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Diseases of the soul are more dangerous and more numerous than those of the body. ~Cicero

... I love this quote…. Our ability to get things wrong intellectually is infinitely greater and more probable than for us to get things wrong physically… It is just easier to ignore the intellectual failings. Unrelenting Skepticism, in my understanding is a denial of our ability to recognize that we have a disease of the mind. Which leads me to a quote from one of my favorite films. “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” This is all akin to a point I made earlier about calling things that are problems, not problems; and then saying we have dealt with the problem.

1) Certainly, what each person himself thinks of (his personal phantasm) as the tea-kettle reality is nothing more than “a set of unconscious understandings that also varies from person to person”. BUT that does not mean that the ontological reality to which the person is pointing with these personalized thoughts, ideas, and descriptions is itself nothing more than these personal thoughts, ideas, and descriptions.

So, my ideas and descriptions of the “teakettle” might be different from yours but the tea kettle we are both failing to describe is the same and it can’t be anything but that or else when we talk to each other about the world we are speaking of ontologically different things by using similar names when what we think we are doing is using different names to describe the same ontological reality.

To give up the notion that we are all pointing at the same thing is, in my mind, to acknowledge that there is no reason for us to talk to each other at all since we have nothing in common with each other.

2) Health, either bodily or mental, is best described as an activity and not a static state of being in a particular disposition or orientation. I think our discussion thus far has led us to that fact, unambiguously. But, the path we have taken to get there has diverged into the “teakettle people” and the “no teakettle people”. That difference does color the meaning of our definition as health as an activity. 

What this means coming from a teakettle person’s perspective is something like this:

Health, as an activity, is an excellent activity/ a virtue. (See Aristotle’s Ethics, book 2 or 3 I think) Virtues/one’s degree of excellence is measured by growth. For example, a fat slothful person who learns to exercise has cultivated his health in a way that an average person (Just because you're not sick doesn't mean you're healthy. ~Author Unknown) who does not exercise has not.  Repeated activity/formation of a habit leads to “healthy activity” or “well functioning” in a way that is not characteristic of individual acts/ or states.  This view of health allows us a tremendous amount of leewaywhen we are naming things healthy or unhealthy. We need not even say that allfat people are “unhealthy”. 

This definition of health I think is legitimate fruit of our semester's labor and certainly less wrong than most of my earlier thoughts.