Posted by Rachel Cooper<\/p>\n
\u201cDoes philosophy of psychiatry need metaphysics?\u201d was a conference held in Lancaster in June 2016 (with sponsorship from the British Society for the Philosophy of Science, and Lancaster University). It\u2019s taken a while, but podcasts of the talks have now been edited and are available below. In some cases the introductions to the talks are quite hard to hear on the podcasts \u2013 but keep listening because the talks themselves are fine.<\/p>\n
I organized the conference because it seemed to me that philosophers of psychiatry spend a lot of time writing and arguing about metaphysics. Many recent books in the philosophy of psychiatry have presupposed some metaphysical framework or other. Peter Zachar\u2019s important book, A Metaphysics for Psychopathology<\/em> (2014), explicitly sets out to develop a metaphysical framework, and argues for a pragmatist approach. Tim Thornton\u2019s Essential Philosophy of Psychiatry<\/em> (2007) adopts a McDowellian view. My Classifying Madness<\/em> (2005) assumed a scientific realism. In Mind, Meaning and Mental Disorder<\/em> (1996) Jonathan Hill and Derek Bolton argue from a Wittgensteinian perspective. In all of these works, discussions of metaphysics play a key role.<\/p>\n Although philosophers of psychiatry have spent a lot of time disagreeing on questions of basic metaphysics, it wasn\u2019t clear to me how much useful work the metaphysical discussions were really doing. The conference brought together Derek Bolton, Tim Thornton, Peter Zachar and me. Each of us considered whether our key claims about psychiatry and mental disorder could have been made without making use of the controversial metaphysical assumptions that we in fact employed in our books. John O\u2019Neill also gave a commentary.<\/p>\n You can get the podcasts here:<\/p>\n Peter Zachar (University of Auburn at Montgomery) \u2018Empiricism, pragmatist metaphysics and the philosophy of psychiatry\u2019<\/p>\n