Document Type : Research Paper
Author
Assistant Professor Department of Philosophy of Science and Technology, Humanities Research Institute
Abstract
In “Birth of the Clinic” Foucault's shows that it was not the natural sciences but the clinical medicine that laid the foundation for the humanities. At the end of the book The Birth of the Clinic, he argues that the humanities are based on modern clinical medicine. The importance of medical science in the founding of the humanities, he says, is not purely methodological because human existence is defined or perceived as the object of positive science. Of course, Foucault does not make more of his claim and does not expand it. In this article I will try to show how this claim can be defended on the basis of his formulation of clinical medicine, and what implications it will have for the humanities.
In order to understand comprehensively the thesis medicine should be framed based on the views of medical philosophers. Without these arrangements, it would be difficult to understand Foucault's claim. It seems that not only he has suspended implicitly or neglected many of philosophical issues of medicine in the Birth of the Clinic, but also his interpreters were unfamiliar with the tradition of medical philosophy. First, I'm trying to show that medicine is a different mode of thinking than the natural sciences, if that were not the case, Foucault's claim would be so trivial: human being has been transformed to the object by medicine, and it was then that the founding of the human sciences was inspired by the natural sciences, which is a mistaken belief. This section will be based on the views of Ludwig Falk on the serious differences between medical thinking and the natural sciences. I describe the structure of clinical medicine and its various disciplines and their interaction. In this is based on Kazem Sadeghzadeh ideas. In the next section, I will attempt to show how Foucault has formulated modern clinical medicine and its evolution in the form of three-level spatialization. In the final chapter, I will show how Foucault's formulation of clinical medicine can form the basis of the humanities. Thus this article appears to be an attempt to link the philosophy of medicine and the philosophy of the humanities through a new reading of the Birth of a Clinic
Keywords
)