Operatywno-heurystyczne kształcenie dla zdrowia w koncepcji filozoficznej Juliana Aleksandrowicza

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of employing a heuristic approach to examine the concept of health. The first to address this issue was Julian Aleksandrowicz, who developed the concept of a “new medicine”, which I will call “engaged philosophy”. The background for the discussion is given by postmodernist tendencies in contemporary culture, characteristic of a civilisation transforming at the level of ultra-technology and information. This paper highlights the necessity to reevaluate the Enlightenment and Neo-positivist heritage, as well as to redefine the key notions of life, death, health, and illness. The decisive problem of “life or death”, defined according to these mutually exclusive categories, demands a new way of interpreting the moral categories attributed by Aleksandrowicz to the concept of a “healthy life”. The idea of self-creation in the process of the “restoration of well created nature” is, according to him, equivalent to the category of “subjective health” broadly understood as psychophysical, social, spiritual, and economic health.

Keywords

• effectiveness
• heuristics
• engaged philosophy
• vitality
• health