The medical humanities pursue the person-centered relationship as its ideal mode of doctor-patient relationship. Currently its mainstream position is the principle of patient autonomy, which aims to recognize a patient as a subject of rights to be treated fairly in the doctor-patient relationship and medical decision. However, in actual scenes of medical practice, this principle seems to weaken the professionality of medical staff on the one hand and to ignore the helplessness of patients in their painful situation on the other hand. To solve this dilemma, this article attempts to start from Nel Noddings' criticism about Western traditional ethics of justice which regards human beings as abstract subjects and ignores their existential relationship and the fragility of human existence. According to Eva Kittay's theory of dependency relations and Annette Baier's moral theory of trust, both based on Noddings' care ethics, it is clear that medical humanities without the supplement of care ethics can hardly achieve their ideal of a "person-centered" relationship in medicine. Thus, we try to explain how the doctorpatient relationship from care ethics is more suitable for the existential situations of patients and the professional medical staff, and how it can respond to the medical dilemma mentioned above.
The study of education systems as social phenomena has led scholars to question the role of education in modern society. The question of how to improve education naturally leads to concerns about what is wrong with the present education system. If education is meant to elevate the next generation, how can it meet the goal of ensuring a meaningful existence for those being educated? Scholars have demonstrated that education has been reduced to a process of the construction of objects, where curriculum as techne commodifies students into products with market value. We propose that the tendency of interpreting techne as technology is a perspective of the modern age, and the rules of modern education are based on the rules of modern technology, under the guidance of the paradigm of productivity. We will introduce a broader interpretation of techne which frames it as the cultivation of virtue, i.e., virtue-techne. On this basis, education could be viewed as techne in the sense of praxis (practice, exercise), rather than as fabrication in the sense of production. We highlight the rising rate of student suicides in Taiwan in recent years, where we determine the education system lacks a focus on praxis. This article investigates alternative praxis-oriented notions of education, from Aristotle's cultivation of virtue to Hadot's "spiritual exercises," to advocate for a shift away from the production paradigm. Indebted to Heidegger, we clarify his "techne as revealing" by emphasizing two frameworks for education: The first, modern education being valued by its adherence to metrics based in the paradigm of production. The second, education as a process wherein its value is derived from the life context of the participating individual. Finally, as a comparative study, we explore the current state of education in Russia and Taiwan, and present the case of one high school in Taiwan which has adopted the practice of spiritual exercises in its curriculum, including a required hike to the peak of Taiwan's tallest mountain, to cultivate a sense of (and value for) the liberated life before its students graduate.
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