Reality, Reason, and Action in and Beyond Chinese Medicine: Discerning Patterns

Judith Farquhar, Max Palevsky Professor Emerita at the University of Chicago and Faculty Director of the University of Chicago Center in Beijing, explores the science and philosophy of traditional Chinese medicine in this thought-provoking lecture series.

Drawing from both the practice and theory of Chinese medicine, these lectures examine deep ontological, epistemological, and ethical questions. Often misunderstood as mystical or superstitious, traditional Chinese medicine is re-examined here as a modern, rationalized, and scientific field.

Professor Farquhar explores how Chinese medicine constructs real objects—bodies, symptoms, and drugs—how it interprets health and pathology through concepts like yin-yang, right and wrong qi, stasis, and flow, and how practitioners today act ethically in pursuit of healing by “seeking out the root” of disorder.

Through:

Lecture 1: The Myriad Things of Classic Chinese Metaphysics

Lecture 2: Discerning Actionable Patterns in Diagnosis

Lecture 3: Ethics and Modern Humanism in Chinese Medicine

…the lectures collapse boundaries between tradition and modernity, East and West. Systematic Chinese medicine emerges not as superstition or pseudo-science, but as a philosophical partner and resource for a more expansive vision of science.