In the second funding period, the Central and Integrative Project (ZIP) pursues the aim of bringing together the insights gained within the Research Unit (FOR 5022) into a comprehensive account of the temporal structures of the good life in the context of medicine. The focus lies on clarifying the role of continuity and discontinuity for a good life—dimensions that have emerged in the work of the Research Unit as central aspects of human temporality.

In the first funding period, the Research Unit initially examined the temporality of the good life under conditions of a changing horizon of medical possibilities, focusing on the individual’s biographical temporality. Across all medical fields of practice, structures of continuity and discontinuity became particularly salient as key figures of human temporality requiring closer examination. In the second funding period, the Research Unit expands its research question beyond the individual life course toward supra-individual structures of continuity. With its focus on generativity, the project addresses the question of whether—and in what ways—it is relevant for a good life to orient oneself beyond one’s own lifespan, for example with regard to one’s descendants or other forms of transmission.

According to the central research thesis of the ZIP, whether temporal structures are experienced as conducive to a good life depends crucially on how the relationship between stable structures, on the one hand, and ruptures or breaks, on the other, is shaped—both with regard to intrabiographical temporality and to generative orientation. The ZIP examines and further develops this thesis by drawing on medically relevant situations and narratives identified by the subprojects working in the three practice fields of chronic heart disease, reproductive medicine, and geriatric medicine.

Methodologically, the ZIP employs a phenomenologically oriented approach that is already well established within FOR 5022. In doing so, the ZIP provides a twofold integrative contribution. First, it brings together the perspectives of the two funding periods by jointly considering intrabiographical and generative structures of (dis)continuity, particularly in their interrelation. Second, the investigation integrates the perspectives of the individual fields of practice with the aim of elaborating the relevance of (dis)continuity for a good life over time as a fundamental orientation for medical care as a whole.

The subproject is based in the Division of Ethics in Medicine at the Department of Health Services Research at Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg.

Senior Researchers: 

Dr. Sonja Deppe
Prof. Dr. Mark Schweda

Student Assistants: 

Joshua Stolle
Friederike Rhein
Clara Mathilda von Lingen