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Mind, Brain and Mental Illness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Leslie Stevenson
Leslie Stevenson
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews
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Extract

The distinction between mental illness and bodily illness would seem to presuppose some sort of distinction between mind and body. But dualist theories that the mind is a substance separable from the body, or that mental events could occur without any bodily events, raise ancient conceptual problems, which I do not propose to review here. What I want to do is to examine the psychiatric implications of materialist theories, which hold that the mind is the brain, or a function of the brain. If all character has a basis in chemistry, can we still attribute some mental distress to character and some to chemistry, as if the two categories were different?

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 52 , Issue 199 , January 1977 , pp. 27 - 43
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1977

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References

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9 Op. cit. note 4, 57.

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31 As Drury points out in talking of ‘the fallacy of the alchemists’ in Chapter 1 of op. cit. note 13.

32 Op. cit. note 13, Chapter 5, ‘Madness and Religion’.

33 Previous versions of this paper have been read at the Philosophy Club in the University of St Andrews, at the State University of New York at Albany, and at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in the University of Pittsburgh. I am grateful to the discussions on those occasions, and to Adam Morton, Tom Nagel, Peter Railton, Richard Rorty, and Alan Spiro at Princeton, for criticisms which have saved me from many errors. I am also indebted to the University of St Andrews for a period of sabbatical leave, and to the Philosophy Department of Princeton University for encouraging me to come as a Visiting Fellow.