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Besides offering a critical analysis of the WHO definition and a review of both ancient and contemporary conceptions of health, the cooperative effort of physicians and philosophers presented in this book works through the challenges which any definition of health faces, if it is to be both truly personalist, and at the same time operational.
The overall purpose of this book is to capture the essentials of human health and to propose the outlines for a personalist understanding of this concept, i.e., a conception that does justice to the personal nature of human beings by introducing dimensions that are essential to personal life and well-being, such as the realms of rationality, affectivity and freedom, the realms of meaning, values, morality, and spirituality, the realms of social and interpersonal relations.
List of contents
Section One / Health and the Human Person.- According to Plato, the Evils of the Body Cannot be Cured Without Also Curing the Evils of the Soul.- The General Systems Theory: An Adequate Framework for a Personalist Concept of Health?.- Health: Two Idolatries.- The Concept of Mental Health.- What is Human Health? Towards Understanding its Personalist Dimensions.- Section Two / Health and Human Well-Being.- Health, Disease and Persons: Well-being in a Post-Modern World.- The Good of Health: An Argument for an Objectivist Understanding.- Empirical and Philosophical Aspects of a Definition of Health and Disease.- Section Three / Health and Society.- Positive and Negative Aspects of the WHO Definition of Health, and their Implications for a New Concept of Health in the Future.- The Challenge of Government in the Constructing of Health Care Policy.- Epilogue.- Notes on Contributors.
Summary
Besides offering a critical analysis of the WHO definition and a review of both ancient and contemporary conceptions of health, the cooperative effort of physicians and philosophers presented in this book works through the challenges which any definition of health faces, if it is to be both truly personalist, and at the same time operational.
The overall purpose of this book is to capture the essentials of human health and to propose the outlines for a personalist understanding of this concept, i.e., a conception that does justice to the personal nature of human beings by introducing dimensions that are essential to personal life and well-being, such as the realms of rationality, affectivity and freedom, the realms of meaning, values, morality, and spirituality, the realms of social and interpersonal relations.
