Present-day biological medicine has not reconciled the modern heritage of mechanistic conception of causality, which in many aspects limits the diagnostic and therapeutic potential of contemporary physicians. If such reduced principle of causality is confronted with Aristotelian conception of four types of disease causes and with the possibility to use it in the study of life nature (and therefore also in medicine), non-trivial differences will be revealed, which can at least bring some inspiration to present day physicians. The contemporary psychosomatically thinking physicians are in a similar position from which Aristotle criticized his foregoers for insufficient explanation of the principle of cause and effect. Medical doctors have many common points with Aristotle and that is why it is possible to speak, with certain hyperbole, about renewal of Aristotelian conceptions in some of the new trends of contemporary medicine, where the present-day mechanistic mentality is replaced with ecosystematic thinking.

Fakulta humanitních studií UK Praha