Much research in the philosophy of psychiatry has been devoted to the characterization of the normal and the pathological. In this article, we identify and deconstruct two postulates that have held sway in the philosophy of psychiatry. The first postulate concerns the belief that clinicians would benefit from conceiving of psychiatric disorders as stable entities with clear boundaries. By relying on a symptom-based approach, we support a conception of psychiatric disorders whose symptoms are the products of many activated mechanisms in (...) mutual interactions. The second postulate concerns the way in which the philosophy of psychiatry has approached the question of harm. We posit that clinicians perceive harms primarily through networks of clinical manifestations. The identification and deconstruction of these two postulates leads us to propose a practical definition of a psychiatric disorder that is useful for the clinician, while adopting a principle of prudential conservatism that does not exclude other theoretical definitions of psychiatric disorder that are useful as an epistemic hub. Thus, we propose the following definition of a psychiatric disorder that is relevant to clinical practice: “a set of clinical manifestations belonging to the prototypical central core of psychiatry, organized in a causal network, involving at least one harm, and whose set of harms exceeds the traditional threshold of significance for a given psychiatric disorder, directly related to an activated mechanism. Such a network composed of clinical manifestations is frozen in a state that is unable to allow the deactivation of these manifestations spontaneously without a therapeutic intervention”. (shrink)

Staging and stratification are two diagnostic approaches that have introduced a more dynamic outlook on the development of diseases, thus participating in blurring the line between the normal and the pathological. First, diagnostic staging, aiming to capture how diseases evolve in time and/or space through identifiable and gradually more severe stages, may be said to lean on an underlying assumption of “temporal determinism”. Stratification, on the other hand, allows for the identification of various prognostic or predictive subgroups based on specific (...) markers, relying on a more “mechanistic” or “statistical” form of determinism. There are two medical fields in which these developments have played a significant role and have given rise to sometimes profound nosological transformations: oncology and psychiatry. Drawing on examples from these two fields, this paper aims to provide much needed conceptual clarifications on both staging and stratification in order to outline how several epistemological and ethical issues may, in turn, arise. We argue that diagnostic staging ought to be detached from the assumption of temporal determinism, though it should still play an essential role in adapting interventions to stage. In doing so, it would help counterbalance stratification’s own epistemological and ethical shortcomings. In this sense, the reflections and propositions developed in psychiatry can offer invaluable insights regarding how adopting a more transdiagnostic and cross-cutting perspective on temporality and disease dynamics may help combine both staging and stratification in clinical practice. (shrink)

The Spiritualist Movement is divided into three hardback volumes (handsomely produced) which between them contain 43 chapters on assorted aspects of the subject, the boundaries of which are generously interpreted. Most of the chapters are between 15 and 25 pages in length. The topics covered can be relatively narrow or relatively broad, and not all of them will be of keen interest to every reader. The contributors (who range from Ph.D. candidates to emeritus professors) are of varied academic backgrounds and (...) attitudes toward the phenomena or alleged phenomena of Spiritualism. Some are pretty skeptical, others less so-indeed (interestingly), several are or have been practicing mediums. However, excessive partisanship, pro or con, is refreshingly absent. The editor, Christopher Moreman, makes clear in his Introduction (which is printed in each of the three volumes) that his "collection" (he also refers to it as an "anthology") does not aim to provide a "comprehensive coverage of scholarship on Spiritualism," but rather to "illustrate the complexity of the movement and the ways it might be open to academic consideration." And this is the light in which we must consider it. (shrink)

Are we witnessing progress or regress in the recent increasing popularity and electoral success of populist politicians and parties in consolidated democratic nations? ... Is the innovative use of popular referendum in Great Britain to settle fundamental constitutional questions a progressive or regressive innovation? ... Similarly, is the increasing use of constituent assemblies to change constitutions across the world evidence of progress in democratic constitutionalism, or, a worryingly regressive change back toward unmediated popular majoritarianism? ... This paper reflects on some (...) of the perils and promise of framing such questions with the conceptual couplet of progress and regress. It considers four compelling critiques of the use of ‘progress’ and its cognates in sociopolitical theory, as well as arguing that such concepts are nevertheless ineliminable for our normative theories. The paper concludes by suggesting that we can avoid the most serious problems by employing only conceptions of political progress and regress that are piecemeal, pragmatic, and processual. (shrink)

Approaches to the Study of Man In this chapter we shall distinguish two broad approaches to the study of human behaviour, the natural scientific, ...

This paper argues that we should replace the common classification of theories of welfare into the categories of hedonism, desire theories, and objective list theories. The tripartite classification is objectionable because it is unduly narrow and it is confusing: it excludes theories of welfare that are worthy of discussion, and it obscures important distinctions. In its place, the paper proposes two independent classifications corresponding to a distinction emphasised by Roger Crisp: a four-category classification of enumerative theories (about which items constitute (...) welfare), and a four-category classification of explanatory theories (about why these items constitute welfare). (shrink)

This chapter surveys hybrid theories of well-being. It also discusses some criticisms, and suggests some new directions that philosophical discussion of hybrid theories might take.

Group-based reasons are reasons to play one’s part in some pattern of action that the members of some group could perform, because of the good features of the pattern. This paper discusses three broad conceptions of such reasons. According to the agency-first conception, there are no group-based reasons in cases where the relevant group is not or would not be itself an agent. According to the behaviour-first conception, what matters is that the other members of the group would play their (...) parts in the relevant pattern, not whether they would have the cooperative intentional states constitutive of group agency in doing so. This paper argues against these conceptions and in favour of the powers-first conception, according to which what matters is that the members of the group have practically relevant powers. (shrink)

Theorists of public reason such as John Rawls often idealize constitutional courts as exemplars of public reason. This paper raises questions about the seduction and limits of analogies between theorists’ account of public reason and actual constitutional jurisprudence. Examining the work product of the United States Supreme Court, the paper argues that while it does engage in reason-giving to support its decisions—as the public reason strategy suggests— those reasons are (largely) legalistic and specifically juristic reasons—not the theorists’ idealized moral-political reasons (...) on matters of fundamental principle. But if constitutional courts do not engage on matters of fundamental principle, then a public reason strategy for assuaging democratic worries about judicial review would no longer be open: prominent liberal and deliberative democratic theorists could no longer point to the alleged superiority of constitutional courts to speak in the name of, and for, the people’s shared political principles. The paper extends beyond the U.S. case study by pointing to three institutional factors explaining the disanalogy between what some constitutional courts do and what public reason theories require them to do. It concludes with considerations about whether the public reason strategy might be more successfully applied to international courts. (shrink)

Difficult Atheism shows how contemporary French philosophy is rethinking the legacy of the death of God in ways that take the debate beyond the narrow confines of atheism into the much broader domain of post-theological thinking. Christopher Watkin argues that Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux each elaborate a distinctive approach to the post-theological, but that each approach still struggles to do justice to the death of God.

This article proposes a way of understanding Kantianism, act-utilitarianism and some other important ethical theories according to which they are all versions of the same kind of theory, sharing a common structure. I argue that this is a profitable way to understand the theories discussed. It is charitable to the theories concerned; it emphasizes the common ground between them; it gives us insights into the differences between them; and it provides a method for generating new ethical theories worth studying. The (...) article briefly discusses the relationship between these ideas and some other recent proposals that emphasize the common ground between Kantianism and versions of consequentialism. (shrink)

One recently popular strategy for avoiding the moral error theory is via a ‘companions in guilt’ argument. I focus on those recently popular arguments that take epistemic facts as a companion in guilt for moral facts. I claim that there is an internal tension between the two main premises of these arguments. It is a consequence of this that either the soundness or the dialectical force of the companions in guilt argument is undermined. I defend this claim via (i) analogy (...) with philosophical debates concerning the indispensability of mathematical objects to natural science, and (ii) discussion of the ‘entanglement’ of epistemic concepts and moral concepts in deliberation. I conclude by proposing a positive view of what kind of argument must be used if moral error theories are to be successfully undermined. (shrink)

Authentizitat ist ein in unserem kulturellen Raum allgegenwartiges Phanomen. Doch wem oder was begegnen wir, wenn wir meinen, uns selbst verwirklichen oder alternativ einfach uns selbst treu sein zu mussen? Christoph Wiesinger zeigt, dass wir auf ein Selbst geworfen werden, das zwar als homogener Nukleus der Person projiziert werden kann, sich aber bei genauerem Hinsehen als komplexe sozial verinnerlichte Struktur entpuppt. Das Selbst ist keineswegs objektiv zu fassen, sondern unterliegt sozialen Genesen und wird durch soziale Adressierung unterschiedlich formiert. Das Ereignis (...) von Authentizitat gibt somit Anlass zur Reflexion der Differenz zwischen Erwartung und Erfahrung. Christoph Wiesinger legt die Strukturen des Phanomens der Authentizitat frei, zeigt die theologischen Implikationen auf und diskutiert die praktisch-theologischen Konsequenzen. (shrink)

Die Kernthese der Paracelsischen Naturphilosophie, die Ahnlichkeit von Mensch und Welt, festgelegt in der Analogie von Mikro- und Makrokosmos, enthullt einen -Code-, der als konstitutives Moment samtliche Aussagen auf einer prakonzeptionellen Ebene organisiert, samtliche Teilbereiche in ihrer funktionalen Bedeutung fur das -Ganze- markiert und schliesslich im Sinne Foucaults zu einer -diskursiven Formation- werden lasst. Die auf diese Weise vorgefuhrte Erfahrungsform von Welt und Natur steht zu dem neuzeitlich-technischen Verfugungswissen in einer historischen Diskontinuitat.".

Basing his view on the object relations theories of the "British School" of psychoanalysis, Christopher Bollas examines the human subject's memories of its earliest experiences (during infancy and childhood) of the object, whether it be mother, father, or self. He explains in well-written and non-technical language how the object can affect the child, or "cast in shadow," without the child being able to process this relation through mental representations of language.

In this article Cristoph Wulf examines the basic concepts of pedagogy and educational science in the German-speaking world, looking at education and socialization from the perspective of educational anthropology. He makes evident that the complex German concept of Bildung, in particular, can only be fully understood by means of a historical and philosophical analysis.

This article explores the use of interactive and kinetic technologies in contemporary art practice as a means by which artists engage with conditions of social and ecological crisis. In a context in which the perpetual exploitation of human and natural resources threatens the sustainability of the planet and all earthy life, the language of interactivity provides perspective into the interconnectivity of organisms and the interdependence of biological, social, economic and political systems. The interactive, kinetic work affords a distilled set of (...) relationships and movements that rely on connection and participation and, as such, serve as simple and relatable models of complex and interrelated systems. By engendering a sense of fragile suspension between sustainability and collapse – a felt experience of the present ecological crisis – the artists discussed incite affective responses through their works that are argued to be distinctly empathic in nature. Contemporary environmental theory provides insight into a shifting relationship between human and ‘nature’ that dissolves the previously instated binary in favour of an empathic consciousness, at the core of which is a recognition of the interdependence of living organisms. Art historical insight of interactivity as a means of production reveals a notable link between interactive art, destruction and trauma. The affective response engendered in contemporary works that grapple with concepts of transience and mortality relies on the very human knowledge of the body as a relatable site of experience, particularly pain and trauma. The idea of empathy as prefigured by violence and loss is particularly resonant in relation to contemporary ecological trauma. Works by artists including Rebecca Horn, Theo Jansen, Natalie Jeremijenko, Alan Rath, Lygia Clark, Alexandra Karakashian and Robert Krishner are discussed in terms of interactivity and kineticism as prompting empathic engagement in the context of environmental entropy. (shrink)

Originally published in 1968 The Founders of Psychical Research is centred upon prominent members in the Society for Psychical Research - during its early years. It passes over important aspects of the S.P.R.'s story and deals at some length with outside matters.

Person-centered care offers a promising way to manage clinicians’ conscientious objection to providing services they consider morally wrong. Health care centered on persons, rather than patients, recognizes clinicians and patients on the same stratum. The moral interests of clinicians, as persons, thus warrant as much consideration as those of other persons, including patients. Interconnected moral interests of clinicians, patients, and society construct the clinician as a socially embedded and integrated self, transcending the simplistic duality of private conscience versus public role (...) expectations. In this milieu of blurred boundaries, person-centered care offers a constructive way to accommodate conscientious objection by clinicians. The constitutionally social nature of clinicians commits and enables them, through care mechanisms such as self-care, to optimize the quality of health care and protect the welfare of patients. To advance these conditions, it is recommended that the medical profession develop a person-centered culture of care, along with clinician virtues and skills for person-centered communication. (shrink)

This paper connects two ideas. The first is that some common responses to ethical views are responses to their degrees of pragmatism, where a view’s degree of pragmatism is its sensitivity to ethically relevant changes in the actor’s circumstances. I claim that we feel the pull of opposing pro-pragmatic and antipragmatic intuitions in certain cases. This suggests a project, of searching for an ethical view capable of doing justice to these opposing intuitions in some way. The second central idea is (...) that a theory of pattern-based reasons looks more promising than the obvious alternatives to fulfil this role, amongst Teleological theories at least. Pattern-based reasons are reasons to perform some action because of the goodness or rightness of a larger pattern of action—such as a pattern that a group could perform or that the actor could perform over an extended period—of which the immediate action is a mere part. Existing theories of such reasons share two features that prevent them explaining the intuitions we wish to explain: they consider only one pattern at a time (they are monist), and they treat patterns as eligible only if the agents concerned are willing to realise them (they accept the Willingness Requirement). But we need not accept these doctrines. Moreover, a theory of patternbased reasons without them is able to explain the pro- and anti-pragmatic intuitions in an elegant way, and has other attractive features. (shrink)

One of the most important elements of Hegel’s philosophical anthropology is his moral psychology. In particular, his understanding of the relation between motivations and reason plays a crucial intermediate role in connecting his anthropological meditations on the complete nature of the human being with his political theory of actualized freedom. Whereas recent important work on Hegel’s moral psychology has detected a Kantian distinction between natural desires and the rational perspective, the activity of practical reason actually takes place within motivations themselves (...) on Hegel’s view. The exercise of the free, rational will is best understood in terms of its role in shaping the experience of malleable, indeterminate motivations. Rather than stepping back, the free agent on Hegel’s account delves further into the motivation, acting on it in the dual sense of being guided by and transforming it. This is what it means for Hegel to conceive of agency as self-expression while maintaining the centrality of reason for Free Will. Hegel says that when we go further into the motivations in this way, we should stop speaking of motivation in terms of drives and instead begin speaking of character. (shrink)

What makes philosophy on the continent of Europe so different and exciting? And why does it have such a reputation for being 'difficult'? Continental philosophy was initiated amid the revolutionary ferment of the 18th century, philosophers such as Kant and Hegel confronting the extremism of the time with theories that challenged the very formation of individual and social consciousness. Covering the great philosophers of the modern and postmodern eras – from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze right to up Agamben and (...) Žižek – and philosophical movements from German idealism to deconstruction and feminism – Christopher Kul-Want and Piero brilliantly elucidate some of the most thrilling and powerful ideas ever to have been discussed. (shrink)

Here, for the first time, Christopher Kul-Want brings together twenty-five texts on art written by twenty philosophers. Covering the Enlightenment to postmodernism, these essays draw on Continental philosophy and aesthetics, the Marxist intellectual tradition, and psychoanalytic theory, and each is accompanied by an overview and interpretation. The volume features Martin Heidegger on Van Gogh's shoes and the meaning of the Greek temple; Georges Bataille on Salvador Dal’'s The Lugubrious Game; Theodor W. Adorno on capitalism and collage; Walter Benjamin and Roland (...) Barthes on the uncanny nature of photography; Sigmund Freud on Leonardo Da Vinci and his interpreters; Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva on the paintings of Holbein; Freud's postmodern critic, Gilles Deleuze on the visceral paintings of Francis Bacon; and Giorgio Agamben on the twin traditions of the Duchampian ready-made and Pop Art. Kul-Want elucidates these texts with essays on aesthetics, from Hegel and Nietzsche to Badiou and Rancire, demonstrating how philosophy adopted a new orientation toward aesthetic experience and subjectivity in the wake of Kant's powerful legacy. (shrink)

This chapter examines Karl Jaspers’s influential distinction between understanding and explaining, and its significance in psychiatry. It first outlines one way of interpreting the distinction, on which it is connected to the distinction between singular and general causal claims. It then discusses one reason for thinking that understanding has an essential role to play in psychiatry: Not achieving at least some level of understanding in the context of dealing with psychiatric patients would constitute a particular kind of epistemic failure—a failure (...) to recognize their illness for the particular type of illness it is. Drawing on some ideas recently put forward by Kenneth Kendler and John Campbell, it also illustrates the particular kind of understanding that is crucial in this context. (shrink)

Details the role that giants have played in the history of humankind. _...style is breezy and accessible...a pleasant browse._ --BOOKLIST.

The idea of the ‘executive technician’ or the teacher who follows theoretically prescribed rules is outlined. Through a discussion of the ideas of Oakeshott the idea of a rule‐following rigid practitioner of prescribed protocols is developed. The advantages of this conception of teaching as well as its disadvantages are outlined. Some practical applications of the executive technician conception of the teacher in both developed and developing countries are presented.

This chapter will outline a third conception of the role of the teacher, the professional technician or professional for short. The professional teacher is one who most corresponds to the description of professional occupations described in the literature already discussed. The professional described in this chapter will be an ideal type, whose attributes will be found to a greater or lesser degree in actual teachers around the world. Should this be a preferred model of what a teacher should be? The (...) answer depends on what kind of education system a society wants and the degree to which it is prepared to invest in such a kind of education system. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the analysis of Joseph Raz on coercion, trust, and citizenship. The chapter starts with a number of brief comments on some of his observations regarding the doctrine of liberty and the preference for minimum government. The chapter also includes one of Raz's arguments that states that some people favour non-perfectionist forms of government out of a misunderstanding of the implications of perfectionism for liberty.

It was not so long ago that the dominant picture of Kant’s practical philosophy was formalistic, focusing almost exclusively on his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and Critique of Practical Reason. However, the overall picture of Kant’s wide-ranging philosophy has since been broadened and deepened. We now have a much more complete understanding of the range of Kant’s practical interests and of his contributions to areas as diverse as anthropology, pedagogy, and legal theory. What remains somewhat obscure, however, is (...) how these different contributions hang together in the way that Kant suggests that they must. This book explores these different conceptions of humanity, morality, and legality in Kant as main ‘manifestations’ or ‘dimensions’ of practical normativity. These interrelated terms play a crucial role in highlighting different rational obligations, their source, and their applicability in the face of changing circumstances. (shrink)

What would it look like for researchers to take non-human animal rights seriously? Recent discussions foster the impression that scientific practice needs to be reformed to make animal research ethical: just as there is ethically rigorous human research, so there can be ethically rigorous animal research. We argue that practically little existing animal research would be ethical and that ethical animal research is not scalable. Since animal research is integral to the existing scientific paradigm, taking animal rights seriously requires a (...) radical, wholesale reimagining of science.Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT05340426. (shrink)

I defend a new reading of Spinoza's account of causation that reconciles the strengths of the mechanist and formal cause interpretations by locating instances of nature's fixed and unchanging laws inside individual natures; natures are efficacious because that's where the laws are. God's necessity, for instance, follows from certain logical principles contained within God's nature. Causes between finite particulars likewise stem entirely from finite natures. They do so, I argue, because finite instances of nature's fixed and unchanging laws are inscribed (...) within those natures. In each of these instances, effects follow from natures on account of laws contained within them. (shrink)

Temporal binding occurs when people observe two events that they believe to be causally connected: They underestimate the length of the interval between those two events, when compared with their estimates of the length of intervals between events they believe to be causally unrelated. I discuss temporal binding in the context of Dennett and Kinsbourne’s (Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 15(2), 183–201, 1992) influential argument levelled at what they call ‘Cartesian Materialism’. In particular, I argue that Dennett and Kinsbourne’s argument trades (...) on a representational conception of perceptual experience, which blurs the boundary between perception and judgement, and that temporal binding can serve as a case study for developing an alternative, relational, conception of perceptual experience and of its relation to judgement. Based on research on the mechanisms underlying temporal binding, I provide an explanation of the phenomenon in which perception and judgement play clearly distinct roles. (shrink)

What is required for an individual to entertain a singular thought about an object they have encountered before but that is currently no longer within their perceptual range? More specifically, does the individual have to think about the object as having been encountered in the past? I consider this question against the background of the assumption that non-human animals are cognitively ‘stuck in the present’. Does this mean that, for them, ‘out of sight is out of mind’, as, e.g., Schopenhauer (...) seems to have thought? I suggest an alternative answer, also drawing on some empirical work on animal cognition. (shrink)

What role should a citizen's religious convictions play in her political activities? Is she, for example, permitted to decide on the basis of her religious convictions to support laws that criminalize abortion or discourage homosexual relations? Christopher Eberle is deeply at odds with the dominant orthodoxy among political theorists about the relation of religion and politics. His argument is that a citizen may responsibly ground her political commitments on religious beliefs, even if her only reasons for her political commitments are (...) religious in nature. His ideal of citizenship allows citizens to engage in politics without privatizing their religious commitments, and yet does not license mindless and intransigent sectarianism. An inherently controversial book that offers a substantial challenge to political liberalism, it will be read by students and professionals in philosophy, political science, law and religious studies, and general readers seeking insight into the relationship between religious commitments and liberal politics. (shrink)