Philosophy of Psychiatry
This entry was posted on 9/3/2006 9:34 PM and is filed under Psychology,Psychiatry.
I have spent a lot of the summer reading in a mish-mash of areas that
are new to me to gear up for a capstone course in Science, Technology,
and Society that I'll be teaching in January called "What Sorts of
People Should There Be?". The course will try to thread together
work on the history of eugenics with reflection on contemporary uses of
medical and biotechnology. Much of the reading has been in
disability studies, and a chunk of it on psychiatry. So much for
background.
What I was wondering about was why there is so little work by
philosophers on psychiatry. The history of psychiatry seems to
have flourished over the past 30 years to be a respectable
sub-discipline in the history of medicine, and there is also a healthy
presence in reflecting on that history and on current trends of
anthropologists and sociologists. But work by
philosophers—either of science, or of cognitive science—seems
scant. Why is that? Philosophers did, true, join in
discussions of the status of psychoanalysis in the 80s and 90s, and
there has been a lively involvement in related issues, such as that
over memory and trauma. But we don't seem to have found our way
very far into what seems to me a potentially rich and rewarding part of
the sciences of the mind. Is it because psychiatry is a part of
medicine and, in general, philosophical work on medicine from a cog sci
/ sci perspective is swamped by that from bioethics? Something
else? Or is there a wealth of material out there that I just
haven't bumped into yet?
