Arte medica e politica della cura nell’età della tecnica. La presenza di Jaspers nel pensiero dei medici-filosofi spagnoli di metà ’900

The aim of this paper is to highlight the influence of Jaspers’ philosophy of medicine, with his criticism to the drifts of psychologism and technicism, on the theoretical elaboration of some exponents of the so-called ‘philosophical medicine’ or ‘humanistic medicine’ in mid-20th century Spain. Thanks to the exchange between the Spanish and German scientific milieu and numerous translations, Jaspers’ works have contributed to further deepening that fruitful dialogue between medicine and philosophy rooted in a centuries-old tradition in Spain. Doctors such as Pedro Laín Entralgo, Juan Rof Carballo, Juan José López-Ibor offered an original reworking of Jaspers’ theses, revisiting them in the light of the realism typical of the native philosophical tradition. Focusing in particular on the thought of Laín Entralgo, some exquisitely anthropological and epistemological issues will be highlighted where the reference to Jaspers appears more or less explicitly: the biographical dimension of illness with the overcoming of the Cartesian matrix dichotomy, the relationship between explanation and comprehension in clinical reasoning, the doctor-patient relationship in the technological context, the limits of the all-embracing claim of the psychoanalytical method.