Reality, Reason, and Action In and Beyond Chinese Medicine: Discerning Patterns – Dwight H. Terry Lectures 2017
Judith Farquhar, Max Palevsky Professor Emerita, University of Chicago, Faculty Director, University of Chicago Center in Beijing
These lectures draw on the science and practice of traditional Chinese medicine to address enduring and troublesome ontological, epistemological, and ethical questions. Chinese medicine has often been taken to be “mystical” or superstitious, and its efficacy has been seen as a matter of naïve faith. By contrast, the lectures consider how the modern, rationalized, and scientific field of traditional Chinese medicine constructs its very real objects (bodies, symptoms, drugs), how experts think through and sort out pathology and health (yinyang, right qi/wrong qi, stasis, flow), and how contemporary doctors act responsibly to humanistic ethical ends, “seeking out the root” of bodily disorder. As we better understand the myriad things of classic Chinese metaphysics (Lecture 1), see how doctors discern actionable patterns (Lecture 2), and appreciate the ethics of medicine’s modern humanism (Lecture 3), tradition and modernity, East and West, collapse. Systematic Chinese medicine, no longer superstitious or a pseudo-science, can become a philosophical ally and a rich resource for a more capacious science.
