Understanding the Dynamics of Health

by Patrick Daly

Overview

Understanding the Dynamics of Health develops a comprehensive framework for understanding health and its impairments, drawing on the work of Bernard Lonergan. By integrating perspectives from common sense, theory, practice, and finitude, this book examines health as a multidimensional phenomenon shaped by organic, psychological, cognitive, and social-historical factors.

Providing a systematic and critical foundation for uniting diverse health-related disciplines, from network biology and neuroscience to narrative medicine, bioethics, and public health philosophy, this book’s holistic framework not only emphasizes the lived experience of the whole person but also establishes a methodological approach for integrating the ever-expanding fields of health science and healthcare.

This book is essential reading for scholars, practitioners, and students in medicine, healthcare, and philosophy, as well as anyone seeking a deeper, more integrated understanding of health in today’s complex world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781487570910
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press
Publication date:	12/15/2025
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Patrick Daly is a physician, philosopher, and a research associate at the Lonergan Institute at Boston College.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
Part 1: Health and Common Sense
2. Health as Experienced
3. Making Sense of Health as Experienced
Part 2: Health in Theory
4. Health and Normativity
5. Multilevel Dynamics of Function, Dysfunction, Risk, and Boundaries
6. Disordered Subjectivity
7. Theoretical Summation
Part 3: Health Care as Praxis
8. Praxis and Interiority
9. Clinical Health: Caring for One Another
10. Social Health: Caring to Cooperate
11. Cultural Health: Caring about Meaning
Part 4: Health and Finitude
12. Aging, Death, and Immortality
13. Hope and Healing in the Drama of Existence
14. Epilogue
Glossary
Index