Main description:

This volume addresses some of the most prominent questions in contemporary bioethics and philosophy of medicine: 'liberal' eugenics, enhancement, the normal and the pathological, the classification of mental illness, the relation between genetics, disease and the political sphere, the experience of illness and disability, and the sense of the subject of bioethical inquiry itself. All of these issues are addressed from a "continental" perspective, drawing on a rich tradition of inquiry into these questions in the fields of phenomenology, philosophical hermeneutics, French epistemology, critical theory and post-structuralism. At the same time, the contributions engage with the Anglo-American debate, resulting in a fruitful and constructive conversation that not only shows the depth and breadth of continental perspectives in bioethics and medicine, but also opens new avenues of discussion and exploration.

For decades European philosophers have offered important insights into the relation between the practices of medicine, the concept of illness, and society more broadly understood. These interventions have generally striven to be both historically nuanced and accessible to non-experts. From Georges Canguilhem's seminal The Normal and the Pathological, Michel Foucault's lectures on madness, sexuality, and biopolitics, Hans Jonas's deeply thoughtful essays on the right to die, life extension, and ethics in a technological age, Hans-Georg Gadamer's lectures on The Enigma of Health, and more recently Jurgen Habermas's carefully nuanced interventions on the question of liberal eugenics, these thinkers have sought to engage the wider public as much as their fellow philosophers on questions of paramount importance to current bioethical and social-political debate. The essays contained here continue this tradition of engagement and accessibility. In the best practices of European philosophy, the contributions in this volume aim to engage with and stimulate a broad spectrum of readers, not just experts. In doing so the volume offers a showcase of the richness and rigor of continental perspectives on medicine and society.

Contents:

Table of Contents.- Acknowledgements.- Preface.- Part I: Figures and Grounds: Continental Approaches to Bioethics and Medicine.- Chapter 1, Gilbert Hottois; "Defining Bioethics".- Chapter 2, Michael Hauskeller; "The Ontological Ethics of Hans Jonas".- Chapter 2, Niall Keane; "On the Origins of Illness and the Hiddenness of Health: A Hermeneutic Approach to the History of a Problem".- Chapter 4, Mihail Evans; "Derrida, Habermas and the Ethical Self after Genetics.- Part II: The Experience of Illness: Phenomenological Approaches.- Chapter 5, Jenny Slatman and Guy Widdershoven; "An Ethics of Embodiment: The Body as Subject and Object".- Chapter 6, Havi Carel, "Conspicuous, Obtrusive, Obstinate: A Phenomenology of the Ill Body".- Chapter 7, Eran Dorfman; "The Body Between Pathology and The Everyday".- Part III: The Normal and the Pathological.- Chapter 8, Andreas De Block and Jonathan Sholl; "Towards a Critique of Normalization: Canguilhem and Boorse".- Chapter 9, Pieter Adrians; "Are Paraphilias Mental Illnesses?".- Chapter 10, Catherine Mills; "Liberal eugenics, human enhancement and the concept of the normal".- Part IV: Life Itself: From Bio to Political.- Chapter 11, Charles Wolfe; "Was Canguilhem a Biochauvanist".- Chapter 12, Michael Lewis; "On (Auto)Immune Life: Derrida, Esposito and Agamben.- Chapter 13, Lisa Guenther; "The Psychopathology of Space: A Phenomenological Critique of Solitary Confinement".- Part V: The Horizons of Medicine: Eugenics, Enhancement and Anthropotechics.- Chapter 14, Christien van den Anker; "The Right to be Impaired and the Legacy of Eugenics: a critical reading of the UN Convention on 'disability' rights".- Chapter 15, Sylvie Allouche, "From Enhancement Medicine to Anthropotechnology".- Chapter 16, Corry Shores; "Being Machine, Two Competing Model of Neuroprosthesis".