No 1 (2023)

Personalized medicine development includes an active use of digital products and tools for diagnosing, treating and monitoring health. This phenomenon generates such digital-related concepts as “digital health,” “Digital Medicine,” “Digital Therapeutics,” or “Digital Wellness.” Digital health includes tele- and algorithmic medicine, e-health, and mobile health. Bioethics represents a research area and social institution. Bioethics should increase the ethical support for bioethical choice subjects in the context of the social practices’ transformation in personal and public health. The article highlights the features of the subject and methodology interpretation; indicates the prospects for the development of digital bioethics. This article describes digital bioethics as digital health ethics. This interpretation differs from the understanding of digital bioethics as a field of using digital methods of empirical research. The research subject is social relations regarding confidentiality, truthfulness, trust, justice, and accountability. The entire social system is involved in the bioethical analysis, since the ethical issues of digital health are considered in a wide context of social dynamics, economic interactions, and political governance. Thus, digital bioethics is close to biopolitics. Digital bioethics uses several approaches. It refers to certain ethical theories to evaluate the results of the digital health technologies’ use. It considers different digital health-related situations through bioethical principles. It also describes the ethical harm in the digital technologies’ creation and integration in healthcare. Ethical issues are related to the social mechanisms in which they are created and used. The moral dilemmas’ resolution is seen as power relations’ manifestation. Digital bioethics analyzes the policy of various healthcare actors, the dependence of digital health on communication infrastructure and economic influence. Digital bioethics proposes to address treatment depersonalization and anonymization which represent the consequences of health and disease datafication. Digital bioethics complements empirical description of digital health practices and public health policies. On the one hand, digital bioethics is a field of digital methods’ application for studying bioethical discourse in the digital space. Thus, digital bioethics digitizes analog methods and additionally develops digital analysis methods. On the other hand, digital bioethics is defined as digital health ethics, and does not pay attention to the development of its own research methods. These two interpretations are interconnected. According to digital bioethics, ethically acceptable futures are the basis for management decisions in healthcare. This fact enhances a comprehensive transdisciplinary description of digital ethical foundations and ethical regulation mechanisms. Bioethics, algoretics, artificial intelligence ethics, engineering ethics, business ethics, political ethics, and other manifestations of applied ethics can be combined into a unique research complex and form a common mechanism for social and humanitarian innovations’ expertise. Prospects for the digital bioethics’ development should be comprehended through the empirical and normative traditions, the correlation of analog and digital discourses of bioethics, as well as the peculiarities of the bioethical institutions’ functioning in the digital space.

In modern socio-humanitarian science and everyday reality, the problem of visual semiotics is a key one, given the process of total visualization of the modern world, which requires a serious critical reflection of this phenomenon. The author of this article wants to reveal this problem in the fundamental context of philosophical and visual anthropology, presenting an original project of semiotics and aesthetics of the human image, for which he uses and rethinks the main approaches of modern philosophy in this area. The article is dedicated to the development of the main problems of semiotics in the space of a holistic aesthetic image of a person, presented as a visual message. The author seeks to reveal and substantiate the sovereign, independent and central significance of the visual image of a person in modern semiotic, visual-anthropological, philosophical-anthropological and aesthetic studies. The article explores the mechanisms and levels of perception and understanding of a person, presented as a certain visual message, in everyday life. Critically using and developing the approaches of Roland Barthes in relation to text and image analysis, the author analyses in detail the levels of visual communication encountered in the modern world. He draws special attention to the importance of modern digital technologies in the process of visualizing the everyday existence of a person and their image. Thus, the semiotic and visual-anthropological analysis of modern visual advertising and media, the nature of the use of the image of a person in them and the specifics of modeling its specific meaning are presented in detail. The author considers a person’s image in a more fundamental visual-anthropological and philosophical-anthropological key, and presents it as a spontaneous manifestation of human existence in a phenomenal aesthetic form implemented mainly at the pre-reflexive level. The author of the article uses Barthes’ selection of three levels of meanings (linguistic; having an iconic or denotative code; not having an iconic or connotative code) to study a holistic visual human image, whose formation is somehow influenced by all person’s components (personal name, speech, clothing style, etc.). The author dwells in particular detail on the meaning of language as a manifestation, a way of forming and perceiving a visual human image, the correlations of the denotative and connotative levels in it, and reveals the specific features of visual self-presentation, communication and intersubjectivity in the modern world.

The complex process of examining and perceiving of the world by a person cannot occur without measuring of the objects which surround a human being or events and processes they observe or experience. The findings of these investigations are reflected in the language by various means. Measurements and their results are of particular importance in medicine. The article studies the semantics and linguistic means of representing quantification incorporated in verbs which function in medical discourse. These quantitative measurements are considered the representatives of the category of quantity. About 825 verbs nominating special medical processes and conditions were investigated. A complex of methods including definitional, etymological, interpretative and statistical analyses used in the survey helped to reveal and describe the category of quantity in the verbs at the level of its cognitive, semantic, and linguistic representation. The category of quantity can be studied as a complex category consisting at least of two subcategories. On the one hand, it represents the numerical manifestation of the process (the number of repeated actions, the number of stages for the process performance, the quantitative characteristics of the result of the action) and the correlation between the “part” and the “whole” during the process implementation. On the other hand, it demonstrates the intensity of the process. A set of separated or interrelated concepts, each combining verbs with similar semantic features, forms each subcategory. The sets include the concepts like definite and indefinite quantity, the whole and the part, loss of something, upward or downward change of the amount, increase or decrease of intensity, equalizing of the amount, the measurement of the quantity. Derivational affixes, mostly prefixes, verbalizing these concepts are also studied in the article. They are believed to contribute to the visualization of the semantics of the verbs because they are highly productive and allow deciphering the meaning of the verb. However, some of them demand a medical specialist to have some background knowledge. The category is not a confined one, it interacts with those of time, space, consequence. Thus, the performed investigation shows that this category is widely represented by verbs denoting special medical processes and conditions, reflects cognition and its results in the field of medicine.

A person confronted with pain is transformed. Their ability to perceive and listen, also their capacity to act, are all changed and impaired. These changes must be taken into account in order to support and reduce the suffering of the person in pain. The phenomenology of pain to which this translated article is dedicated allows for a larger and more humane approach to the person in pain, who is often in total isolation, left alone with his or her pain. Is it possible to understand the pain of others the way they experience it, when pain tears one’s body and soul, gradually changes one’s personality? What is a person in pain? Does one remain the same person as one was before the disease, or transform as the illness progresses? The article asserts that one’s personality is radically transformed by pain, and that we should be able to take this transformation into account both in medical care and in our everyday conversations with the patient. The transformation of personality can be so profound and at times irreversible, that it is hard to believe that this is the person we knew before. The multi-year patient monitoring of the author working in palliative care and his reflection on these experiences of observation and empathy lead to the philosophical question “Can we understand another person’s pain?” by examining the elements of visualising suffering and setting the optics of the empathetic look.

The author explores the symbolism of the green colour. Biologists, chemists, botanists, florists, zoologists, artists, and other scientists have standardized, created catalogs, descriptions of colours and shades to eliminate possible errors and facilitate work. Scientists in various fields of knowledge have been interested in this topic for a very long time and comprehensively, ranging from how and in what order people recognized and named colours to assumptions about how a particular colour can affect a person or large groups of people in different circumstances and contexts. The article discusses the various meanings of colour concepts and analyses the language games associated with the visual perception of colour in the variable parameters of the living space. The history (social, cultural, symbolic) of the green colour is multi-layered and contradictory in different periods. The author made an attempt to systematize the symbolism and designate “asymmetry” in the interpretation of the green colour, to draw a conclusion about the prerequisites and consequences of this phenomenon. In Europe, at different times, it could mean luxury, prosperity, or misfortune, deceit. The green colour meant not just different meanings, but opposites: youth, love, life, and decay, poison, illness. In modern times, the green colour has a strong connection with life and prosperity. A person quite often expresses their feelings through the use of colour in one way or another. The analysis of the perception and influence of different colours on human behaviour and emotions is of great importance in psychology and related disciplines. At the moment, the basic principles of the impact of colour in marketing, advertising, positioning and brand policy are quite well studied, formulated and used. Green, like other colours, has an important place in communication and the transfer of meanings at various levels of modern culture. At the moment, there are a large number of studies and various sources of information regarding the origin, classification, history and meaning of colour, which confirms the relevance and interest in the research topic. However, blind spots, ambiguity and inconsistency in some of the findings indicate good opportunities for further work.