Philosophy, Medicine, and Their Historical Relations

The occasion for bringing together the articles in this volume was the conference Philosophy and Medicine – the History of Their Relations held at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń in 2018. The speakers’ speeches, of which most of the present articles are an elaboration, showed how enduring and, at the same time, diverse the relationship between philosophy and medicine was and is. Philosophy often dealt with the conditions proclaimed by philosophy for the legitimacy of medicine, the parallelism of the principles of both disciplines, one of which is to prevent disease and cure the human body, the other to overcome the imperfections of human cognition, but also with the conclusions that the progress of medicine has brought to philosophy. The authors of the dissertations in this volume reconstruct this broad spectrum of interrelationships, starting from the origins of philosophy, marked by the ancient tradition, through the turbulent development of medicine and philosophy in modern times up to the present day.

From the Editors