Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Abstract. Contemporary philosophy of health has been quite focused on the problem of determining the
nature of the concepts of health, illness and disease from a scientic point of view. Some theorists claim
and argue that these concepts are value-free and descriptive in the same sense as the concepts of atom,
metal and rain are value-free and descriptive. To say that a person has a certain disease or that he or she is
unhealthy is thus to objectively describe this person. On the other hand it certainly does not preclude an
additional evaluation of the state of aairs as undesirable or bad. The basic scientic description and the
evaluation are, however, two independent matters, according to this kind of theory. Other philosophers
claim that the concept of health, together with the other medical concepts, is essentially value-laden. To
establish that a person is healthy does not just entail some objective inspection and measurement. It
presupposes also an evaluation of the general state of the person. A statement that he or she is healthy does
not merely imply certain scientic facts regarding the persons body or mind but implies also a (positive)
evaluation of the persons bodily and mental state. My task in this paper will be, rst, to present the two
principal rival types of theories and present what I take to be the main kind of reasoning by which we
could assess these theories, and second, to present a deeper characterization of the principal rival theories
of health and illness.
Key words: biostatistical theory of health, disease, health, holistic theory of health, illness, medicine, values
Introduction
It is often maintained that health is one of the
major goals of medicine or even the goal of
medicine. This idea has been eloquently formulated
by the American philosophers of medicine
Edmund Pellegrino and David Thomasma in their
A Philosophical Basis of Medical Practice (1981,
p. 26):
Medicine, then, is an activity whose essence appears to lie in the clinical event, which demands
that scientific and other knowledge be particularized in the lived reality, of a particular human,
for the purpose of attaining health or curing illness, through the direct manipulation of the
body, and in a value-laden decision matrix.
LENNART NORDENFELT
THE
LENNART NORDENFELT
THE
10
LENNART NORDENFELT
References
Boorse, C.: 1977, Health as a Theoretical Concept,
Philosophy of Science 44, 542573.
Boorse, C.: 1997, A Rebuttal on Health, in: J.M. Humber
and R.F. Almeder (eds.), What is Disease? Totowa, New
Jersey: Biomedical Ethics Reviews, Humana Press, pp. 1
134.
Canguilhem, G.: 1978, On the Normal and the Pathological.
Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company.
Fulford, K.W.M.: 1989, Moral Theory and Medical
Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nordenfelt, L.: 1995, On the Nature of Health (2nd ed.).
Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Nordenfelt, L.: 2001, Health, Science and Ordinary Language. Amsterdam: Rodopi Publishers.