1 WHAT IS PHENOMENOLOGY OF MEDICINE? EMBODIMENT, ILLNESS AND BEING‐IN‐THE‐WORLD By Fredrik Svenaeus, Centre for Studies in Practical Knowledge, Södertörn University Published in: Health, Illness and Disease: Philosophical Essays, ed. Havi Carel and Rachel Cooper, Acumen Publishing, 2013, pp. 97‐111. The question of my paper’s title involves two issues that have to be settled before moving on to the main topic, the phenomenology of medicine: the issue of what phenomenology itself might be, certainly, and I will return to that shortly, but no less important, the issue of what medicine is. Medicine So, what is medicine? What is its essence and how are its borderlines with other human activities to be delineated? As everyone who has pursued the field of philosophy of medicine knows, the exact nature and border of medicine is itself a constant topic of debate. I myself would defend a concept of medicine that stresses the meeting of health care professional and patient in an interpretative attempt to help and cure the ill and suffering one, whereas others would look rather for the essence of medicine in the application of medical knowledge in attempts to understand and alter the biological organism (Svenaeus 2000). These two answers to the question of what medicine is do not necessarily exclude each other; they could be brought into dialogue, and the first answer could be made to include the second, just as the second answer could be complemented by the first. The interpretative practice of understanding and helping the patient could, and, indeed, should, include biological knowledge, while the applied‐biology paradigm would need to address, in some way, that the doctor sees a person and not only the person’s body. Despite the possibility of combining the two alternatives, where one puts the major stress will be important, not only in answering the question of whether or not a particular activity is to be counted as a medical activity, but also in addressing ethical and political questions concerning the mission of medicine today and in the future. If medicine is an interpretative, helping meeting between persons aiming to restore or protect health and alleviate the suffering of illness, the practice itself will have ethical roots, whereas if medicine is basically the application of medical knowledge in the clinical context, medicine will have to be encouraged to grow ethical branches on its morally neutral tree, so to speak. Towards the end of this paper, I will return briefly to the issue of what medicine is in itself, but first I will focus on the second issue mentioned above, that of phenomenology. What is phenomenology? Phenomenology A first and preliminary answer to this question can be provided by stating that phenomenology can be considered a kind of first philosophy seeking foundations of ontological and epistemological questions by returning to lived experience (Spiegelberg 1982). Phenomenology has branched out into many additional disciplines from the trunk that started out in philosophy about a hundred years