This multidisciplinary collection explores three key concepts underpinning psychiatry -- explanation, phenomenology, and nosology -- and their continuing relevance in an age of neuroimaging and genetic analysis. An introduction by Kenneth S. Kendler lays out the philosophical grounding of psychiatric practice. The first section addresses the concept of explanation, from the difficulties in describing complex behavior to the categorization of psychological and biological causality. In the second section, contributors discuss experience, including the complex and vexing issue of how self-agency and (...) free will affect mental health. The third and final section examines the organizational difficulties in psychiatric nosology and the instability of the existing diagnostic system. Each chapter has both an introduction by the editors and a concluding comment by another of the book's contributors. Contributors: John Campbell, Ph.D.; Thomas Fuchs, M.D., Ph.D.; Shaun Gallagher, Ph.D.; Kenneth S. Kendler, M.D.; Sandra D. Mitchell, Ph.D.; Dominic P. Murphy, Ph.D.; Josef Parnas, M.D., Dr.Med.Sci.; Louis A. Sass, Ph.D.; Kenneth F. Schaffner, M.D., Ph.D.; James F. Woodward, Ph.D.; Peter Zachar, Ph.D. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE INCOMMUNICABILITY OF HUMAN PERSONS JOHN F. CROSBY, III Franciscan University of Steubenville Steubenville, Ohio I PROPOSE TO explore the idea that persons do not exist as replaceable specimens of or as mere instances of an ideal or type, but rather exist in some sense for their own sakes, each existing as incommunicably his or her own.1 I undertake this study in the conviction that the incommunicability of persons (...) is profoundly characteristic for them precisely as persons, and has a major role to play in any philosophy of the person. And there is an entirely different reason which attracts me to this subject. I think that most of what I have to say here can find acceptance across a broad spectrum of philosophical positions. At a time when thinkers are increasingly suspicious of universally valid truth about man, when many of them think that a vision of man is proper only to some tradition and valid only within that tradition and not beyond it, one can offer a salutary challenge to one's contemporaries by showing a centrally important truth about persons which, as I say, can be accepted by philosophers coming from the most various points of view. Suppose that you were to minimalize the death of someone by saying that at least the human species did not die with him or her, as if the immortality of the species more than compensated for the mortality of this individual : everyone understands that you would thereby radically depersonalize the deceased. Or suppose that you were grieving over the death of someone dear to you, and a friend tried to comfort you with the thought that the 1 My thanks to Josef Seifert, William Frank, Damian Fedoryka, and Katryna Fedoryka for their comments on earlier drafts of this study. The text of this article forms Chapter Two of my book, Essay on Personal Selfhood, which is close to completion. 403 404 JOHN F. CROSBY, III particular excellences of the deceased, which awakened your love, also exist in other human beings who are still living, as if you could continue to love in them what you had loved in the deceased. Again, everyone understands that if you treat people having excellences as if they were replaceable specimens of those excellences, then you lose your grip on them as persons. But why is this? Why is personhood driven out of human beings as soon as their species-membership, or their particular excellences, are thought to predominate in them? What is that incommunicability of each person which is obscured as soon as persons are thought to be only specimens? One commonly thinks that this aspect of personal selfhood has been recognized only in modern thought; in fact it was recognized already by St. Thomas Aquinas. Creatura autem rationalis divinae providentiae substat sicut secundum se gubernata et provisa, non solum propter speciem, ut aliae corruptibiles creaturae : quia individuum quod gubernatur solum propter speciem, non gubernatur propter seipsum; creatura autem rationalis propter seipsam gubernatur, ut ex dictis manifestum est. Sic igitur solae rationales creaturae directionem a Deo ad suos actus accipiunt non solum propter speciem, sed secundum individuum.2 Notice that Aquinas teaches here the metaphysical ultimacy of personal incommunicability; it exists even before God in the sense 2 " Now, a rational creature exists under divine providence as a being governed and provided for in himself, and not simply for the sake of his species, as is the case with other corruptible creatures. For the individual that is governed only for the sake of the species is not governed for its own sake, but the rational creature is governed for his own sake, as is clear from what we have said (ch. 112). And so, only rational creatures receive direction from God in their acts, not only for the species, but for the individual." Summa Contra Gentiles, III, ch. 113 (Bourke translation). By the way, Chapters 111-114 of Book III seem to me to constitute the most " personalist " passage' in the entire corpus of St. Thomas. The modern reader sees to his amazement that St. Thomas here has already made his own the Kantian idea that each person in a sense exists for his... (shrink)

F. Thomas Burke believes that pragmatism, especially as it has been employed in politics and social action, needs a reassessment. He examines the philosophies of William James and Charles S. Peirce to determine how certain maxims of pragmatism originated. Burke contrasts pragmatism as a certain set of beliefs or actions with pragmatism as simply a methodology. He unravels the complex history of this philosophical tradition and discusses contemporary conceptions of pragmatism found in current US political discourse and explains what (...) this quintessentially American philosophy means today. (shrink)

This volume is composed of extended versions of selected papers presented at an international conference held in June 2011 at Opole University—the seventh in a series of annual American and European Values conferences organized by the Institute of Philosophy, Opole University, Poland. The papers were written independently with no prior guidelines other than the obvious need to address some aspect of George Herbert Mead’s work. While rooted in careful study of Mead’s original writings and transcribed lectures and the historical context (...) in which that work was carried out, these papers have brought that work to bear on contemporary issues in metaphysics, epistemology, cognitive science, and social and political philosophy. There is good reason to classify Mead as one of the original classical American pragmatists (along with Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey) and consequently as a major figure in American philosophy. Nevertheless his thought has been marginalized for the most part, at least in academic philosophy. It is our intention to help recuperate Mead’s reputation among a broader audience by providing a small corpus of significant contemporary scholarship on some key aspects of his thought. (shrink)

The essays in this collection address different aspects of Dewey's philosophy of logic, from his work at the beginning of the twentieth century to the culmination of his logical thought in the 1938 volume, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry.

The limited aim here is to explain what John Dewey might say about the formulation of the grue example. Nelson Goodman’s problem of distinguishing good and bad inductive inferences is an important one, but the grue example misconstrues this complex problem for certain technical reasons, due to ambiguities that contemporary logical theory has not yet come to terms with. Goodman’s problem is a problem for the theory of induction and thus for logical theory in general. Behind the whole discussion of (...) these issues over the last several decades is a certain view of logic hammered out by Russell, Carnap, Tarski, Quine, and many others. Goodman’s nominalism hinges in essential ways on a certain view of formal logic with an extensional quantification theory at its core. This raises many issues, but the one issue most germane here is the conception of predicates ensconced in this view of logic. (shrink)

A common finding is that information order influences belief revision (e.g., Hogarth & Einhorn, 1992). We tested personal experience as a possible mitigator. In three experiments participants experienced the probabilistic relationship between pieces of information and object category through a series of trials where they assigned objects (planes) into one of two possible categories (hostile or commercial), given two sequentially presented pieces of probabilistic information (route and ID), and then they had to indicate their belief about the object category before (...) feedback. The results generally confirm the predictions from the Hogarth and Einhorn model. Participants showed a recency effect in their belief revision. Extending previous model evaluations the results indicate that the model predictions also hold for classification decisions, and for pieces of information that vary in their diagnostic values. Personal experience does not appear to prevent order effects in classification decisions based on sequentially presented pieces of information and in belief revision. (shrink)

This paper describes an abductive process model of anomalous data integration. The model makes use of the entrenchment of the current explanation and the probability of alternative explanations. It is hypothesised that increasing confirmation of the anom-aly itself increases the probability of alternative explanations. In an experimental study we found that both the entrenchment of an existing explanation and confirmation of the anomaly clearly influence how people resolve anomalous data. These results are in agreement with the predic-tions of the model.

In multicausal abductive tasks a person must explain some findings by assembling a composite hypothesis that consists of one or more elementary hypotheses. If there are n elementary hypotheses, there can be up to 2n composite hypotheses. To constrain the search for hypotheses to explain a new observation, people sometimes use their current explanation—the previous evidence and their present composite hypothesis of that evidence; however, it is unclear when and how the current explanation is used. In addition, although a person's (...) current explanation can narrow the search for a hypothesis, it can also blind the problem solver to alternative, possibly better, explanations. This paper describes a model of multicausal abductive reasoning that makes two predictions regarding the use of the current explanation. The first prediction is that the current explanation is not used to explain new evidence if there is a simple (i.e., nondisjunctive, concrete) hypothesis to account for that evidence. The second prediction is that the current explanation is used when attempting to discriminate among several alternative hypotheses for new evidence. These hypotheses were tested in three experiments. The results are consistent with the second prediction: the current explanation is used when discriminating among alternative hypotheses. However, the first prediction—that the current explanation is not used when a simple hypothesis can account for new data—received only limited support. Participants used the current explanation to constrain their interpretation of new data in 46.5% of all trials. This suggests that context‐independent strategies compete with context‐dependent ones—an interpretation that is consistent with recent work on strategy selection during problem solving. (shrink)

The reaction to Darwin's Origin of Species varied in many countries according to the roles played by national scientific institutions and traditions and the attitudes of religious and political groups. The contributors to this volume, including M. J. S. Hodge, David Hull, and Roberto Moreno, gathered in 1972 at an international conference on the comparative reception of Darwinism. Their essays look at early pro- and anti-Darwinism arguments, and three additional comparative essays and appendices add a larger perspective. For this paperback (...) edition, Thomas F. Glick has added a new preface commenting on recent research. (shrink)

"Christliche Philosophie" steht in dem Verdacht, weder Philosophie noch christlich zu sein. Ob dieser Vorbehalt zurecht besteht, entscheidet sich an der Frage nach der Weite der Vernunft. Wo nur das als vernünftig anerkannt wird, wird, was die Naturwissenschaften von der Wirklichkeit erfassen, bleibt die Vernunft hinter ihren Möglichkeiten zurück. Auf jeden Fall bleibt das Bedürfnis der Vernunft, Sinn und Ziel des Ganzen als Zusammenhang von Gott, Welt und Mensch zu verstehen, unerfüllt. Aber welche Möglichkeiten hat die Vernunft, ihrem Erkenntnisbedürfnis zu (...) folgen? Eine Leitthese des Buches wird sein, dass die philosophische Einsicht im gleichen Maße zunimmt, wie sie im Hören auf die christliche Offenbarung vom Anfang und Ende aller Dinge mitbegründet ist. Pieper und Lewis waren überzeugt, dass im verstehenden Nachvollzug des Gehörten mehr Licht auf die großen Lebensfragen des Menschen fällt, als dies im modernitätstypischen Kontext einer selbstreferentiellen Vernunft der Fall sein kann. Autonomie der Vernunft und Anerkennung religiöser Überlieferungen schließen sich für Lewis und Pieper nicht aus. Ihre Denkwege sind eine für jeden nachvollziehbare Herausforderung, seine Grundoptionen angesichts der Wirklichkeit im Ganzen zu überprüfen. (shrink)