12 Facts About Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh

Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh was a German analytic philosopher of medicine of Iranian descent.

Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh 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.

Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh's father was a craftsman and manufacturer and ran a minor terrycloth weaving mill.

At eleven years of age when entering the high school shortly after his father's bankruptcy, Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh told his parents he would become a professor of medicine in the future and provoked laughter from them.

Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh was married since 1970 and has two sons.

Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh 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 consider this latter, traditional style of philosophizing on medicine a scientific endeavor, but "belles lettres".

Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh considered medical language an ill-structured and ill-kept extension of everyday language by adding technical terms such as "angina pectoris", "appendicitis", etc.

Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh conceived it as a task or branch of the philosophy of medicine already in 1982 deploring that "The contemporary philosophy of medicine movement is mainly concerned with medical-ethical problems while unduly neglecting medical-epistemological ones".

Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh has proposed an elaborate systematics of all types of medical hypotheses and knowledge the latter ones including classificatory knowledge, causal knowledge, experimental knowledge, theoretical knowledge, practical knowledge, clinical knowledge, and medical metaknowledge.

Apart from the deontic nature of medical-practical knowledge referred to above, a second reason why Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh classifies medicine as a deontic field is his view that according to his prototype resemblance theory of disease, the concept of disease is inherently value-laden.

So, there is no logic of medicine, Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh concludes, a logic that could be viewed or used as a specifically medical logic.

Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh devotes himself extensively to pure, formal, and applied ontology to use them in his logical analysis of medical-ontological issues of medical knowledge, clinical practice, nosology, psychiatry, psychosomatics, and biomedicine such as, for example, whether diseases exist or are fictitious entities invented by nosologists and physicians, and whether particular other things such as genes, psyche, and schizophrenia exist or are mere myths.