Emerging medical technologies are changing our views on human nature and what it means to be alive, healthy, and leading a good life. Reproductive technologies, genetic diagnosis, organ transplantation, and psychopharmacological drugs all raise existential questions that need to be tackled by way of philosophical analysis. Yet questions regarding the meaning of life have been strangely absent from medical ethics so far. This book brings phenomenology, the main player in the continental tradition of philosophy, to bioethics, and it does so in a comprehensive and clear manner. Starting out by analysing illness as an embodied, contextualized, and narrated experience, the book addresses the role of empathy, dialogue, and interpretation in the encounter between health-care professional and patient. Medical science and emerging technologies are then brought to scrutiny as endeavours that bring enormous possibilities in relieving human suffering but also great risks in transforming our fundamental life views. How are we to understand and deal with attempts to change the predicaments of coming to life and the possibilities of becoming better than well or even, eventually, surviving death? This is the first book to bring the phenomenological tradition, including philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Edith Stein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Hans Jonas, and Charles Taylor, to answer such burning questions.

This book offers a unique description of how phenomenology can help professionals from medical, environmental and social fields to explore notions such as interaffectivity, empathy, epoche, reduction, and intersubjective encounter. Written by a group of top scholars, it uniquely covers the relationship between phenomenology and bioethics, and focuses not only on medical cases, but also on the environment and emerging technologies. This variety of themes, whilst including techno-ethics, environmental ethics, animal ethics, and medical ethics, is conducive to appreciating broadly how phenomenology can improve our quality of our life. Despite its difficult themes, the book appeals to an audience of both academics and professionals who are willing to understand how to increase the quality of care in their professional field. Chapter 8 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Essays approach bioethics from postmodernist feminist theoretical perspectives, opening it to critiques that question the traditional normative framework.

Many declare the debate about abortion to be hopelessly polarised, between conservatives and liberals, between forces religious and secular. In this book Mumford upends this received wisdom and challenges consensus, arguing that many dominant attitudes and argument fail to take into account the particular way human beings 'emerge' in the world.

This book provides a unique phenomenological dialogue between psychology and philosophy on the origin of bioethics that shows the importance of bringing emotions into bioethical discourse. Divided into two parts, the book begins by defining bioethics and explaining the importance of emotions in making us human, allowing us to consider life holistically. Ferrarello argues that emotions and bioethics are better served when they are combined, and that dismissing emotions as nothing more than a nuisance to our rationality has created a society that does not fit our human nature. Chapters explore how ethics relate to intimate life and how ethical agents determine themselves within their surrounding world, uniquely and interrogatively using ‘bioethics’ to consider not only medical dilemmas but also issues concerning environmental and individual well-being. By addressing personal, interpersonal, and societal problems as dynamically interconnected in bioethical problems she helps us to renew our sense of responsibility toward a good quality of life. This interdisciplinary book is invaluable reading for students of health science, psychology, and philosophy, as well as for those interested in the link between emotions and bioethical discourse from both a psychological and philosophical perspective.

Husserl's 20th-century phenomenological project remains the cornerstone of modern European philosophy. The place of ethics is of importance to the ongoing legacy and study of phenomenology itself. Husserl's Ethics and Practical Intentionality constitutes one of the major new interventions in this burgeoning field of Husserl scholarship, and offers an unrivaled perspective on the question of ethics in Husserl's philosophy through a focus on volumes not yet translated into English. This book offers a refreshing perspective on stagnating ethical debates that pivot around conceptions of relativism and universalism, shedding light on a phenomenological ethics beyond the common dichotomy.

This is the first monograph to deal with medicine as a form of hermeneutics, now in a thoroughly revised and updated edition, including a whole new chapter on medical ethics. The book offers a comprehensive philosophical argument why good medical practice cannot be curtailed to scientific investigations of the body but is a form of clinical hermeneutics performed by health-care professionals in dialogue with their patients. Medical hermeneutics is rooted in a phenomenology of illness which acknowledges and proceeds from the ill party’s bodily feelings, everyday life-world circumstances and self-understanding in aiming to restore health. The author shows how the works of classical phenomenologists and hermeneuticians – Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur – may be employed to understand how medical diagnosis is enveloped by professional empathy and clinical judgement and developed by scientific investigations of the patient’s bodily condition. Health and illness are ultimately considered to be ways of feeling at home or not at home in the world, and such experiences are the starting point of medical hermeneutics when aiming to make best use of scientific knowledge. The book is aimed at researchers and teachers in philosophy of medicine and medical ethics, and at physicians, nurses and other health-care professionals meeting with patients in ethically complex and challenging situations. Phenomenology and hermeneutics, most often considered as methods belonging to the humanities, are shown to be of vital importance for the understanding of medical practice and ethical dilemmas of health care.