Search

Clinical judgement has become a central topic in both medicine and the philosophy since the 1960s. With the development of evidence-based medicine in the 1990s, clinical judgment is expected to be more sensitive to the needs and preferences of patients in the face of threats from positivist approaches that are considered to neglect individuality. This paper addresses this problem in the light of a philosophy of medicine that is more sensitive to the historical components of epistemology, ontology, and ethics. The analysis is directed to the 19th century in order to elucidate the tensions about the place of medical knowledge and the commitment, for the sake of professional improvement, to provide clinical judgment with new methods. This trip to the past is useful to understand the current transformations in the field of medicine, especially the way in which they help constitute new types of patients, new types of professional ethos, and new forms of relationship between these actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I interpret the first four sections of Human, All Too Human I to argue that Nietzsche's philosophy has diagnostic and therapeutic ambitions. In the first section, I show that his philosophy is psychological. In the second section, I illustrate the descriptive psychology of Nietzsche's philosophy, for which metaphysical doctrines rest on psychological misunderstandings and highly valued sensations and conceptions are based on selfish motives and mistakes of reason. In the third section, I argue that Nietzsche's philosophy is also medical and intellectualist: his inquiry into human psychology allows him, first, to diagnose two types of illnesses, one caused by scientific knowledge (existential illness) and the other caused by metaphysical doctrines (nervous illness), and second, to cure both types of diseases by eliminating their causes with this same scientific knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]