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Updated: Aug 16, 2025

Assessment and Communication for People with Disorders of Consciousness
Published on: August 1, 2017
Health, consciousness, and the evolution of subjects
Walter Veit1,2,3
1Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK.
Abstract:
The goal of this programmatic paper is to highlight a close connection between the core problem in the philosophy of medicine, i.e. the concept of health, and the core problem of the philosophy of mind, i.e. the concept of consciousness. I show when we look at these phenomena together, taking the evolutionary perspective of modern state-based behavioural and life-history theory used as the teleonomic tool to Darwinize the agent- and subject-side of organisms, we will be in a better position to make sense of them both as natural phenomena.
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