Imperfect Cognitions

In today's post I am going to present an argument I developed in an article for the Supplementary Volume of the Aristotelian Society , Doctors without 'Disorders'. The paper was recently listed among the best articles in Philosophy published by Oxford University Press in 2020 (and thus it is available open access at the moment). I also presented this idea at the Joint Session last summer in  a symposium on the concept of disorder and a video of the presentation is available (click below to watch). How do we decide whether the problems we experience deserve the attention of medical professionals? Many believe that the answer hangs on whether the problem we have is caused by a disorder: if it is caused by a disorder, then medical attention is appropriate. If it is not caused by a disorder, then it is still a problem, but not a medical problem. It is a problem in living , a problem we need to try and solve by some other means. I argue that the dichotomy between medical pr...

This post is by Jennifer Radden , Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Boston . Here, she discusses some of the ideas in and related to her paper “ Rethinking Disease in Psychiatry: Disease Models and the Medical Imaginary ” recently published in the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice. My philosophical research on the understanding, care and implications of mental disorder reflects an abiding interest in medical history. (Recent monographs with this focus include The Nature of Melancholy (2000), On Delusion (2011), and Melancholic Habits: Burton’s Anatomy for the Mind Sciences (2017).) The era during which asylum-keepers were gradually being replaced by newly professional and medically scientific alienists, using observations from the asylum to consolidate ideas about a class of distinctly mental diseases, offer us intriguing hints about how to understand mental disorder today.  Salient for my paper about the medical imagin...

What is the relation between mental disorders and physical disorders? Is it possible to find a biological basis for mental disorders? What purpose would a reduction of mental disorders to physical disorders serve? These are some of the questions addressed at the workshop ‘Pathologizing Mind and Body’ organized by Jonathan Sholl and Marcus Eronen. Philosophers, psychologists and psychiatrists approached this topic from different angles and highlighted problems and recent developments. In the first talk, Ignaas Devish stressed the distinction between suffering and pain, claiming that suffering is not a phenomenon that is amenable to diagnostic operationalisation and medicalization. He argued that because of this, victims of traumatic events should be offered an ethical debriefing in addition to psychological debriefing, which allows them focus on their suffering and the existential problems they face from a non-medical perspective. Arantza Exteberria talked about ‘Interacti...

The British Society for the Philosophy of Science Annual Conference took place on 2-3 July 2015 at the University of Manchester. Throughout two days philosophers of science presented their recent work in this fascinating field, including well-established researchers as well as some postgraduate students. In this post I summarise five out of a broad spectrum of papers presented during the Open Sessions, related to – broadly understood – philosophy of psychology and psychiatry. Brice Bantegnie (pictured below) kicked off the Open Sessions with his paper ‘A Shift in Focus: From Mental States to Mental Capacities’. The author reviewed different mental capacities investigated in cognitive psychology and argued that a greater attention ought to be paid to the work of psychologists in order to better understand a great diversity of these capacities. Bantegnie stressed that the good criterion of individuation can lead us to postulate a very high number of sensory modalities.