Illness and disease from the viewpoint of medicine as a human science

Evandro Agazzi has defended an ideal of medicine in which the hermeneutical-existential and the scientific-objective dimensions can cooperate to understand the human experience of malady. The paper supports this account by justifying such a cooperation on epistemological and methodological grounds intrinsically related to the peculiar status of medicine as a human science. The peculiarity of the “laws” of medicine as a human science demands a synergistic, reciprocal, and continuous interaction of clinical-personal and extraclinical-biomedical testing. The resulting spiral movement is one of the most general epistemological and methodological conditions for the possibility of realizing, at least in part and in an ongoing process, an ideal of medicine in which objective, biomedical and extraclinical knowledge, on the one hand, and the personal and clinical knowledge, on the other, can work together to reliably promote the goal of health in its two main meanings of the term, the analytic-naturalistic and the phenomenological-existential.