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Bertalanffy was calling for a new view on science but he was not calling for a new
“Weltanschauung,” however. He wanted to turn attention to the interdisciplinary and
transdisciplinary system structures of scientific principles.
One of the principles he found was the feedback principle, also central to Nor-
bert Wiener's Cybernetics or Control and Communications in the Animal and the
Machine [96] that appeared when the history of Ludwig von Bertalanffy's General
Systems Theory was already 20 years old. The both melded in North America in the
1950s to a a new system theoretical approach in engineering sciences.
3.2.1
Iatrophilosophy - A System View on Medicine
Inspired by Cybernetics and General Systems Theory the Argentinian physicist and
philosopher Mario Bunge (born 1919, Fig. 3.3 (a)) presented in the mid-seventies
of the 20th century “Iatrophilosophy” as a new branch of epistemology. After he
had emphasised that there are no generally accepted concepts of illness and health,
he offered a general framework on the basis of Cybernetics and General Systems
Theory that could contribute to build a theory of health and illness.
He picked the Greek word iatros for “physician”, literally: the one who removes
darts. “Iatrophilosophy” is the heading of a chapter of his book Epistemología ,acol-
lection of lectures and speeches that he has given in Mexico in 1975/76. [15] Hence,
“Iatrophilosophy” is Bunge's new name for the field of philosophy of medicine.
Bunge started with the system-theoretical concept of a systems “state” that he
transfered to the person as a patient in the field of medicine. He postulated that
all the data gathered from a specific person at a specific time can be called his/her
“medical status”. This medical status is comprised of the various characteristics and
symptoms of the person in question, such as his/her height, weight, body temper-
ature, blood glucose levels, et cetera. The number of factors considered represents
the number of parameters of the medical status. The relevance of individual symp-
toms to specific medical conditions can vary, but a person's medical status covers
all of his/her attributes, providing a general overview of his/her condition.
Bunge's framework was the following system theoretic scheme: A concrete sys-
tem a has a certain number of properties P i , i
n and we can find a function F i
to represent the property P i , for example, if a is a human being, then F i could be the
glucose concentration in the blood, the blood pressure or the oral body temperature,
the weight etc. In the easiest case, F i is a function of the system a and of the time T .
If H and
1
,...,
stand for the sets of human beings and the real numbers, respectively,
than we have the following function:
R
m
F i : H
×
T
R
.
(3.4)
We can imagine the n -tuple F
=
F 1 ,
F 2 ,...,
F n
to be a vector in a n -dimensional
Cartesian space and the value s
for a system a at time point t is called the
state of this system at this time. During the times the state s moves in the state space
S of the system a :
=
F
(
a
,
t
)
 
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