Alfonso Maurizio Iacono – författare

The History and Theory of Fetishism, the expanded version of Iacono''s enduring classic Teorie del feticismo and available for the first time in English, aims to provide the historical context necessary to understanding the concept of "fetishism" and offers an overview of the ideologies, prejudices, and critical senses that shaped the Western observer''s view of otherness and of his own world. Iacono examines the moment when the Western observer turned his colonizing and evangelizing gaze to continents such as Africa and the Americas, while attempting to simultaneously destabilize and look at his own world critically.

This classic text in Italian history of political philosophy, translated into English for the first time, investigates the philosophical and ideological conceptions hidden beneath the modern image of the isolated individual. In The Bourgeois and the Savage, Alfonso Maurizio Iacono reveals that this apparently simple and transparent image is imbued with a profound complexity containing human and social relationships, which are intertwined with relationships of power, domination, inequality, colonisation and servitude. As Karl Marx argued, and as was later confirmed by twentieth-century anthropology, the isolated individual does not stand at the beginning of history; he can emerge only where social relationships are already very developed and where society appears as a tool used for private purposes. Considering the writings of Daniel Defoe, the great French Enlightenment philosopher Turgot, and the father of political economy Adam Smith, The Bourgeois and the Savage critically analyses the process which led to the naturalisation of the image of the isolated man and traces its development and transformation into a still dominant paradigm.

In the current era, evidence-based medicine and various supporting technologies dominate everyday clinical practice, according to a disease-centred, as opposed to patient-centred, approach. They have obviously improved the clinical management of diseases and it is therefore unreasonable to think of a medicine in which they are not considered fundamental. In fact, the strength of the new medicine should be to adapt scientific knowledge to a specific clinical case.

This book therefore looks at the prospect of a new ''person'' centred medicine, which stands alongside the ''disease'' and ''patient'' centred medicine, which pays special attention to the subjectivity of scientific knowledge and the relationship between doctor and patient. It is important to emphasise that this book is written by several hands, i.e. by experts from different fields, doctors, philosophers, architects, sociologists, art critics, physicists and engineers. This is with the intention of providing as broad a perspective as possible on the doctor-patient relationship.

Due to its translational and multicultural approach to the subject, the book will be of interest to a wide readership, from medical experts to students, psychologists, philosophers and institutional actors.