Week 3/10: What relevance does Aristotle have today? What are some articles that use Aristotle for contemporary thinking and practice?

I searched the biomedical literature for articles that applied Aristotle’s metaphysics principles, when preparing for my metaphysics class discussion. I found that his principle was most often applied in bioethics – specifically surrounding the use and destruction of embryos and stem cells.

• ·      Morgan, L. M. (2013). The potentiality principle from Aristotle to abortion. Current Anthropology, 54(S7), S15-S25.
• ·      Mosteller, T. (2005). Aristotle and headless clones. Theoretical medicine and bioethics, 26(4), 339-350.
• ·      Watt, H. (2007). Embryos and pseudoembryos: parthenotes, reprogrammed oocytes and headless clones. Journal of medical ethics, 33(9), 554-556.

Another example of the application of the metaphysical principle in biomedicine was causation.

• ·      Sunday, J., Eyles, J., & Upshur, R. (2001). Applying Aristotle's doctrine of causation to Aboriginal and biomedical understandings of diabetes. Culture, medicine and psychiatry, 25(1), 63-85.
• ·      Wildner, M. (2000). Aristotle and the human genome project. The Lancet, 356(9238), 1360.

The Sunday article on causation is very interesting to me and I didn’t have the chance to elaborate in class so I’ll do that here. 

Issues of health and obesity are of particular interest to me because I lost 100 pounds a few years ago. It was striking to me that in support group for post operative bariatric patients that many currently or formerly morbidly obese people did not claim ultimate responsibility for their weight. This was absurd to me - as the only person ultimately responsible for one's weight is the personal themselves. While a variety of factors in and out the the person's control can influence their mental and physical state - obesity is generally caused by a positive caloric balance, which is very much in the control of the person, unlike many other health conditions. Obesity, is causal factor for diabetes and therefore this article was both intellectually enlightening and personally applicable. 

The article examines diabetes from 2 lenses: 1) personal responsibility and 2) genetic predisposition. The literature on health perceptions demonstrates there is a vast difference between lay and professional understandings of health influences and outcomes.

 The health care providers (biomedical community) emphasized the role of lifestyle factors, such as the impact of obesity, in causation. Because lifestyle factors (read choices) were the cause of diabetes the Aboriginal diabetics are morally deficient.  

In contrasts the Aboriginal people emphasize the role of genetics in causation, which releases them from complete responsibility for their health status.

Sunday notes that Aristotle’s doctrine on causation identifies four distinct types of cause: formal, efficient, material, and final. Science is said to have differentiated itself from philosophy by concentrating solely on efficient causes. Sunday examines how Aristotle’s doctrines applied to narratives of causation provide in the Aboriginal framework for health venture beyond the ‘efficient’ cause of biomedicine.