| Summary: |
it been more urgent to be enlightened by a philosophical nreflection on the body. Confronted with such crucial issues as organ
traffic, organ donation, assisted suicide and biomedical research, citizens,
politicians and policy makers certainly need solid scientific evidence to justify
their decisions. But, first and foremost, actors in the public forum need to
identify what the real issues are. this cannot be accomplished without getting
at a problem’s philosophical underpinnings. too often, solutions address only
pseudo-problems. take this line of reasoning, for example: there is a shortage of
organs; therefore we should implement policies and programs for the purpose
of increasing the availability of organs. While this assertion makes sense in
and of itself, most politicians, policy makers and citizens fail to see that this
kind of assertion results from a philosophical discourse on the body, which itself
rarely becomes the subject of an enlightened public discussion. Why? Because
philosophy itself is part of the problem.
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