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Health in Non-human Organisms

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Explaining Health Across the Sciences

Part of the book series: Healthy Ageing and Longevity ((HAL,volume 12))

Abstract

This chapter analyses attempts made to define health for non-human organisms. This could be done either as a bottom-up approach finding a common denominator that all organisms share, or as a top-down approach which starts with a certain valuable criterion that those organisms share. Through this chapter I will discuss both approaches. I will briefly discuss the concept of organism and why I only choose to discuss biological organisms. This chapter will also further develop a categorization of health definitions that acknowledges the variety of the different kinds of definitions. This is done as a two-level categorization consisting of categories and versions of these categories. I will go through relevant categories and versions in order to be able to say which could be fruitful to use as well as where science needs to be heading.

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Correspondence to Henrik Lerner .

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Lerner, H. (2020). Health in Non-human Organisms. In: Sholl, J., Rattan, S.I. (eds) Explaining Health Across the Sciences. Healthy Ageing and Longevity, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52663-4_19

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