Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh (; ; born 23 April 1942; died 6 March 2023) was a German analytic philosopher of medicine of Iranian descent. He was the first ever professor of philosophy of medicine at a German university and has made significant contributions to the philosophy, methodology, and logic of medicine since 1970.
Life and career
Sadegh-Zadeh was born on 23 April 1942 in Tabriz, Iran. The fourth of eight children, he grew up in Tabriz and attended school from 1947 to 1959. His father was a craftsman and manufacturer and ran a minor terrycloth weaving mill. In the wake of severe political and economic crisis in the country caused by the U.S. and British coup d'état against the democratically elected government of Iran's Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, he went bankrupt and never recovered. At eleven years of age when entering the high school shortly after his father's bankruptcy, Sadegh-Zadeh told his parents he would become a professor of medicine in the future and provoked laughter from them. Upon finishing school education at the prestigious Ferdowsi High School in Tabriz, Sadegh-Zadeh came to Germany in March 1960 to pursue his goal as a working student and studied medicine and philosophy at the universities of Münster, Berlin, and Göttingen from 1960 to 1971 with Internship and residency 1967–1971. He earned a doctorate of medicine, Dr. med., from the University of Göttingen in November 1971. But after these five years of doing practical medicine he left clinical practice to conduct theoretical research on clinical theory and reasoning, for during his work in the hospital he had got the impression that in the foundations of clinical decision-making something was going wrong to produce about 38% errors of diagnosis and treatment. In an autodidactic way he specialized in the philosophy of medicine and was assistant professor and lecturer 1972–1982 and full professor of philosophy of medicine 1982–2004 at the University of Münster located in the city of Münster in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia in northwest Germany. He is married since 1970 and has two sons.
Sadegh-Zadeh is the founder of analytic philosophy of medicine,<ref name="Organism">Sadegh-Zadeh K. The organism as a cyclic-causal system. (In German.) Ärztekolloquium 1970; No. 1, pp. 26–39, edited by Duensing F. Department of Clinical Neurophysiology, University of Göttingen.</ref>. He inaugurated this new direction in the philosophy of medicine, which he based, like analytic philosophy, on the application of formal logic to distinguish it from the traditional philosophy of medicine for he did not, and still does not, consider this latter, traditional style of philosophizing on medicine a scientific endeavor, but "belles lettres". His international recognition came especially through his work on the logic and methodology of clinical reasoning, including artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic application in the theory of medical decision-making, in the theory of medical knowledge and in medical ethics. He is the founding editor of two international journals, first Metamed founded in 1977 (renamed Metamedicine later. Current title: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, published by Springer Verlag), and second, Artificial Intelligence in Medicine founded in 1989 (published by Elsevier). His extensive work includes the following innovative theories: a comprehensive theory of medicine presented in his monumental Handbook, theory of fuzzy biopolymers, the prototype resemblance theory of disease, the palimpsest theory of mind, and the theory of technoevolution and .
Work
Analytic philosophy of medicine
Sadegh-Zadeh conceives analytic philosophy of medicine as philosophy of medicine in the analytic tradition of philosophizing, i.e., philosophy of medicine by means of logical and conceptual analysis with its primary fields of inquiry being:
Philosophy of medical language, Medical praxiology, i.e., philosophy, methodology and logic of medical practice, Medical epistemology, Medical deontics, i.e., analysis of medical morality, obligations, and law, Medical logic, and Medical metaphysics.Seising R, Tabacchi ME (eds.), Fuzziness and Medicine: Philosophical Reflections and Application Systems in Health Care, A Companion Volume to Sadegh-Zadeh's Handbook of Analytic Philosophy of Medicine. Berlin: Springer, 2013.