[Buddha-l] Re: Aama do.sa I

[Erik Hoogcarspel]

Joy Vriens schreef:
> In addition, I am intrigued by the role medicine -- in the form of 
> medical
>> causal thinking -- has played in the history of philosophy. That 
>> pramana-theory was invented by physicians and only afterward appropriated by 
>> "philosophers" makes perfect sense. Aristotle was primarily a botanist, and 
>> secondarily a biologist... philosophy was the byproduct, and his writings 
>> (e.g., on melancholia -- what today we tend to include under the label of 
>> depression) were influential in the Western medical traditions.
>>     
>
> That makes sense somehow. First you survive, then you can think about life.
>
>   
An alternative to Joy's 'digressions' is the link between power and 
medicine as Michel Foucault has revealed in his Birth of the Clinic and 
History of sexuality. Sects and alternative or magical healing are quite 
close, because sects want power. I have personal experience with 
macrobiotics and antroposophy, and I find those sects very unhealthy. In 
Holland a  local celebrety died of breastcancer because she was relying 
to much on alternative medicine and since then the public opinion has 
changed a lot in favour of regular medicine.
I wonder if the sceptical philosophies of physicians like Sextus 
Empiricus, Rabelais and  Bernard of Mandeville are in any way related to 
theri profession.

-
Erik

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