Философия на медицината
PHILOSOPHY OF MEDICINE
https://doi.org/10.53656/phil2024-03-01
Philosophy is one of the significant achievements of humanity. The human ability to entangle the intellect and speculative thinking in attempts to explain the world, is at the heart of philosophy. The essence of Medicine is build on the benevolence of the doctor to the patient. Antiquity as a time path meets philosophy and medicine in the moment of their rising. The connection between philosophy and medicine has been started then and still keeps them close. Contemporary problems in medical knowledge and practice demonstrate the need to analyse situations from philosophical point of view.
Philosophy of medicine is the field where medicine and philosophy have been acquainted and even more. The high speed of contemporary knowledge requires from medicine to answer the questions that lay beyond standard/typical/common methods and approaches in medical science. This situation in a very natural way shows the need for/of philosophical analysis of the various topics, problems and situation in new dimensions. Here it is important to distinguish philosophy of medicine from problems discussed in bioethics. In this issue only themes from the field of the philosophy of medicine, will be presented.
In March 2024 the first scientific conference in the Bulgarian academic space with the theme “Philosophy of medicine: approaches and perspectives” was held. In the conference researchers with interests in the domain of philosophy of medicine, from medical, social and humanitarian fields from Bulgaria and abroad took part. The problems presented at the conference called the attention of the editors of the journal Filosofiya-Philosophy, and as a result, for the first time in the Bulgarian research space, an issue with articles in English, dedicated to the problems of the philosophy of medicine, are published.
Philosophy of medicine puts on discussions of problems belonging to medicine and analyse them from metaphysical, epistemological, axiological, methodological and conceptual positions. There are lots of interesting topics in the field of philosophy of medicine and one of them is the classical debate on concepts “health” and “disease”, which starts in the middle of the last century and still continuous today. The topic about the so called “decision making” in medicine is of great importance in philosophy of medicine. Connected to this are problems that analyse the doctor-patient relationships. The central theme in philosophy of medicine from the beginning of the 1990, is connected with introduction of the Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) model. In this direction most of the philosophical criticism has been presented concerning methodological role and status of the model. On the basis of these philosophical researches a new model is presented, the so called Personalised Medicine (PM). One of the important characteristics of this model in contemporary medicine is connected with an introduction of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) in medicine.
The current Issue presents some important topics from the field of the philosophy of medicine. Here, the authors develop their themes on the pages of the Journal Filosofiya-Philosophy.