There has been an argument going on in the contemporary society about the nature of man. The quest for an answer to that question is growing more and more intense in the face of scientific and technological development. One of the branches of science, which provokes a discussion on its moral and anthropological character, is transplantology. Closely connected with this discussion is the book Ethics and Transplantations by Maria Nowacka.
On one hand, these considerations outline her standpoint on the ethical dimension of such activities, and on the other hand, they embark on a discussion with her opinions. While Maria Nowacka argues that the application of transplantology is therealisation of the Cartesian philosophy, with its mechanistic view of human body, whereas the author of the article argues that transplantation is based upon an integral vision a person. At this point he emphasizes that the „informed consent” of donor is the prerequisite for taking a human organ to be morally right and to express human solidarity. The author also stresses that in the integral vision of human being as a bodily and spiritual unity, the human organism is the sign of a living man. The death of an organism as a whole is the sign of death of a human being. The death of an organism takes place only after the death of its integrating element, that is the brain.
The author disagrees with Mrs. Nowacka’s opinion that a human being is a living organism which is actually or potentially conscious.According to the author the consciousness element is too much emphasized. The whole truth about man is that he is spirituallybodily unity. This holistic theory of a human person forms the basis of both philosophical system called personalism and the modern teaching of the Catholic Church.
Download files
Citation rules
Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The Copyright Owners of the submitted texts grant the Reader the right to use the pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative Commons 4.0 International License: Attribution-Share-Alike (CC BY-SA). The user can copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose.
1. License
The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
2. Author’s Warranties
The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.
If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International".
ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).
3. User Rights
Under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
4. Co-Authorship
If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.
I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.
Vol. 37 No. 1 (2004)
Published: 2021-02-10
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
English
Język Polski