Phenomenological Bioethics: Medical Technologies, Human Suffering, and the Meaning of Being Alive

Lecture by Fredrik Svenaeus, professor of philosophy at Södertörn University in Stockholm, Sweden.

Emerging medical technologies are presently changing our views on human nature and what it means to be alive, healthy, and leading a good life. Reproductive technologies, genetic diagnosis, organ transplantation, and psychopharmacological drugs all raise existential questions that need to be tackled by way of philosophical analysis. Yet questions regarding the meaning of life have been strangely absent from medical ethics so far.

 

In this talk – based on a newly released book – Svenaeus will try to show how phenomenology, the main player in the continental tradition of philosophy, can contribute to bioethical issues. Phenomenological bioethics may be viewed as an opportunity to scrutinize and thicken the rather thin philosophical anthropology implicitly present in contemporary mainstream bioethics. The concept of personhood in such an analysis may be substantiated by an exploration of phenomena such as embodiment, suffering, empathy, responsibility, and instrumentalization, drawing on philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Edith Stein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Hans Jonas, and Charles Taylor. In the talk Svenaueus will present the outline of his book and give some examples of how to approach and develop a phenomenological bioethics.

 

Medisinsk-filosofisk forum

Leger, medisinstudenter og andre som er interessert i medisin og filosofi ønskes med dette velkommen til diskusjonskvelder om medisinsk-filosofiske temaer. I den travle hverdagen gis det lite rom for faglige refleksjoner og diskusjoner med medisinskfilosofisk vinkling.

Arrangementet er gratis.

Publisert 11. jan. 2018 15:41 - Sist endret 25. jan. 2018 12:57