Ten years ago the Royal Institute of Philosophy marked the establishment of the Society for Applied Philosophy with a series of public lectures, published in an earlier book in this series, under the title Philosophy and Practice (Griffiths, 1985). Looking back it is hard to believe this was only ten years ago. Applied philosophy still has its critics. But it is now so pervasive, so much the norm, that it seems to have been with us always. Law, medicine, education, nursing, the environment, politics, economics … almost it seems, no subject is quite respectable nowadays without its philosophy and its philosophical exponents.

Psychiatry is a relative newcomer to the applied philosophy party (Fulford, p. 5, this volume). There are evident historical reasons for this: as Jeremy Holmes (p. 41) notes, psychiatry has gained respectability as a medical discipline by identifying itself with empiricism. But now that it has arrived, psychiatry brings with it a new vision of what the party is all about.

The rise of applied philosophy is generally portrayed as a reaction to the supposed aridity of the analytical philosophy of the post-war period. Preoccupied as it was with questions of meaning, philosophy appeared to have lost its connections with questions of substance. Bernard Williams (1985) captures a poignant image of the impotence of the professor's arguments when the mob breaks down the door and tramples his glasses.