PHIL 3345,
Bioethics
TTh 4:20-5:45 pm, BAS S330
Supporting the philosophical study of bioethics, bio-medical
ethics, biotechnology, and the future of life, at Middle Tennessee State
University and beyond... "Keep your
health, your splendid health. It is better than all the truths under the
firmament." William James
The anchoring theme will again be the psychological and
social dimensions of medicine and the life sciences, from birth to death.
Texts 2017. We’ll
begin with these texts:
·
Bioethics: The Basics (Campbell) ”...the
word ‘bioethics’ just means the ethics of life…”
·
On Immunity (Biss) “If we imagine the
action of a vaccine not just in terms of how it affects a single body, but also
in terms of how it affects the collective body of a community, it is fair to
think of vaccination as a kind of banking of immunity.”
·
Gratitude (Oliver Sacks) “Oliver Sacks was
like no other clinician, or writer. He was drawn to the homes of the sick, the
institutions of the most frail and disabled, the company of the unusual and the
‘abnormal.’ He wanted to see humanity in its many variants and to do so in his
own, almost anachronistic way—face to face, over time, away from our burgeoning
apparatus of computers and algorithms. And, through his writing, he showed us
what he saw.” -Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal
