Plato argues by analogy that a leader is someone that must act in the best interest of her subjects in The Republic. He says a ship captain takes care of her crew, a farmer of her sheep, and a doctor of her patients. In this article, we will look at the claim that the first…
Category: Metaphysics
Purpose
The purpose for this article is to explore the idea that things have innate purposes. The idea of the final cause (purpose) is left out of most scientific conversations except when it comes to biological phenotypes. The classic examples are that the eyes are for seeing and the teeth are for chewing. This intuitively makes…
Understanding Autonomy vs Personal Choice
This blog post will help to develop understanding of the concept of autonomy and its importance to ethics. We will juxtapose it with the concept of personal choice. Respect for autonomy is a very important principle in dental bioethics but it is often conceived as respect for personal choice. While modern day ethics is colloquial…
Mindfulness
What is Mindfulness? Mindfulness is the idea of increasing one’s conscious awareness of perceptions and centering one’s thoughts to present activities. Not only does it relieve stress and reduce anxiety, it is meant to help us order our lives so we live better. Mindfulness is composed of sensual and rational mediative techniques rooted in mainly…
Why be a Good Dentist?
A Good Dentist What makes a good dentist? The first thing that comes to mind is how skilled and smart the dentist is. However, a dentist may do very good crown preparations but may lie to patients for financial gain (skill vs virtue). The blog is not concerned about technical dentistry but ethical dentistry. Dentists seem to…
A Healthy Smile is a Beautiful Smile
Dentistry is part medicine and part artistry. A good dentist needs both to bring patients teeth back to health and function. Cosmetics are opposed to health as some situations require sacrificing longterm health for cosmetics and some sacrificing cosmetics for health. This article offers a different philosophical perspective. A healthy simile is to be understood…
Oral Health: What is it?
Defining health is a metaphysical concern because health is an abstract idea or concept. We explore metaphysical questions such as what is health by using the dialectical method. This post is an initial attempt at defining oral health using the dialectical method. We will first explore some common sense conceptions of health to better our…
Smile Design: A Philosophical Analysis
What Does Smile Design Have to do with Philosophy? Simle design makes dentistry an artistry but also a philosophy. Questions asking what is beautiful are metaphysical questions (read about metaphysics here). Metaphysical questions are those concerned with the nature of reality when it comes to abstract ideas or concepts. The idea of beauty is not…
Why Metaphysics is Still Relevant to Dentistry
First Principles Many people think metaphysics is what is transcendental, what is “beyond the physical” or “outside spacetime.” Laypeople get this impression from pseudo-intellectual hippies. Academics get this impression from an etymological misunderstanding of “meta” and “physics.” Metaphysics, however, is the study of first principles: a set of propositions that explain the nature of reality as…