https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.2307%2F3343168.pdf

Development as Freedom

Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy

Oneself as Another

Time and narrative

Book Review: The Theory of Communicative Action Vol. Two, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist ReasonThe Theory of Communicative Action Vol. Two, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason By: HabermasJurgen Translated by: McCarthyThomasBoston: Beacon Press. 1987. 457 pp. $37.50.

People think about health and illness in multifaceted ways, evidencing a conceptual complexity that corresponds to equally complex behaviours in relation to a diversity of healing practices. Stimulated by fieldwork in Lesotho and elsewhere, and engaging principally with Jurgen Habermas, we set out to introduce, explain and develop a conceptual innovation: healthworld. We argue that this notion describes and provides a key analytical tool for the field of health in its social context; a tool that can explain the empirical complexity of health beliefs (importantly, including religion) and behaviours, thereby illuminating possibilities for improving health practice and outcomes. Framed in relation to Habermas’s notion of lifeworld, the healthworld is identified as a distinctive ‘region’ of the lifeworld defined by a particular telos — that of comprehensive well-being, a lifeworld without dysfunction.

Paul Germond

Papers

Healthworlds: Conceptualizing Landscapes of Health and Healing