Philosophy of Culture. Medicine in the culture system

1. KARAGANDA STATE MEDICAL UNIVERSITYDepartment: History of Kazakhstan and social-political disciplines Lecture 29 Philosophy of Culture. Medicine in the culture system Temirbekova M.Y. - teacher of department’s History of Kazakhstan and SPD, Master of Humanities

2. Brief contents • Definition • Culture is as the historical phenomenon • The elements of culture • Typology of culture • Medicine in the culture system

3. Definition • The Latin cultura, deriving from the word “colere,” meaning both to “cultivate” and to “worship”. • In ancient time the word “culture” was thus from the beginning related to good action. And action usually means assimilation of our world in some form or another. • The forms of culture are a kind of mirror that reflects the essence of every enterprise, its techniques and methods, and the contribution which it makes to the development of culture itself. • Culture manifests itself in ordinary consciousness and everyday behaviour, in labour activity and the attitude that one adopts to such activity, in scientific thought and artistic creation and the vision of their results, in self-control, in one's smile and manner of laughing, in love and other intimate relationships, which the individual may elevate to unexpected heights of tenderness and spiritual beauty.

4. Culture is as the historical phenomenon • The primitivehorde and the tribal society and all the subsequent forms of organization, all the stages of civilization are characterized by their own peculiar way of life, perception of the world, and levels of consciousness. • Primitive society was full of animist, magic and mythological beliefs and this left its imprint on the whole system of the life, thought, emotions and interrelations of people and their relationship with nature. • The ancient Orient is characterized by an urge to achieve complete union between man and nature, the extinction of the self in nirvana, understood as the highest level of the existence of energy. • The Middle Ages had a special type of culture related to the desire to achieve a personal absolute—God. • Medieval culture is a culture of religious spirituality and the mortification of the flesh in the name of this spirituality with its orientation on the heavenly kingdom as the highest ideal of earthly existence, to which all the spheres of the life of society are subordinate.

5. When capitalism came into being, everybody began to claim the right of free manifestation of his creative ego. • The whole mode of human existence changed. • Everything was subjected to the judgment of human reason and everything that failed this test was rejected. • Society was rife with individualism, calculation and pragmatism. • Forms of culture • the form of human activity, which is generalized into certain modes or methods of its realization, in the sign or symbolic forms of the existence of the spirit, and finally in palpable material forms, objects, in which the individual's purposeful activity finds its embodiment • The objective forms is created by mankind, by the nation, the class, the social group and the individual as the fruit of the creative activity of the people as a whole, the masterpieces of geniuses and other great talents.

6. The elements of culture • values, • norms, • symbols, • language, • knowledge. • The world of values. The highest of all existing values is man himself, his sense of dignity, his honor, his rights, his free thought, the self-realization of his capabilities. • Value is that which has meaning for man and society. • These are the values of wisdom, kindness, heroism, love of one's parents, the love of a mother for her children, and respect for one's ancestors, for one's country, for freedom. • Values change over time, and they are not necessarily shared by all members of a society. Moreover, dominant values within a society may be inconsistent with each other.

7. Norms • Norms, then, are specific guidelines for action that specify how people should behave in particular situations. • These guidelines may be either explicit (as in a "no parking" sign) or implicit (as in our automatic assumption that one should lock car doors when parking in public). • Norms vary from society to society, and from group to group within any particular society. • Norms are situational: their injunctions hold for a designated time and place.

8. Norms come in several forms: • Folkways are taken-for-granted, common-sense rules that people typically follow without even thinking about them. • Mores are norms that are related to values which people consider essential to their survival. • Laws are a special kind of norm that have been formalized or institutionalized: the rule has been written up in a code of laws, and police and courts have formally been assigned the tasks of enforcement and punishment. • Symbols are objects, gestures, sounds, or images that represent something other than themselves, can be either multivocal or univocal. • Language is a system of verbal and (sometimes) written symbols with rules about how those symbols can be strung together to convey complex meanings. Language permits the creation, communication, and preservation of abstract cultural ideas.

9. Typology of culture • Spiritual culture includes knowledge, creative activity, values, communication • Material culture include any kind of material activity (production). • According to effect on humans, culture is: • The progressive; • Regressive; • Revolutionary • Function of culture: • Humanistic; • Informational; • Cognitional; • Regulative; • Semiotic (or symbolic); • Axiological