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A “Goodbye to the Aristotelian Weltanschauung”
and a Handbook of Analytical Philosophy of Medicine
Rudolf Seising
Abstract. In the 1960s Lotfi A. Zadeh founded the theory of Fuzzy Sets and Sys-
tems based on his works in system and information technology. In the 1970s, Mario
Bunge published a system theoretical approach in philosophy of medicine that he
named Iatrophilosophy and in the 1980s Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh opened the door to
use fuzzy system's concepts in this area and to define a patient's state of health as
a linguistic variable. He demonstrated that the concepts of health, illness, and dis-
ease “are not amenable to classical logic”, he rejected the conceptual opposition
that an individual could be either healthy or ill, and he created a new approach to-
ward a novel theoretical framework of these concepts: “health is a matter of degree,
illness is a matter of degree, and disease is a matter of degree”. In the years be-
fore 2000 Sadegh-Zadeh fuzzified the “Fundamentals of clinical methodology” in
a series of articles and he also started his research program from “Fuzzy Polynu-
cleotide Spaces” to “Fuzzy Genomes”. In 2001 he proclaimed a 'Goodbye to the
Aristotelian Weltanschauung'. About one decade later he published “The Prototype
Resemblance Theory of Disease” and his voluminous Handbook of Analytical Phi-
losophy of Medicine . This introductory contribution delineates the historic path of
fuzzy theoretic thinking in medicine.
3.1
Introduction
The German word 'Weltanschauung' has the meaning of 'world view'. Dictionaries
show the literally translation “a comprehensive view of the world and human life”.
The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy translates “Weltanschauung” to “a general
world view; an overarching philosophy”. [12] Therefore, the “Aristotelian Weltan-
schauung” is the all-world-embracing and completely independant philosophy of
the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322) that he had developed in oppo-
site to the idealistic philosophy of his teacher Plato (428/427-348/347) and also to
the atomic materialism of the epicurean, who followed Epicurus (341-270) and his
 
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