Philosophical Foundations of Classical Chinese Medicine

This book makes Classical Chinese Medicine (CCM) intelligible to those who are not familiar with the tradition, many of whom may choose to dismiss it off-hand or to assess it negatively) . Keekok Lee uses two related strategies: arguing that all science and therefore medicine cannot be understood without excavating its philosophical presuppositions and showing what those presuppositions are in the case of CCM compared with those of biomedicine. Such excavations enable Lee in turn to demonstrate the following theses: (1) the metaphysical/ontological core of a medical system entails its own methodology, how to understand, diagnose and treat an illness/disease; (2) CCM rests on process-ontology, is Wholist, its general mode of thinking is Contextual-dyadic, its implicit logic is multi-valent, its model of causality is non-linear and multi-factorial; (3) Biomedicine (in the main) rests on thing-ontology and dualism, is Reductionist, its logic is classical bi-valent, its model of causality is linear and monofactorial; (4) hence to condemn CCM as “unscientific”/”pseudo-scientific”/plain “mumbo-jumbo” while privileging Biomedicine as the Gold Standard of scientificity is as absurd as to judge a cat to be inferior to a dog, using the criteria of “goodness” embodied in a dog-show.

With this volume, Lee (Manchester Univ., UK) picks up where her earlier study, The Philosophical Foundations of Medicine (CH, Jun'12, 49-5598), left off, providing a chiefly descriptive outline of the key philosophical concepts found in Classical Chinese Medicine (CCM). A third companion volume, detailing the implications of those concepts for the development of CCM, is described as forthcoming. Western, “scientific” medicine and CCM are founded in different philosophical/ontological worldviews and, Lee insists, as distinct paradigms that are subject to different standards of evaluation. In the present work, she focuses on an interpretation of central texts and concepts of the Daojia tradition that underlie CCM (such as Qi, Ziran, Zhouyi, and Yinyang) and the metaphysical and epistemological dimensions of the modes of thought. Captivatingly, Lee not only suggests that there is much for Western medicine to learn from CCM, but she envisions a broader convergence in the future “with modern science moving toward the Chinese model based on process-ontology, non-linearity and Wholism.” Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above; researchers and faculty.

Keekok Lee is honorary research professor at Manchester University.