Letter on Alzheimer's Disease in Light of My Research and the Distinction Between the Mental and the Physical

Abstract

As clearly explained in the work by Zhang et al. (2024), dementia—and Alzheimer's disease in particular—afflicts an increasing number of people worldwide, reducing them to a devastating condition of life. Even today, Alzheimer's remains an incurable and largely misunderstood disease. Various explanatory hypotheses exist, which—as with the early stages of any theoretical framework—link one dysfunction after another in the search for a triggering or at least dominant cause. This way of speaking without technical jargon may raise a smile, but I am a philosopher, and if I am to speak about this issue, it is my responsibility to avoid technicalities as much as possible, so as not to confuse a theoretical and philosophical treatment with an empirical one, which rightly belongs to the domain of medicine and biology.