The aim of Heidegger, Medicine and 'Scientific Method' is to ensure that the profound implications of the Zollikon Seminars Heidegger held for doctors and psychiatrists do not remain unheeded. In one short volume Peter Wilberg concisely summarises Heidegger's fundamental critique of 'scientific method', redefines the basic principles of the 'phenomenological method' and lays out the foundations of a new 'phenomenological' approach to medicine - one which understands that illnesses have meanings not 'causes'. Grounded in Heidegger's fundamental distinction between the physical body (Körper) and the 'lived' or 'felt' body (Leib), phenomenological medicine offers a highly practical and therapeutic understanding of the relation between a patient's clinical disease 'pathology' and the felt 'dis-ease' or pathos that it embodies.

Existential Medicine explores the recent impact that the philosophies of existentialism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics have had on the health care professions. A growing body of scholarship drawing primarily on the work of Martin Heidegger and other influential twentieth-century figures such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Hans-Georg Gadamer has shaped contemporary research in the fields of bioethics, narrative medicine, gerontology, enhancement medicine, psychiatry and psychotherapy, and palliative care, among others. By regarding the human body as a decontextualized object, the prevailing paradigm of medical science often overlooks the body as it is lived. As a result, it fails to critically engage the experience of illness and the core questions of ‘what it means’ and ‘what it feels like’ to be ill. With work from emerging and renowned scholars in the field, this collection aims to shed light on these issues and the crucial need for clinicians to situate the experience of illness within the context of a patient’s life-world. To this end, Existential Medicine offers a valuable resource for philosophers and medical humanists as well as health care practitioners.

Long awaited and eagerly anticipated, this remarkable volume allows English-speaking readers to experience a profound dialogue between the German philosopher Martin Heidegger and the Swiss psychiatrist Medard Boss. A product of their long friendship, Zollikon Seminars: Protocols-Conversations-Letters chronicles an extraordinary exchange of ideas. Heidegger strove to transcend the bounds of philosophy while Boss and his colleagues in the scientific community sought to better understand their patients and their world. Boss approached Heidegger during World War II asking for help in reflective thinking on the nature of Heidegger's work. A correspondence ensued, followed by visits that soon became annual two-week meetings in Boss's home in Zollikon, Switzerland. The protocols from these seminars, recorded by Boss and reviewed, corrected, and supplemented by Heidegger himself, make up one part of this volume. They are augmented by Boss's record of the conversations he had with Heidegger in the days between seminars and by excerpts from the hundreds of letters that Heidegger wrote to Boss between 1947 and 1971. For the first time, Heidegger makes the fundamental ideas of his philosophy accessible to nonphilosophers. Heidegger confronts certain philosophical/psychological theories, including Freudian psychoanalysis, Ludwig Binswanger's and Boss's forms of Dasein (existential) psychoanalysis, and Indian philosophy that he has never previously addressed. The lectures, correspondence, and conversations span twenty-five years, offering an ongoing view of Heidegger's career and philosophical development. A richly detailed picture of one of the century's great philosophers, Zollikon Seminars is the best and clearest introduction to Heidegger's philosophy available.

"Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" a short story by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne, about a doctor who claims to have been sent water from the Fountain of Youth. Originally published anonymously in 1837, it was later published in Hawthorne's collection Twice-Told Tales, also in 1837.

The experience of illness is a universal and substantial part of human existence. Like death, illness raises important philosophical issues. But unlike death, illness, and in particular the experience of being ill, has received little philosophical attention. This may be because illness is often understood as a physiological process that falls within the domain of medical science, and is thus outside the purview of philosophy. In Phenomenology of Illness Havi Carel argues that the experience of illness has been wrongly neglected by philosophers and proposes to fill the lacuna. Phenomenology of Illness provides a distinctively philosophical account of illness. Using phenomenology, the philosophical method for first-person investigation, Carel explores how illness modifies the ill person's body, values, and world. The aim of Phenomenology of Illness is twofold: to contribute to the understanding of illness through the use of philosophy and to demonstrate the importance of illness for philosophy. Contra the philosophical tendency to resist thinking about illness, Carel proposes that illness is a philosophical tool. Through its pathologising effect, illness distances the ill person from taken for granted routines and habits and reveals aspects of human existence that normally go unnoticed. Phenomenology of Illness develops a phenomenological framework for illness and a systematic understanding of illness as a philosophical tool.

Fredrik Svenaeus' book is a delight to read. Not only does he exhibit keen understanding of a wide range of topics and figures in both medicine and philosophy, but he manages to bring them together in an innovative manner that convincingly demonstrates how deeply these two significant fields can be and, in the end, must be mutually enlightening. Medicine, Svenaeus suggests, reveals deep but rarely explicit themes whose proper comprehension invites a careful phenomenological and hermeneutical explication. Certain philosophical approaches, on the other hand - specifically, Heidegger's phenomenology and Gadamer's hermeneutics - are shown to have a hitherto unrealized potential for making sense of those themes long buried within Western medicine. Richard M. Zaner, Ann Geddes Stahlman Professor of Medical Ethics, Vanderbilt University

The Science Delusion offers a counterpart to the wave of aggressive anti-religionism exemplified by Richard Dawkins' 'scientific' critique of The God Delusion. Its aim is not to defend any specific religious faiths, but to show how what we call 'science' is as much based on irrational and dogmatically unquestioned beliefs as the most 'fundamentalist' religion. By cutting through the common myths and delusions that make up our idea of 'science', as well as those that science itself is founded upon, philosopher Peter Wilberg lays down a 'heretical' challenge to the quasi-religious authority that the modern scientific world-view wields in today's globalised Western media and culture. In contrast to the unthinking debate between secular atheists and religious theists, he argues that the question of God's reality does not depend on the existence or non-existence of a supreme being 'with' consciousness - but can be answered through a new understanding of God as consciousness.