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CHAIR'S STATEMENT FACULTY GRADUATE STUDENTS COLLOQUIUM CALENDAR UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAM GRADUATE PROGRAM GRADUATE PLACEMENT MASTER SCHEDULE UNDERGRADUATE BULLETIN GRADUATE BULLETIN ACADEMIC CALENDARS USC LIBRARIES CAS COMPUTING & IT USC COMPUTER SERVICES ABOUT COLUMBIA SC RESTRICTED ACCESS: Faculty | Graduate Students Search USC   THIS SITE		COLLOQUIA & CONFERENCES PHILOSOPHY NEEDS MEDICINE: THE CASE OF DESCARTES AND THE PROBLEM OF OTHER MINDS   Gideon Manning University of Chicago   January 26, 2005 Wednesday, 4:00pm-6:00pm BA (Close/Hipp) 008   Western Medicine and Western Philosophy have been in dialogue since their separation in the Hippocratic corpus. But how should we understand the nature of this dialogue? In particular, what has philosophy gained from medicine? One possible answer, endorsed by contemporary scholars, is that medicine enriches the philosophy of science, by, for example, expanding on the notion of scientific practice. In this paper I offer a different perspective which avoids the philosophy of science altogether. I suggest that medicine's influence on philosophy in the work of René Descartes led to the creation of a new philosophical problem: the philosophical problem of other minds skepticism. I also argue that historians of philosophy have misunderstood Descartes' solution to this skeptical problem because of their insensitivity to his medical interests. I conclude by endorsing an expanded view of the dialogue between medicine and philosophy, and suggest that the history of philosophy would benefit from greater acquaintance with the history of medicine.
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