Culture, Disease, and Well-Being: The Grey Zone of Health and Illness – serie

Both sides in controversies tend to argue they have logic on their side. This book proposes that the interminable nature of these controversies suggests there is a problem with the main tool of logic, the syllogism. An alternative mode of judgment is needed. Drawing on contemporary and classic sources in social theory and philosophy, Stanley raffle argues that metaphors are not just aesthetic tools; they can be used to judge phenomena. Featuring case studies drawn from both literary material and current controversial debates, The Method of Metaphor ultimately demonstrates the value of this neglected potential of metaphoric reasoning and shows its far-reaching implications in both moral behaviour and moral education.

An interdisciplinary collection of essays on the medical and social articulation of death, this anthology considers to what extent a subject as elusive as death can be examined. Though it touches us all, we can perceive it only in life – with the predictable result that we treat it either as a clinical or social problem to be managed or as a phenomenon to be studied quantitatively. This volume goes beyond these models to question self-reflexively how the management of death is organized and motivated and the ways that death is at once feared and embraced. Drawing on the very latest in the medical humanities, Spectacular Death gives us an enlightening new perspective on death from the classical world to the twenty-first century.

Most discussions of health care center on medical advances, cost, and the roles of insurers and government agencies. With The Grey Zone of Health and Illness, Alan Blum offers a new perspective, outlining a highly nuanced theoretical approach to health and health care alike. Drawing on a range of thinkers, Blum explains how our current understanding of health care tends to posit it as a sort of state of permanent emergency, like the nuclear standoff of the Cold War. To move beyond that, he argues, will require a complete rethinking of health and sickness, self-governance and negligence. A heady, cutting-edge intervention in a critical area of society, The Grey Zone of Health and Illness will have wide ramifications in the academy and beyond.