A Comprehensive Research on the historical background of the era when the American Bioethics had acquired its institutional identities.

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In the first phase of this research, I wanted to identify the major characteristic of the "first period of the American bioethics". To achieve this work, I read carefully the following 4 books. Tristram Engelhardt and Daniel Callahan eds., The Foundations of Ethics and Its Relationship to Science (1976-1980). But after this work, I was obliged to change the direction of the research, because of the relative lack of interest, in terms of the history of thought, of the further development of the American bioethics. The American bioethics became more and more closely related to the economical concern, and the scholars specialised in theology and philosophy in this domain were little by little marginalized by the participants who worked more closely in the domains such as economics, statistics, and even theory of management and business science. So, in the second phase of this research, I made an effort to find more philosophically interesting concepts upon the bioethics, or the theory of life. During this second research, fortunately I could find a really interesting couple of concept, that is, the couple of Bios and Zoe. Drawing on especially the works of Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben, I tried to elaborate a theory of Bios and Zoe, taking concrete examples from the medical ethics and medical history.