The paper explores the role of pharmacology in understanding the experience of illness and existence, suggesting a new framework.
Phenomenology of medicine describes what illness, grief, and thrownness feel like,but says little about how much, how fast, and under what conditions experience acts upon aperson. I argue that pharmacology supplies the missing vocabulary—of rate, dose, threshold, andmodulation. Developed in two movements, existential pharmacokinetics treats the passiveuptake, distribution, metabolism, and clearance of reality; pharmacodynamics treats the activebinding of events to values. The determinism–freedom boundary runs as a continuum throughboth, and agency, correctly located, is receptor self-modulation rather than control of events. Theframework earns its keep only by conceding where the analogy breaks.
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Oladipupo cornelius Faniyi (2026) studied this question.
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