Master’s Thesis by Nataliya Shok
Preface
Medicine occupies a special place among the natural sciences: its subject is the human being. Medicine studies human’s diseases, preventing and treating them, and making people better. Accordingly, it deals with various gnoseological issues, part biological, part physical, part philosophical. Medicine develops on the basis of clinical practice, but it should not be forgotten that it is inseparably linked to more general issues in terms of understanding the physical world, where finding the initial link in the full chain of causes and their effects is practically impossible. This is a particular issue in medical theory and practice. Identifying the causes of illnesses, correctly interpreting symptoms, each of which may point to often contradictory forms of sickness, and studying aetiology are on one hand all part of clinical praxis, and on the other belong to the philosophical issues of medical theory. The combination of disparate information from anatomy, histology and physiology will remain merely a set of data without an understanding of the ontological nature of the treatment process, which is possible only when each physician perceives the human body as an integral whole. The philosophical foundations of medicine make it possible to establish more clearly the relationship between pathological phenomena and processes (or cause-and-effect relationships). When a disease takes hold and develops, various completely new behaviours become apparent, for which the vital functions of a healthy body are not responsible. The methodology, like the philosophy of science in general, should, without question, make use of research done by historians of science. In turn, historians of science need to draw on worldviews and methodological principles that shed light from a broader philosophical point of view on the general development prospects for science, as without philosophy the history of science is blind, and without the history of science philosophy is empty. In the foreword to his treatise De Medicina, Celsus describes the birth of medicine in Greece as follows: “At first the science of healing was held to be part of philosophy, (…) Hence we find that many who professed philosophy became expert in medicine, the most celebrated being Pythagoras, Empedocles and Democritus. But it was, as some believe, a pupil of the last, Hippocrates of Cos, a man first and foremost worthy to be remembered, notable both for professional skill and for eloquence, who separated this branch of learning from the study of philosophy.” Claude Bernard also highlights the connection between philosophy and medicine: “Philosophy embodies the eternal aspiration of human reason toward knowledge of the unknown… By ceaselessly stirring the inexhaustible mass of unsolved questions, philosophy stimulates and maintains this healthful movement in science… Philosophy and science, then, must never be systematic: without trying to dominate one another, they must unite.” The most general ideas find their expression in the philosophical foundations of science. Philosophy is important to us because we want to learn “something about the riddle of the world in which we live, and the riddle of man’s knowledge of that world.” In medicine, as in science generally, related research areas are of great interest. From a heuristic point of view, not only the basic principles of Hippocratic ethics but also many of the ideas of classical antiquity remain relevant to modern medicine. This underlines the important methodological role of research in the field of the philosophy and history of medicine. The complexity of defining scientific problems makes it possible to study the circumstances of the emergence and development of the scientific method in medicine and to identify epistemological resources for potential scientific discoveries, providing the Scientific discovery always exists in the context of the overall development of a specific discipline, and of the methodological paradigm and worldview of the scientist making it.
In medicine, as in science generally, related research areas are of great interest. From a heuristic point of view, not only the basic principles of Hippocratic ethics but also many of the ideas of classical antiquity remain relevant to modern medicine. This underlines the important methodological role of research in the field of the philosophy and history of medicine. The complexity of defining scientific problems makes it possible to study the circumstances of the emergence and development of the scientific method in medicine and to identify epistemological resources for potential scientific discoveries, providing the conditions needed for the researcher to develop a worldview that is based on an understanding of the continuity in the development of medical science.
The universal nature of philosophical methods is shown in the fact that they can be used in studying any spheres and forms of activity, and in drawing up both practical and theoretical agendas. Understanding particular organic proportions and conditions of the living body is the main focus of medical science, and disruption to the balance of a particular combination of elements, and to the harmony of parts with each other, and overall, leads to sickness, definition of which is the physician’s art. In the history and philosophy of science, values are constantly being reassessed. Improvements to the methodological tools thanks to the active involvement of interdisciplinary research are making it possible to rethink the significance of fundamental philosophical definitions to the development of scientific knowledge in the context of newly discovered historical evidence.
The close relationship between philosophy and medicine derives primarily from the fact that medical theory is always part of a general field of ideas that constitutes the philosophy of medicine, which enables comprehensive study of a complex living system — the human body, while the majority of medical concepts originate from outside the field of medicine. The history of the development of the philosophical method in medicine has its origins in antiquity. Hippocrates advised: “Transplant wisdom into medicine and medicine into wisdom.” This is referred to by, for example, the Soviet pathologist I. Davydovsky. Problema prichinnosti v meditsine (etiologiya) [The problem of causation in medicine (aetiology). As a branch of scientific knowledge, medicine always strives for truth. At the same time, truth in medicine is attained in a specific way, as it is shaped by the applied nature and specific features of a physician’s clinical thinking. A physician’s ontological thinking follows a path from studying changes in a particular part of the body to the cause producing them. Writing in the second century AD, Galen had this in mind when he said that “we ought first to ascertain the diseases that the patient has had in the past, and those he has at the present time, and those that are likely to affect him in the future, as matters to which we should give the greatest attention.”
As such, our objectives include the need to ascertain the compatibility of philosophical ideas and medical beliefs, through the example of Pythagorean teaching. In doing so, we attempt to show that certain philosophical beliefs of the Pythagoreans had an influence on the development of medical ideas. At the same time, the presence of strong occult/magical tendencies in the teaching of the Pythagoreans means that we need to be careful in assessing this influence. With regard to the significance of the Pythagorean legacy to medicine, theories relating to the role of the idea of opposites, mathematical proof, and harmony as an essential principle, have become fundamental, making it possible to conceive the workings of the world according to its laws. As a branch of scientific knowledge, medicine attempts to understand these laws within the context of its own objectives, using the methodological tools at its disposal.
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