Pathologizing Body and Mind
Leuven Philosophy of Medicine Conference 2015
The Centre for Analytic Philosophy at the University of Leuven (Belgium) will be organizing a conference on the philosophy of medicine that will take place on 15-16 October 2015 and we are now accepting abstract submissions.
This conference will focus on the rather controversial relation between mental and physical disease. While some describe (and decry) mental illness as a social construction, other recent theories try to establish what is unique about psychopathology. Should there be two separate disease concepts, one dedicated to the mental and the other to the physical realm? Or does such a dualistic approach problematically divide up biological reality? There are also many attempts to describe disease in more general terms, regardless of where it is located in the body. Can such attempts, ranging from networks and systems theories to claims that disease is a bio-social phenomenon, provide a way to capture the similarities and distinctions between mental and physical diseases?
Confirmed keynote speakers are:
– Denny Borsboom
– Rachel Cooper
– Carl Craver
– Arantza Etxeberria
– Elselijn Kingma
– Maël Lemoine
There are 3-4 slots open for contributed papers. Each presentation will be roughly 1 hour long, with around 20 mins for the talk, 10 minutes for a respondent, and then 30 mins for discussion. There will be more emphasis on discussion since this will be a pre-read conference in which drafts of the papers are sent around to all participants before the conference begins.
If you are interested, please send a 300-500 word abstract to Jonathan Sholl (jonathan.sholl@hiw.kuleuven.
Scientific organizing committee: Andreas De Block, Markus Eronen, Jonathan Sholl, and Sigrid Sterckx.