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The Art of Reasoning in Biology and Medicine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Jean Hamburger*
Affiliation:
Académie des Sciences and Académie Française

Extract

The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget devoted his life to following, step by step and lovingly, the development in children of the art of reasoning. In the course of the successive stages of this development, the child's view of the world changes in nature. Similarly, from its earliest infancy, medicine has viewed living things in successively different manners. For medicine, it is true, the stages overlap; one may still be using an ancient discourse from which another has daringly freed itself. Nevertheless, for the sake of clarity in this analysis, I will try to define successive epistemological attitudes as if they had represented a regular progression of medical thinking.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1987 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

1 Hippocrates. De l'ancienne médecine, in Oeuvres complètes (French translation of Littré with the Greek text on facing page, t. 1, p. 556-637, Paris 1839, Baillière).

2 Aristotle, Natural History of Animals.

3 René Descartes, L'Homme, followed by De la Formation du Foetus (New edition with a preface by Louis de la Forge, Paris 1729, Compagnie des Libraires).

4 Jean Hamburger, Le Journal d'Harvey Paris, Flammarion, 1983, and Gallimard Coll. Folio, 1986.

5 Claude Bernard, Introduction à l'étude de la médecine expérimentale Paris, Delagrave, 1965.

6 Alfred Kastler, Cette étrange matière Paris Stock, 1976.

7 Jean Hamburger, La Raison et la Passion, réflexion sur les limites de la connaissance, Paris Le Seuil, 1984.

8 Daniel Schwartz, Méthodes statistiques à l'usage des médecins et des biologistes, Paris, Flammarion Médecine-Sciences, 1969.

9 Béatrice Descamps, Nicole Hinglais and Jean Crosnier, in Transplantation Proceedings, 1973, vol. 5, p. 231.

10 André Lalande, Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie, 12th ed., Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1976.