ABSTRACT
The new diagnostic and therapeutic possibilities that medicine offers challenge borders between life and death and what is normal versus abnormal in direct and indirect ways. This chapter attempt to do so by introducing and discussing the most well-known contribution to philosophy of technology made by a phenomenologist namely, Martin Heidegger's critique of modern technoscience. Heidegger could hardly deny that inventions such as X-ray, the medical laboratory, the artificial kidney, or antibiotics do more and better things to us than exposing us to a life in the technological 'framework'. Pharmaceuticals are clearly examples of biomedical technology, and in the case of psychopharmacology the targets of the chemicals are the functions of neurons of the brain, making the drugs into 'neurotechnologies'. Bioethics should be well informed about the practice it is studying, and this includes learning a lot about medical science and technology. Thus, mental illness has a far more complicated relationship to the processes of the body.
