Healthy Embodiment: Philosophical Reflections on the Experience of Health

This book provides a philosophical analysis of the experience of health and investigates how this experience is shaped by recent developments in medicine and public health. It shows how phenomenological and Foucauldian approaches to health can be systematically integrated into a general account of healthy embodiment.

Many medical practitioners argue for a shift from curative to preventative medicine. Technoscientific developments now enable us to track our health and provide more effective ways to live healthily. This book argues that these developments shape how we experience our health of and others, as well as the way in which we distinguish between health and illness. Its starting point is that health is not so much an object with well-defined boundaries that can be scrutinized scientifically but is better understood as an embodied experience. The author uses phenomenology and the work of Foucault to develop a theory of healthy embodiment. He argues that experiencing oneself as a healthy subject requires being made present as a healthy object by someone or something else. He explores how the experience of health results from the interaction between being a subject and being an object and potentially involves challenging medical norms.

Healthy Embodiment will be of interest to researchers and graduate students working in phenomenology, science and technology studies, medical humanities, bioethics and sociology of medicine.

Bas de Boer is an assistant professor in the philosophy of technology at the University of Twente. He is the author of How Scientific Instruments Speak (2021) and editor of the recent volume Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Technology (2024).