Bioethics: Ancient Themes in Contemporary Issues

✍ Scribed by Mark G. Kuczewski, Ronald Polansky

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 319
• Series: Basic Bioethics
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In recent years, bioethicists have worked on government commissions, on ethics committees in hospitals and nursing homes, and as bedside consultants. Because ethical knowledge is based on experience within the field rather than on universal theoretical propositions, it is open to criticism for its lack of theoretical foundation. Once in the clinic, however, ethicists noted the extent to which medical practice itself combined the certitudes of science with craft forms of knowledge. In an effort to forge a middle path between pure science and applied medical and ethical knowledge, bioethicists turned to the work of classical philosophy, especially the theme of a practical wisdom that entails a variable knowledge of particulars. In this book contemporary bioethicists and scholars of ancient philosophy explore the import of classical ethics on such pressing bioethical concerns as managed care, euthanasia, suicide, and abortion. Although the contributors write within the limits of their own disciplines, through cross references and counterarguments they engage in fruitful dialogue.

✦ Table of Contents

Series Foreword......Page 8
Introduction......Page 10
I The Character of Medical and Ethical Knowledge......Page 16
1 Remembering the Hippocratics: Knowledge, Practice, and Ethos of Ancient Greek Physician-Healers......Page 18
2 Is Medicine Art, Science, or Practical Wisdom? Ancient and Contemporary Reflections......Page 46
3 Phronesis and the Misdescription of Medicine: Against The Medical School Commencement Speech......Page 72
4 Aristotle, Phronesis, and Postmodern Bioethics......Page 82
5 Confessions of an Unrepentant Sophist......Page 108
6 Philosophical Therapy, Ancient and Modern......Page 124
II The Heuristic Value of Classical Approaches......Page 144
7 Thrasymachus and Managed Care: How Not to Think about the Craft of Medicine......Page 146
8 Potentiality and Persons: An Aristotelian Perspective......Page 170
9 Can Communitarianism End the Shrill and Interminable Public Debates? Abortion as a Case-in-Point......Page 194
10 Classical and Modern Reflections on Medical Ethics and the Best Interests of the Sick Child......Page 208
11 Facing Death Like a Stoic: Epictetus on Suicide in the Case of Illness......Page 244
12 Euthanasia and the Physician’s Role: Reflections on Some Views in the Ancient Greek Tradition......Page 266
Contributors......Page 306
Index......Page 308