Abstract
This chapter is where the audience is introduced to what the blind-spot in medicine has missed: human existence. Bodies are there, but humans exist; humans are being there. Two dimensions of human being—the concrete world of existence and the abstract world of bodies—are carefully introduced and compared. The world of medical science, with its objective observations, manipulation, and control, takes as its object the material or corporeal body (Körper). The concrete body is the one that is lived (Leib). Humans can be understood through their concrete experience. Efforts to do so are directed at their existence.
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Notes
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It has become fashionable among contemporary continental philosophers to imagine the world of objects from the latter’s perspective, but even these thought experiments are carried out in service to the project of de-anthropocentrizing philosophy.
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Whitehead, P.M. (2019). Reality and Medicine. In: Existential Health Psychology. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21355-8_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21355-8_3
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