On Wednesday, December 18, starting at 10:30 a.m., the PhD student Anna Blanché Gil-Ortega thesis defense will take place at Sala de Graus of La Salle Campus Barcelona. Entitled 'The concept of the person in the thought of Diego Gracia', the thesis has been carried out under the direction of Dr Francesc Torralba Rosselló and Dr Montserrat Esquerda Aresté.
Bioethics is a growing discipline that is highly contemporary despite its short life. In only half a century of existence, important advances have been made in this field which have had repercussions, on the one hand, on clinical practice and the way we understand health, and, on the other, on the method by which we academically educate healthcare providers. And although bioethics was born in the 1970s in the United States, the introduction of this area into Europe is due to Diego Gracia, a Spanish doctor and intellectual who has dedicated his whole professional career to the study of this subject.
Now more than ever, bioethical debates have become increasingly popular and concern multiple topics –for example, the limits of life, pain mitigation, patients' rights, the relationship between medicine and new technologies, and so many others. But one issue that is rarely debated, and yet is a fundamental implicit in life sciences discourses, is the anthropological conception from which such thinking is structured. All bioethics assumes a certain notion of personhood, but this is taken for granted, acting as a sort of supposition that inspires the bioethical system defended from within. This lack of an explicit anthropological perspective is a deficiency that Diego Gracia, the central figure in this essay, also suffers from, and this is precisely the context of our research. The present work is, therefore, an effort to investigate Gracia's work with the aim of gathering and systematising those extracts which, in his writings, provide a glimpse of the anthropological idea that the author supports through his bioethical and philosophical approaches. The ultimate aim is, therefore, to offer an explicit synthesis of the concept of the person that lies at the intellectual base of Diego Gracia's reflections.
In order to achieve the purpose of our thesis, we have deemed it essential to have a general understanding of Diego Gracia's thought. Without a broad knowledge of this author it is very difficult to show his theory of the human being. To this end, we have taken his origins as the starting point, which is why we have gone back to what Gracia considers to be his teachers: Xavier Zubiri and Pedro Laín Entralgo. These two Spanish intellectuals shaped the fertile ground on which Diego Gracia has based his own philosophy; it is absolutely necessary to talk about them if an in-depth understanding of our author is to be attained. For this reason, we have devoted a part of the study to properly present both figures, and, at the same time, we have placed them in relation to Diego Gracia, indicating those points in which their influence has been most evident. After this, we have traced a brief intellectual biography of Diego Gracia, describing the evolution of his theories in the context of his life experiences and with the goal of bringing his person, and not only his bioethicist side, closer to the reader. Once the biographical profile of Gracia has been obtained, and the general features of his philosophy that we have been highlighting throughout the essay have been established, we enter into the systematisation of all the elements that compose the concept of the human being that underlies his thought. Hence, the conclusion of the research leads to a clear and consistent approach that comprehensively shows the idea of the person that underpins Diego Gracia's bioethical statements.
The tribunal is made up of the president, Dr Begoña Román Maestre; the secreatary, Dr Ana Pagès Santacana; and the member, Dr Ignacio Javier Fuster Camp.