Main description:

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 behaviour 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, PhD; Thomas Fuchs, MD, PhD; Shaun Gallagher, PhD; Kenneth S Kendler, MD; Sandra D Mitchell, PhD; Dominic P Murphy, PhD; Josef Parnas, MD, Dr Med Sci; Louis A Sass, PhD; Kenneth F Schaffner, MD, PhD; James F Woodward, PhD; Peter Zachar, PhD.

Contents:

List of Contributors
Preface
Introduction. Why Does Psychiatry Need Philosophy?
Part I: Explanation
Chapter 1.Explaining Complex Behavior
Chapter 2. Etiological Models in Psychiatry: Reductive and Nonreductive Approaches
Chapter 3. Levels of Explanation in Psychiatry
Chapter 4. Cause and Explanation in Psychiatry: An Interventionist Perspective
Chapter 5. Causation in Psychiatry
Part II: Phenomenology
Chapter 6. Varieties of "Phenomenology": On Description, Understanding, and Explanation in Psychiatry
Chapter 7. Self-agency and Mental Causality
Part III: Nosology
Chapter 8. Real Kinds but No True Taxonomy: An Essay in Psychiatric Systematics
Chapter 9. The Incredible Insecurity of Psychiatric Nosology
Epilogue
Index