Introduction

Abstract

Misunderstanding is a very real possibility, not only in the conversations of everyday life, but also in the more specific encounters between a text and its readers in academic institutions. Although there is no possibility of a total safeguarding of one’s work from this kind of violence, there are some things one can do in order to guide the reader and make his journey safer and more comfortable, as well as, to as great extent as is possible, appealing and interesting. The latter goal, no less than the former, certainly seems crucial, since it is clear that the greatest risk you run in presenting a work is not to be misread, but not to be read at all. The purpose of this introduction is therefore to provide the reader with appropriate guidance in the reading of this book and to awake some interest for the matters I am going to pursue there. It will consequently mainly be devoted to methodological issues, but I will, in the process of presenting these issues, make use of some illustrative quotations and metaphors to create a stage setting for the arguments and theories that are going to be performed later on. I therefore beg the reader who finds the representations and metaphors of philosophy and medicine in this introduction too crude and daring to remember that they are only meant as illustrations, as an introduction to the far more sober and specified arguments to come.

‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.’¹