Comments on Nordenfelt’s ‘On the Circle of Health’

Abstract

The search for ideal definitions of concepts, the earlier master of which was, perhaps, Aristotle, has always appealed to philosophers whose quest for certainty was a guiding epistemological principle. In the last half-century, following the analysis of ordinary and “natural” language, a number of philosophers have concluded that there are in fact no neat or sharp boundaries that can, without exception, be drawn between concepts like ‘disease’, ‘disability’, ‘handicap’, ‘deformity’, ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’.