This new edition of Mind, Meaning, and Mental Disorder addresses key issues in the philosophy of psychiatry, drawing on both philosophical and scientific theory. The main idea of the book is that causal models of mental disorders have to include meaningful processes as well as any possible lower-level physical causes, and this propsoal is illustrated with detailed discussion of current models of common mental health problems. First published in 1996, this volume played an important role in bridging the gap between (...) philosophy and psychiatry, and introducing those in psychiatry to philosophical ideas somewhat neglected in their field. Completely updated, the new edition of this acclaimed volume draws on the strengths of the first edition, and will be a central text in the burgeoning field of philosophy of psychiatry. (shrink)

Over the last 50 years, the term professionalism has undergone a widespread expansion in its use and a semantic shift in its meaning. As a result, it is at risk of losing its descriptive and analytical value and becoming instead simply an empty evaluative label, a fate described by C. S. Lewis as ‘verbicide’. This article attempts to rescue professionalism from this fate by down-sizing its extension and reassigning some of its work to two other ethical domains, introduced as the (...) neologisms organizationalism and sur-moralism. Professionalism is defined as a morality based in system of obligations that are assumed by physicians over the course of their professional training and which primarily refer to two groups: patients and colleagues, including trainees. Organizationalism is also a morality, but the obligations are owed to the employing organization and on different grounds. A third ethical domain, here called sur-moralism, comprises actions that are not based in obligations. They are discretionary and potentially meritorious; they cannot be required by the profession or organization. This article presents a conceptual model of the three ethical domains and the shifting borders between them. One practical benefit of this typology is that physicians can more accurately understand the nature and sources of obligations that they are asked to accept, and when necessary prioritize them. Another is that physicians will be able to describe the potential tension between the three domains and understand how and why the borders between them can move. Both should help physicians to be more ethically oriented to their work settings. (shrink)

This book offers a broad, systematic philosophical approach to mental disorder. The authors spend the first half of the book presenting their basic philosophical allegiances, and they go on to apply their philosophical approach to mental disorder. As the authors note, psychiatry has been largely neglected by contemporary philosophy of mind, and this book is a laudable attempt to rectify the situation by producing a sustained and clinically well-informed philosophical treatment of mental disorder.

This article presents a model for doing clinical ethics consultations. It describes four phases of a consultation: investigation, assessment, action, and review. The consultant must identify the problem and determine whether it is a nonmoral problem (e.g., lack of information) or a moral problem involving uncertainty or conflict. The consultant must be able to identify the types of moral arguments that are used by participants to the situation. A simplified taxonomy of moral arguments is presented. The consultant must then assess (...) the arguments for their cogency and identify where they align and where they conflict. The action phase of the consultation involves finding ways for the arguments to be presented and hopefully reconciled. The normative limitations to the role of the consultant are described. (shrink)

Just why a patient should trust a particular healer isa question that has not been adequately explored inthe literature on healing. This ethnographiccase-report examines the healing performance of achiropractor and proposes that it contains fourintrinsic claims to trustworthiness: he claims to bea qualified and sincere healer who is inpossession of knowledge and techniques that derivetheir power from their truth content and whichempower him to make beneficial changes in thepatient. Taking each claim in turn I described thenature of the claim, how (...) it might be adequatelyvalidated, ways in which his healing performance mightvalidate it and how he might be assisted by thepatient, and how their actual validation may bedistorted by the healer and patient. It is suggestedthat while unusual in many regards, this unorthodoxhealing performance may be a foil by which toexamine other more orthodox healing performances. (shrink)

This article examines Ian McEwan's script for director Richard Eyre's film, The Ploughman's Lunch, the title of which alludes to a deceptive, post-World War II advertising campaign that promulgated a false narrative about British tradition. McEwan's script, and Eyre's film adaptation of it, offer a prescient exposé of Britain's culture of mendacity in the 1980s in ways that draw on rule-consequentialist ethics to maintain that lying on the personal, professional, and political level has a pernicious effect on society. McEwan's work (...) on the film also marks a crucial turning point in the author's career, one in which he first begins to explore complex ethical and moral conundrums that would figure prominently in his major fiction. (shrink)

Separate from the question of whether our patients believe us as doctors is the question of whether we ourselves believe in our healing ‘performances’. Borrowing from Bernard Williams’ model of truth based on the two irreducible virtues of sincerity and accuracy, this article describes a spectrum of states of self-belief, from the quack who does not believe in his acts to the fanatic who does not ‘dis-believe’, with ranges of pious fraud and bad faith in between and on either side (...) of a variable range of justified self-belief. I describe how as practitioners we move and are moved up and down this range throughout our careers and as a result of the behaviors of others. The model provides the basis for a critique of the marketing efforts of industries related to medical practice. (shrink)

Shepherd propounds a theory of mind with a fair claim to be better than Hume’s at explaining the sources of commonly held human beliefs about causal necessity due largely to her relational theory of sense perception. In comparison with Hume’s account, it incorporates a more sophisticated treatment of mental representation, especially the role of relational structure and logical form. Most important, perhaps, Shepherd’s theory enforces the division, obscured by Hume, between the evidence of necessity and the metaphysical foundation of necessity.

Theories of discourse bring to realism new ideas about how knowledge develops and how representations of reality are influenced. We gain an understanding of the conceptual aspect of social life and the processes by which meaning is produced. This collection reflects the growing interest realist critics have shown towards forms of discourse theory and deconstruction. The diverse range of contributions address such issues as the work of Derrida and deconstruction, discourse theory, Eurocentrism and poststructuralism. What unites all of the contributions (...) is a sense that it is essential to provide a realist alternative to the hitherto dominance of social constructionism, hermeneutics and postmodernism, over many of the issues discussed. By developing a realist perspective the different authors attempt to embed discourse within the structured nature of the reality of the world. Realism can situate language, discourse and ideology within context specific, or 'causally efficacious' circumstances. Realism can help to uncover issues of power, representation, and subjectivity and how discursive and other social practices produce real effects. This can help us understand the manner in which social structures are reproduced through various forms of ideology and discourse. And by knowing this, we can start to address questions concerning human emancipation and how the world is to be transformed. (shrink)

The question "What is mental illness?" raises many issues in many contexts, personal, social, legal, and scientific. This chapter reviews mental health problems as they appear to the person with the problems, and to family and friends-before the person attends the clinic and is given a diagnosis-a time in which whether there really is a problem, as opposed to life's normal troubles and variations, is undecided, as also the nature of the problem, if such it be, and the related matter (...) what kind of expert advice should be sought. Once at the clinic, a diagnosis may be given-using criteria well-worked-out in the diagnostic manuals. The chapter discusses the conceptualizations of mental disorder in the diagnostic manuals, their rationale, and what can and cannot be reasonably expected of them. There are more position statements than definitions, and while they signal many dilemmas, they do not resolve them. Attempts to do so in the surrounding literature on the concept of mental illness are reviewed in the chapter, with conclusions favoring the features emphasized in the diagnostic manuals: distress and impairment. Finally the chapter considers how far the science may help draw boundaries around mental illness. (shrink)

In the wake of the Scientific Revolution, the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the complete demolition of traditional structures of authority, scientific thought, and belief by the new philosophy and the philosophes, including Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau. The Radical Enlightenment played a part in this revolutionary process, which effectively overthrew all justification for monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical power, as well as man's dominance over woman, theological dominance of education, and slavery. Despite the present day interest in the revolutions of (...) the eighteenth century, the origins and rise of the Radical Enlightenment have received limited scholarly attention. The greatest obstacle to the movement finding its proper place in modern historical writing is its international scope: the Racial Enlightenment was not French, British, German, Italian, Jewish or Dutch, but all of these at the same time. In this wide-ranging volume, Jonathan Israel offers a novel interpretation of the Radical Enlightenment down to La Mettie and Diderot, two of its key exponents. Particular emphasis is placed on the pivotal role of Spinoza and the widespread underground international philosophical movement known before 1750 as Spinozism. (shrink)

The nature of the real self -- Whole person and duality -- How nature is dual -- Real self and false self -- A primary certainty -- Certainty in the self -- The original cogito argument -- Overcoming representation -- The theory of right and wrong -- The defining principle -- Narrowing the definition -- The centrality of reason -- A question of proof -- Reason and intelligence -- A universal activity -- Human and animal consciousness -- Anti-spiritual assumptions -- (...) Intellect and religious ideals -- Creativity and spirituality -- The anomaly of creativity -- An archetypal view of creation -- Creativity resistant to systems -- Conforming to the divine pattern -- Happiness and the extension of time -- Happiness distinct from pleasure -- Implications for ascetic values -- Collective suffering -- Transcendence and normal experience -- The inner duality of consciousness -- The core of consciousness -- Theology and reductionism -- A radical conclusion -- The abstract and the concrete -- Common sense concreteness -- Mediation by living organisms -- Spirituality and power -- The freedom of the will -- Confusions about free will -- Free will and release from fate -- Arguments for free will -- Freedom and knowledge of truth -- The law of action and reaction -- Sources in scripture -- The causal principle and continuity -- What controls the world? -- Causality includes free will -- Choice of the lesser evil -- Apparent breaches of the law -- The insentience of the active faculties -- Cosmic reaction and judgement -- Consequences for modern religion -- Providence and fate -- Forms of cosmic order -- Providence and archetypal order -- Fate, providence, and salvation -- Fate and astrology. (shrink)

This book brings together anthropological studies of human-animal relations among Indigenous Peoples in three regions of the Americas: the Andes, Amazonia and the American Arctic. Through ethnographic essays, the authors illustrate and compare entanglements of human and other-than-human lives.

This chapter discusses reasons why we have no prospect of knowing whether or not matter thinks. It focuses on the mechanist hypothesis, its purported explanatory scope, and John Locke's commitment to it. The chapter then demonstrates God's immateriality and its implications for the possibility that God has given perception and thought to some material things. It addresses the notion of divine superaddition elaborated in letters to Stillingfleet and considers how thinking, extension, solidity, and motion are connected in case they do (...) coexist in the same substance. The whole difference between Locke and his opponents on the epistemic possibility of thinking matter comes down to this. He maintains, and they deny, that we know the fixed nature of substances of various kinds, a constituent of a substance that determines the powers it necessarily has and those it necessarily lacks. (shrink)

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

Epistemology has for a long time focused on the concept of knowledge and tried to answer questions such as whether knowledge is possible and how much of it there is. Often missing from this inquiry, however, is a discussion on the value of knowledge. In The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding Jonathan Kvanvig argues that epistemology properly conceived cannot ignore the question of the value of knowledge. He also questions one of the most fundamental assumptions in (...) epistemology, namely that knowledge is always more valuable than the value of its subparts. Taking Platos' Meno as a starting point of his discussion, Kvanvig tackles the different arguments about the value of knowledge and comes to the conclusion that knowledge is less valuable than generally assumed. Clearly written and well argued, this 2003 book will appeal to students and professionals in epistemology. (shrink)

Conditional sentences are among the most intriguing and puzzling features of language, and analysis of their meaning and function has important implications for, and uses in, many areas of philosophy. Jonathan Bennett, one of the world's leading experts, distils many years' work and teaching into this Philosophical Guide to Conditionals, the fullest and most authoritative treatment of the subject. An ideal introduction for undergraduates with a philosophical grounding, it also offers a rich source of illumination and stimulation for graduate (...) students and professional philosophers. (shrink)

One reason why we find the causal theory of reference so interesting is because it provides an account of de re necessity. Necessity is not only predicated of statements but also of objects. It is not only discovered by means of linguistic analysis but also by means of empirical investigation. And this means that truths we once described as contingent turn out to be necessary after all. We may think that this account of de re necessity is due to the (...) causal theorists' open acceptance of essentialism. Certainly essentialism provides an account of de re necessity. The problem, however, is that the causal theorists do not prove essentialism so much as presuppose it. Nevertheless, they still provide an account of de re necessity - an account of de re necessity that owes nothing to essentialism. And it is this account of necessity that I plan to discuss in this paper. (shrink)

Liberalism without Perfection offers an introduction to the debate between liberal perfectionism and political liberalism. This book is a new account and defence of Rawlsian political liberalism, one of the most discussed, but widely misunderstood and criticized theories in contemporary political theory.

This title presents a comprehensive guide to interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) which is an increasingly popular approach to qualitative inquiry taught to undergraduate and postgraduate students today.

Introduction As its title indicates, this book is intended to provide an introduction to the main topics currently discussed under the rather unclear ...

" Here Jonathan Lear argues that irony is one of the tools we use to live seriously, to get the hang of becoming human.

Timely and provocative essays on bioethical questions brought to the forefront by the bioterrorist threat.

Iris Murdoch was not only one of post-war Britain's most celebrated and prolific novelists - she was also an influential philosopher, whose work was concerned with the question of the good and how we can see our moral worlds more clearly. Murdoch believed that paying attention to art is a way for us to become less self-centred, and this book argues that cinema is the perfect form of art to enable us to do this. Bringing together Murdoch's moral philosophy and (...) contemporary cinema to build a dialogue about vision, ethics and love, author Lucy Bolton encourages us to view cinema as a way of studying other worlds and moral journeys, and to reflect upon their ethical significance in the world of the film and in our daily lives. (shrink)

Many philosophers have been attracted to the view that reasons are premises of good reasoning – that reasons to φ are premises of good reasoning towards φ-ing. However, while this reasoning view is indeed attractive, it faces a problem accommodating outweighed reasons. In this article, I argue that the standard solution to this problem is unsuccessful and propose an alternative, which draws on the idea that good patterns of reasoning can be defeasible. I conclude by drawing out implications for the (...) debate over pragmatic reasons for belief and other attitudes and for one influential form of reductionism about the normative. (shrink)

A neurologist presents evidence for locating the unconscious--Freud's concept--within the actual physiology of the brain, in a study that explains current knowledge about perception, memory, sleep, dreams, and Freud's theory of the unconscious.

In this paper I argue in favour of a new definition of presentism that I call ‘existence presentism’ (EP). Typically, presentism is defined as the thesis that ‘only present objects exist’, or ‘nothing exists that is non-present’.1 I assume these statements to be equivalent. I call these statements of presentism ‘conventional presentism’ (CP). First, in §2, I rehearse arguments due to Ulrich Meyer that purport to show that presentism is not adequately defined as CP. In §§2.1–2.4 I show that considerations (...) of the sort raised by Meyer infect attempts to define presentism, due to Thomas Crisp, Tom Stoneham, and Theodore Sider. Thus the first half of the paper is constituted by a negative project that looks to show how extant definitions of presentism fail. In the second half of the paper, I continue in the negative theme in §3, before laying out EP and demonstrating that it solves the problems faced by CP and offering explanations of how to make sense of certain key notions that lie at the heart of EP. I conclude that EP is preferable to CP. (shrink)

The study of conscious experience per se has not kept pace with the dramatic advances in PET, fMRI and other brain-scanning technologies. If anything, the standard approaches to examining the 'view from within' involve little more than cataloguing its readily accessible components. Thus the study of lived subjective experience is still at the level of Aristotelian science, leading to a widespread scepticism over the possibility of a truly scientific study of conscious experience. Drawing on a wide range of approaches -- (...) from phenomenology to meditation -- The View From Within examines the possibility of a disciplined approach to the study of subjective states. The focus is on the practical issues involved. (shrink)

This book represents the first major attempt by any author to provide an integrated account of the evidence for bias in human reasoning across a wide range of disparate psychological literatures. The topics discussed involve both deductive and inductive reasoning as well as statistical judgement and inference. In addition, the author proposes a general theoretical approach to the explanations of bias and considers the practical implications for real world decision making. The theoretical stance of the book is based on a (...) distinction between preconscious heuristic processes which determine the mental representation of 'relevant' features of the problem content, and subsequent analytic reasoning processes which generate inferences and judgements. Phenomena discussed and interpreted within this framework include feature matching biases in propositional reasoning, confirmation bias, biasing and debiasing effects of knowledge on reasoning, and biases in statistical judgement normally attributed to 'availability' and 'representativeness' heuristics. In the final chapter, the practical consequences of bias for real life decision making are considered, together with various issues concerning the problem of 'debiasing'. The major approaches discussed are those involving education and training on the one hand, and the development of intelligent software and interactive decision aids on the other. (shrink)

Research on the capacity to understand others' minds has tended to focus on representations ofbeliefs,which are widely taken to be among the most central and basic theory of mind representations. Representations ofknowledge, by contrast, have received comparatively little attention and have often been understood as depending on prior representations of belief. After all, how could one represent someone as knowing something if one does not even represent them as believing it? Drawing on a wide range of methods across cognitive science, (...) we ask whether belief or knowledge is the more basic kind of representation. The evidence indicates that nonhuman primates attribute knowledge but not belief, that knowledge representations arise earlier in human development than belief representations, that the capacity to represent knowledge may remain intact in patient populations even when belief representation is disrupted, that knowledge (but not belief) attributions are likely automatic, and that explicit knowledge attributions are made more quickly than equivalent belief attributions. Critically, the theory of mind representations uncovered by these various methods exhibits a set of signature features clearly indicative of knowledge: they are not modality-specific, they are factive, they are not just true belief, and they allow for representations of egocentric ignorance. We argue that these signature features elucidate the primary function of knowledge representation: facilitating learning from others about the external world. This suggests a new way of understanding theory of mind – one that is focused on understanding others' minds in relation to the actual world, rather than independent from it. (shrink)

Jonathan Y. Tsou examines and defends positions on central issues in philosophy of psychiatry. The positions defended assume a naturalistic and realist perspective and are framed against skeptical perspectives on biological psychiatry. Issues addressed include the reality of mental disorders; mechanistic and disease explanations of abnormal behavior; definitions of mental disorder; natural and artificial kinds in psychiatry; biological essentialism and the projectability of psychiatric categories; looping effects and the stability of mental disorders; psychiatric classification; and the validity of the (...) DSM's diagnostic categories. The main argument defended by Tsou is that genuine mental disorders are biological kinds with harmful effects. This argument opposes the dogma that mental disorders are necessarily diseases that result from biological dysfunction. Tsou contends that the broader ideal of biological kinds offers a more promising and empirically ascertainable naturalistic standard for assessing the reality of mental disorders and the validity of psychiatric categories. (shrink)

This anthology looks at the early sages of Western philosophy and science who paved the way for Plato and Aristotle and their successors. Democritus's atomic theory of matter, Zeno's dazzling "proofs" that motion is impossible, Pythagorean insights into mathematics, Heraclitus's haunting and enigmatic epigrams-all form part of a revolution in human thought that relied on reasoning, forged the first scientific vocabulary, and laid the foundations of Western philosophy. Jonathan Barnes has painstakingly brought together the surviving Presocratic fragments in their (...) original contexts, utilizing the latest research and a major new papyrus of Empedocles. Translated and edited by Jonathan Barnes. (shrink)