Health and Illness as Enacted Phenomena.
Topoi : an international review of philosophy January 1, 2022 Fredrik Svenaeus 24 citations
Health is argued to consist in a central world-disclosing aspect of existential feelings, experienced with transparency and ease in carrying out important life projects, making it an important part of leading a good life. Illness, by contrast, involves finding oneself at the mercy of unhomelike existential feelings—such as bodily pains, nausea, extreme unmotivated tiredness, depression, chronic anxiety, and delusion—which make it harder or impossible to flourish. In illness, the lived body hurts, resists, or alienates the ill person's activities. The paper explores health and illness through enactivism, a bodily-based, worldly-engaged phenomenology, and scrutinizes biomedical, ability-based, and biopsychosocial health theories from that perspective.