Philosophical Issues in Psychiatry

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. This book opens with Dr. Kenneth S. Kendler’s introduction to the philosophical grounding of psychiatric practice. Chapters in the first section of the book then address 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 includes both an introduction by the editors and a concluding comment by another of the book’s contributors. Contributors: John Campbell, PhD; Thomas Fuchs, MD, PhD; Shaun Gallagher, PhD; Kenneth S. Kendler, MD; Sandra D. Mitchell, PhD; Dominic P. Murphy, PhD; Josef Parnas, MD, DrMedSci; Louis A. Sass, PhD; Kenneth F. Schaffner, MD, PhD; James F. Woodward, PhD; Peter Zachar, PhD "This is a serious and important book... it is certainly one that researchers, scholars and anyone involved in trying to explain the nature of psychiatric disorders to a skeptical audience ought to read."— British Journal of Psychiatry Kenneth S. Kendler, MD, is the Rachel Brown Banks Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry at the Medical College of Virginia, where he is also a professor of human genetics and the director of the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics. He is the author of Genes, Environment, and Psychopathology. Josef Parnas, MD, DrMedSci, is a professor of psychiatry and the consultant medical director for the Department of Psychiatry at Copenhagen University. He is the codirector of the National Danish Research Foundation's Center for Subjectivity Research.