The Philosophy of Medicine: On the Ethical Discussion about the Life and the Death

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to highlight the key philosophical cases in the medical and ethical debate on life and death - ontological, axiological and anthropological. For the philosophy of medicine, the concepts of life and health are fundamental dimensions, as they combine elements of nature and human existence. The aim of the article is to differentiate the existential, value and human contexts of philosophy in the medical space. The methodology used in the study is focused mainly on the analytical cluster of general scientific knowledge. The analysis of the literature on the problem of life and death in medical and ethical discourse allowed us to separately group the medical, philosophical and scientific and worldview clusters of this problem. Through generalising and comparative analysis, an attempt is made to unify the problem of life and death in the context of a single philosophical and scientific paradigm. To achieve these objectives, it is advisable to use the principles of interdisciplinarity, which help to bring to a common understanding the various ideas and views on the ethical component of the dichotomy of life and death in medicine. The results of the study indicate that the human-dimensional philosophical component dominates the ontological and axiological components in the modern worldview of human existence. This is the result of the policy of anthropocentrism in its global manifestation and the consequence of the use of a pragmatic approach in the system of human sciences. However, the COVID-19 pandemic, a minor factor by civilisational standards, has managed (albeit for a short period) to reorient the philosophical issues of life and death to existential dimensions. A promising area of research is modelling the situation of a socio-cultural crisis of a global scale in the healthcare system and the readiness of society to re-position the problem of life and death. Thus, the philosophy of medicine clearly structures the problem of life and death in three fundamental cases: ontological, axiological and anthropological, which change their priority in the scientific and philosophical discourse depending on the socio-cultural trends in the development of society and civilisation.