This book is a comprehensive examination of the field of medicine today from a philosophical, epistemological, socio-anthropological, and political perspective. It contains several layers, unified by a persistent question about health, disease, and healing and the political relevance of how we understand them.

One layer of the book is the critique of current affairs, from which it begins: the medicalization of repression, starting with the so-called "covid-pandemic" and its political management. However, to comprehend the significance of the abovementioned events, a much broader perspective opens up, the perspective of a world-history of medical concepts and practices from antiquity to the modern Western (mechanistic-Cartesian) science. The point of view is socio-anthropological in that it attempts a relativization of the "truth" of the Western biomedical epistemological paradigm in the light of different cultural approaches ("primitive", ancient, Medieval, Eastern, etc.). Through this extensive cultural comparison, the main epistemological-philosophical question emerges: how will disease be centrally signaled - as an exogenous invasion or as a breakdown of the innate immunity system?

Part of the book is an extensive discussion of modern so called "alternative" therapies, like psychanalysis and existential analysis, homeopathy and acupuncture, consisting a current "therapeutic opposition". Since they are quite different from each other at first glance, the possibility of their theoretical unification is also explored, towards a deeper epistemological model, compatible with the political project of a transcendence of capitalism and a non-dominant relationship of civilization with nature, upon which humanity's ongoing pursuit for happiness depends.

FOTIS TERZAKIS (born 1959 in Patras, Greece) is a philosopher, free writer and essayist, one of the most prolific in contemporary Greece. He has published more than 30 books, which can be divided into four broad categories: poetry, theoretical essays, political texts and travel prose. He tackles an unusually wide range of subjects, combining academic occupations with a sharp critique of political reality, and with an aesthetic concern for writing (expressed in an early poetry-collection, and in the genre of literary travelogue he has cultivated over the last twenty years). His political interventions are infused by a radical anti-capitalist momentum, within an anti-authoritarian left tradition that draws from the long revolutionary heritage of council communism, classical anarchism and radical ecology.

Philosophy is at the center of his occupations; whereas, opposing to abstract speculation and considering that reflection must always be tested in contact to the concrete, he seeks in principle a methodological mediation of philosophy with the social sciences ?history, sociology, and social anthropology? on the one hand, and with a psychological science ?Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis, as well as some more recent phenomenological investigations of experience/consciousness? on the other.

A major part of Fotis Terzakis' work is history of ideas, ancient and modern, in parallel with the corresponding art currents and styles (aesthetic philosophy), focusing on the interweaving of the artistic form with the social content. Another part of his work is comparative study of religions, from a historical, psychological and socio-anthropological point of view, which permits a broadening of the view far beyond the limits of Western civilization. This, in turn, allows for a sharp critique of the technological rationalism of the modern European world ?which today tends to become global? and of the problematic foundations of Western science. If we are to somehow summarize all these intersecting considerations and treatments, we could say that they strive to construct a comprehensive philosophy of history, in the sense of a critical overview of human civilization in its long course, aiming at a meta-capitalist liberation of humanity.