| Budget Amount *help |
¥1,500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,500,000)
Fiscal Year 2006: ¥500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥500,000)
Fiscal Year 2005: ¥500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥500,000)
Fiscal Year 2004: ¥500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥500,000)
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| Research Abstract |
The aim of this project has been to explore key features of medical understanding of human nature in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, as compared with the inquiry into human nature, which was chiefly conducted by the contemporary philosophers. The focus has been on conceptual analysis of some of the key terms in the medical texts in the Hippocratic Writings. I have drawn special attention to the use of the Greek term physis in the arguments in the medical texts, such as De Natura Hominis (On the Nature of Man), and De Vetere Medicina (On Ancient Medicine). Through the analysis of the term, I have made clear the following points as important features for our understanding of medical anthropology, as contrasted with the philosophical inquiry into human nature.
1.Hippocratic doctors (or medical scientists) differ from the contemporary' philosophers in their conceptual framework of understanding of human being, which can be elucidated by the analysis of the term physis, as conceptualized in the medical texts mentioned above.
2.Philosophers and philosophical doctors hold that human nature (physis) comes into being emergently from the element (s), which they presuppose in their inquiry into nature as ultimate stuff (s), from which the whole world was generated. In the medical inquiry into human nature, on the other hand, the term physis is conceptually applied to our bodily conditions, which will be understood and explained in terms of humors as physical constituents of human body.
3.Through the introduction of the concept of physis, applied principally to bodily conditions, human body will be demarcated as the physical or material aspect of human being, as opposed to the philosophical view of human nature, which does not seem to have drawn a categorical distinction between the physical and psychic (or mental).
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