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10
A Philosophical Anthropology of Medicine:
The Split Subject
José Lázaro and Juan C. Hernández-Clemente
10.1
Introduction
Sadegh-Zadeh's magnificent
Handbook of Analytic Philosophy of Medicine
is de-
signed in such a way that even those who are not specialists in logic and analytical
philosophy can advance through its pages finding, on every one, all the theoret-
ical resources needed to understand those that follow. This chapter tries to pose
some issues belonging to our own intellectual world that fall outside the bounds of
Sadegh-Zadeh's book but that, in our opinion, radically affect the essence of the
problems he is dealing with.
The most distinguished philosopher of medicine we have had in Spain, Pedro
Laín Entralgo (1908-2001), conceived in his youth a grand intellectual project,
which he did not succeed in putting into practice directly, but which indirectly made
sense of all the impressive work he carried out in the course of his long life. [6] This
project consisted in creating a Philosophical Anthropology applied to Medicine. [5]
His goal was to construct a grand theory of the human being in sickness and in
health. This philosophical concept of the human individual would form the basis
of reflection on the theoretical foundations of language, rationality, ethics and tech-
nique with which one group of humans (medical doctors) try to help the rest to keep
their health and fight illness. Laín Entralgo's philosophical references, mainly Ger-
man and Spanish, were pure examples of what the Anglo Saxons call “continental
philosophy”: Dilthey, Scheler, Heidegger, Ortega y Gasset, Eugenio d'Ors, Zubiri.
citecit:Entralgo1984
In the “Introduction” to Sadegh-Zadeh's book, he lists the kind of questions he
is going to be dealing with: “conceptual, logical, linguistic, methodological, epis-
temological, moral and metaphysical issues”. He naturally makes no mention of
philosophical anthropology, a branch of the purest continental philosophy that lies
at the furthest reaches of analytical philosophy.
Our speciality is not philosophical anthropology either, but medical humanities.
In fact, we consider ourselves two modest specialist in building bridges between
