A Philosophical Disease: Bioethics, Culture, and Identity

by Carl Elliott

Drawing on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and novelists such as Walker Percy, Paul Auster and Graham Greene, A Philosophical Disease brings to the bioethical discussion larger philosophical questions about the sense and significance of human life.
Carl Elliott moves beyond the standard menu of bioethical issues to explore the relationship of illness to identity, and of mental illness to spiritual illness. He also examines the treatment of children born with ambiguous genitalia, the claims of Deaf culture, and the morality of self-sacrifice. This book focuses on a different sensibility in bioethics; how we use concepts, and how they relate to our own particular social institutions.

Genres: Philosophy, Medicine, Science

224 pages, Hardcover

First published November 11, 1998

About the author

Carl Elliott is a professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota. Trained in medicine as well as philosophy, Elliott is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award, the Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History at the Library of Congress, a resident fellowship at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, and the Weatherhead Fellowship at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Mother Jones and The American Scholar. He has been a visiting faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the University of Sydney, and the University of Otago in New Zealand, where he is an affiliate of the Bioethics Centre.

Reviews

[Samuel Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of essays is great fun, a welcome change from much writing on bioethics in the last few decades. At turns tender, wise, and playful Elliott draws especially on Wittgenstein and some minor literary analysis to try to upend assumptions about how bioethics ought to be done and where it's authority resides. While many of the essays don't quite feel like they're finished or entirely persuasive in their current form, Elliott does a wonderful job of pushing the reader to see tired fights in bioethics in a new light. While he doesn't come anywhere close to answers to the hardest question (I suspect by design), he does a good job of provoking hard thoughts about the integrity/coherence of the foundation of contemporary bioethics, what some have considered a non-theistic theology of the modern secular self (to use terms from Charles Taylor in a sloppy way). I'm excited to read his Last Physician after reading his treatments of Walker Percy in these essays.