What is it about?
From the Neurophilosophical point of view is essential to attempt to approach the real existence of the patient who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, endeavoring to understand his or her unique inner essence, as a human being18 with all the existential and ethical dimensions, the functional boundaries and the eventual complexities of the bio-socio-psychological profile of the disease. Definitely, the serious decline of the cognition is the most severe type of existential enclosing, since thinking should be considered as an essential existential property of the human being, who as a rule, “includes his thoughts in his life.
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Why is it important?
An important issue in dementia is the quality of the interior life, consisted of the harmony, the peace, the interior freedom and the integrity of the moral principles of the amnesiac person. It is well known that the interior life is mostly approachable and understandable by the verbal, artistic and social behaviour and the multiple interactions of the individual with the social environment. Therefore, the criteria of the character and the quality of the interior life are mainly based on the phenomena and not on the existential dimensions and the genuine existential substrate of the self.
Perspectives
We would have thought that the ethical being may remain unaffected by the debilitating process of dementia and only the social being based on the experience, the education, the skills and the confrontation of the problems in a social context carries the signs of the mental decline. Also we do not know how the sense of the psychosomatic unity in seriously demented patients is. Apart from Cartesian dualism,38 claiming a split between mind and body, neurophilosophy pleads in favor of the harmonious psychosomatic unity as a substantial existential property. The way that the demented patients perceive their own body might reflect the way they relate to their own existence. We strongly believe that the quality of life is based primarily on the interior life, which even in dementia may retain the inner peace, the personhood’s dignity and the principal moral and spiritual values.
Professor Stavros J Baloyannis or Balogiannis or Balojannis or Baloyiannis or Mpalogiannis
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Is Alzheimer’s disease an existential fragmentation or an imprisonment of mind?, Journal of Neurology & Stroke, May 2019, MedCrave Group LLC,
DOI: 10.15406/jnsk.2019.09.00367.
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