correlated to a profession’s prestige and to a professional school’s ability to generate research and publications. The tensions between trying to satisfy those criteria while simultaneously teaching knowledge-in-action with pure knowledge are essential to the history of professional education. The professions differ from one another in how they have navigated through these tensions, but the differences are variations on more or less the same theme.


Design Issues ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-75
Author(s):  
Sara Zeller

In the literature, the history of Swiss graphic design is regularly told as a linear development from illustrative tendencies to Modernist abstraction. Recent research has shown that these narratives were constructed and disseminated by a group of Modernist graphic designers through journals and their own publications. By the mid-1950s, the Modernists themselves began dividing designers of the time into two camps: the individual or illustrative versus the abstract or Modern. This dichotomy, which established itself quickly, continues to shape the narrative of Swiss graphic design to this day. However, this article argues that the reality of graphic design practice in Switzerland in the 1950s was more diverse than previously assumed. Outside an exclusive circle of practitioners, illustration and abstraction were understood more as design methods than as attitudes. Taking this as its starting point, this article looks beyond this dichotomy by drawing on unpublished sources of the time and, thereby, challenges the traditional understanding of Swiss graphic design.


2008 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans J. Hillerbrand

AbstractChristian Deism broke radically with the past and had its starting point in the notion that Christianity, as it was known, was perverted and no longer represented in the true and apostolic faith. Many of the titles of most of the Deist's books expressed this dismay over the state of the Christian religion, the need for re-interpretation of the nature of the true gospel and for reform. While most books reflected on the matter, the individual perspectives differed on the questions: Whom to blame for this fall? How to date it? What was the correct issue? The article argues that it was not the contention of the English Deists that some churches had erred in some points, but that all the churches had erred in all points: The entire system of the Christian religion was perverted. Their view of the history of Christianity was intimately connected with their view of the person and significance of Jesus.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Phillip Dylan Thomas Knobloch

It is increasingly argued that European colonialism has left its mark not only in the political and economic structures of the current world system, but also in the fields of culture, science and education. Against this background, the demand for a comprehensive epistemic or epistemological decolonization is raised. This issue follows on from this demand to clarify to what extent the phenomena of cultural colonization and coloniality also affect the fields of pedagogy and educational science. In particular, the meaning of the demand for epistemic or epistemological decolonization in the field of education will be discussed. In the introduction to this volume, the main features of decolonial thinking are presented. This is a movement of critical thinking that starts from the history of Latin America in order to reconstruct, criticize and deconstruct the globally powerful connection between modernity and coloniality. After this short introduction, the individual contributions from this issue on decoloniality will be briefly presented. Finally, the differences and similarities of the individual articles are briefly referred to. In the end, the question is raised, whether decolonial education should distinguish itself more strongly within the discipline.


Elore ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Backa

The Finland Swede Are Waerland (1876–1955) was one of the early advocates of vegetarianism in the Nordic countries. Waerland founded a health movement, adherents to which came to be called waerlandists. One of his main theses was that disease could be overcome by a change of lifestyle and diet. In his article, Andreas Backa studies a waerlandist narrative from the book Waerlandkosten räddade oss. Femtio waerlandister berätta (1948). His aim is to analyse the transformation from illness to health, using the structuralist actantial model of Algirdas Julien Greimas as a starting point. In order to gain access to the aspects of change in the narrative, Backa combines the actantial model with the structure of illness narratives—which have been noted as similar to religious conversion narratives—as put forward by Anne Hunsaker Hawkins. In addition, the author regards the patterns appearing in the analysis in relation to modernity. By laying forth three different sets of the actantial model, he makes visible the process in which a person who is ill and completely dependent on a perceived incompetent medical science, is transformed into a person who, through his contact with the Waerland movement, has been cured, and who has thereby become a proclaimer of the message of Are Waerland. In the narratives about the recovery from illness, Waerland appears to be a trickster character who not only challenges the hegemony of conventional medicine and prevalent diet and lifestyle recommendations, but also the hegemony of modernity itself. Thus, an early post-modern, critical perspective of modernity appears, where confidence in established modern truths has collapsed, and faith in science has been lost. Instead, health becomes a personal project in which the individual is responsible for creating his own physical well-being


2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikolaos Asproulis

Abstract In this paper an attempt is made to discuss the importance of the Holy Spirit in the development of an Orthodox political theology, by bringing into critical dialogue the recent contributions of two of the most known Orthodox theologians of the young generation, namely A. Papanikolaou and P. Kalaitzidis. It is commonly recognized that the Holy Spirit is closely related both to the very “constitution of the whole Church” in virtue of the Eucharistic event, as well as to the everyday charismatic lives of individual Christians due to the various forms or stages of ascetism. In this respect a careful comparative examination of these two important works, would highlight some invaluable elements (Eucharistic perspective, eschatological orientation, historical commitment, ethical action, open and critical dialogue with modernity etc.) toward a formulation of a comprehensive and urgently necessary political theology. This sort of political theology should have inevitable implications for the Christian perception of the communal and the individual ecclesial life. This “theo-political” program proposed by the two thinkers and founded on a robust Pneumatology, could be perfectly included, following the apostolic kerygma and the patristic ethos, into a new way of doing (Orthodox) Christian theology, that takes as its starting point the grammar of the self-Revelation of God in the ongoing history of salvation (“Church and World Dogmatics”).


Author(s):  
William G. Rothstein

Medical schools today are being closely scrutinized. Questions have been raised about their educational policies, the activities of their faculty members, and the quality of care provided in their clinical facilities. The concern is due in part to the activities of the medical schools themselves, in part to their accountability for use of government funds, and in part to changes in the American health care system. It is thus appropriate to examine the history of American medical schools to understand how the central issues in medical education have changed and how medical schools have responded to the changes. In this study, medical schools in each period have been placed in the context of that period. Their educational policies have been analyzed in terms of the state of medical practice of the time. Their educational standards have been compared to those of other institutions of higher education. This chapter will develop a framework for the analysis by examining the major issues and groups involved in medical education. The casual reader may wish to know that this framework is not essential for understanding the historical narrative, and that each part of the narrative can be read independently. Because medical education is designed to prepare students for employment as physicians after graduation, a fundamental pedagogical issue concerns how to balance the need to teach students the basic concepts of medical science with the need to train them in the practical skills needed to practice medicine. This becomes particularly difficult when the two bodies of knowledge are as intellectually demanding and as different as they are in medicine. The science and practice of medicine, in their broadest sense, are concerned with the structure and functions of the human organism in health and disease, the causes of change from one to the other, the prevention of disease, and the means of restoring health when disease occurs. Medical science is concerned primarily with the first two of these, medical practice with the last three. Medical practice also involves a social and economic relationship between a patient and a physician. The patient agrees to compensate the physician, either directly or through a third party.


2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 401-408
Author(s):  
Monika Zamachowska ◽  
Ryszard W. Gryglewski

Jan Piltz has gone down in the history of medicine, and not only of Polish medicine, as an eminent researcher into papillary reflexes. Our text is predominantly dedicated to this issue. Our primary goal was to present the course of the research conducted by this Polish scientist, providing details and depicting the conditions in which he reached his solutions; ones so significant for the development of neurology and medical practice. Our paper is a review, therefore, it includes references to both Piltz’s own publications and descriptions of and references to his scientific achievements in the reports of other authors. However, before we touch upon this substantive item of our paper, we assume it would be worthwhile providing a short introduction of Jan Piltz as a scientist and one of the founding fathers of modern Polish neurology.


2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 139-152
Author(s):  
Boštjan Marko Turk

Civilization is a concept that ontologically defines the individual and the communities in which it develops. The most global civilization is the one that has emerged in the West. Civilization is not something static, but an organism that draws its roots from the distant past. In this sense, it is fundamental to answer the question of what are the constitutive elements that define Western civilization. This question only makes sense if it is asked in a historical perspective. In this direction the Freemasonry, A Very Short Introduction is a crucial one. It presents the analysis revealing how the history of freemasonry is related to the evolution of Western identity. It has to be read in the light of Niall Ferguson’s monograph The West and the Rest. The present text does so. The book then brings to light the contribution of the brotherhood to the intellectual habitus of what is called the Judeo-Christian civilization, at the present time still predominant on the Planet. The intellectual apparatus of the Freemasonry, A Very Short Introduction permits to elucidate the history of the masonic movement and its influence on events that seem unconnected and coincidental. Thus, this article tries to explain certain historical turning points in South-Eastern Europe, precisely in the light of the masonic alliances, in particular the case of the Illyrian Provinces and the first Slovenian poet, Valentin Vodnik, and secondly, what concerns the emergence of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which the author of the article defines as the result of the masonic strategy (the Grand Lodge of France and the Grand Orient of France).


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