A Philosophy of Madness

A Philosophy of Madness PDF Author: Wouter Kusters
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262044285
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 769

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Book Description
The philosophy of psychosis and the psychosis of philosophy: a philosopher draws on his experience of madness. In this book, philosopher and linguist Wouter Kusters examines the philosophy of psychosis—and the psychosis of philosophy. By analyzing the experience of psychosis in philosophical terms, Kusters not only emancipates the experience of the psychotic from medical classification, he also emancipates the philosopher from the narrowness of textbooks and academia, allowing philosophers to engage in real-life praxis, philosophy in vivo. Philosophy and madness—Kusters's preferred, non-medicalized term—coexist, one mirroring the other. Kusters draws on his own experience of madness—two episodes of psychosis, twenty years apart—as well as other first-person narratives of psychosis. Speculating about the maddening effect of certain words and thought, he argues, and demonstrates, that the steady flow of philosophical deliberation may sweep one into a full-blown acute psychotic episode. Indeed, a certain kind of philosophizing may result in confusion, paradoxes, unworldly insights, and circular frozenness reminiscent of madness. Psychosis presents itself to the psychotic as an inescapable truth and reality. Kusters evokes the mad person's philosophical or existential amazement at reality, thinking, time, and space, drawing on classic autobiographical accounts of psychoses by Antonin Artaud, Daniel Schreber, and others, as well as the work of phenomenological psychiatrists and psychologists and such phenomenologists as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He considers the philosophical mystic and the mystical philosopher, tracing the mad undercurrent in the Husserlian philosophy of time; visits the cloud castles of mystical madness, encountering LSD devotees, philosophers, theologians, and nihilists; and, falling to earth, finds anxiety, emptiness, delusions, and hallucinations. Madness and philosophy proceed and converge toward a single vanishing point.

A Philosophy of Madness

A Philosophy of Madness PDF Author: Wouter Kusters
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262044285
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 769

Get Book Here

Book Description
The philosophy of psychosis and the psychosis of philosophy: a philosopher draws on his experience of madness. In this book, philosopher and linguist Wouter Kusters examines the philosophy of psychosis—and the psychosis of philosophy. By analyzing the experience of psychosis in philosophical terms, Kusters not only emancipates the experience of the psychotic from medical classification, he also emancipates the philosopher from the narrowness of textbooks and academia, allowing philosophers to engage in real-life praxis, philosophy in vivo. Philosophy and madness—Kusters's preferred, non-medicalized term—coexist, one mirroring the other. Kusters draws on his own experience of madness—two episodes of psychosis, twenty years apart—as well as other first-person narratives of psychosis. Speculating about the maddening effect of certain words and thought, he argues, and demonstrates, that the steady flow of philosophical deliberation may sweep one into a full-blown acute psychotic episode. Indeed, a certain kind of philosophizing may result in confusion, paradoxes, unworldly insights, and circular frozenness reminiscent of madness. Psychosis presents itself to the psychotic as an inescapable truth and reality. Kusters evokes the mad person's philosophical or existential amazement at reality, thinking, time, and space, drawing on classic autobiographical accounts of psychoses by Antonin Artaud, Daniel Schreber, and others, as well as the work of phenomenological psychiatrists and psychologists and such phenomenologists as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He considers the philosophical mystic and the mystical philosopher, tracing the mad undercurrent in the Husserlian philosophy of time; visits the cloud castles of mystical madness, encountering LSD devotees, philosophers, theologians, and nihilists; and, falling to earth, finds anxiety, emptiness, delusions, and hallucinations. Madness and philosophy proceed and converge toward a single vanishing point.

A Philosopher’s Madness

A Philosopher’s Madness PDF Author: Chan Lishan
Publisher: Ethos Books
ISBN: 9811408920
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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Book Description
This is a personal and philosophical account of schizophrenia that aims to raise awareness of mental health issues. The personal aspect of the book reveals the gritty reality of what it is like to have schizophrenia, and explores issues faced by those with mental illness, such as secrecy and recovery. The philosophical aspect of the book raises questions concerning the nature of mental illness, such as whether or not mental illness is ultimately physical or mental. Referencing contemporary debates, such as whether madness is a disease or a culturally- determined label, this book is relevant not only to persons with an interest in a true story of psychosis, but also to those with an interest in the relationship between philosophy and madness. Reader Reviews “Through this book, I hope it challenges the public’s perception of mental health as being an ‘all-or-none’ phenomenon; it is, in actual fact, a spectrum on which all of us oscillate back and forth throughout various times in our lives. Not only should we learn to appreciate mental health, we should also accept that those who suffer from mental illness can recover and lead satisfying lives with the appropriate help.” — A/Prof Swapna Verma, Senior Consultant Psychiatrist and Chief, Early Psychosis Intervention Programme, Institute of Mental Health | Project Director, Community Health Assessment Team | Associate Professor, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School “I can relate to the book as a person who has experienced discrimination as a person who has been diagnosed and she portrays this very clearly. In addition, as a philosopher, she asks pertinent questions on whether the disease is a mental or physical problem. [...] I'd encourage anyone who has a friend or loved one who is mentally ill to read it to understand them better. Also, I'd recommend that every person who is diagnosed or is about to be diagnosed to read it. She helps one understand the tremendous difficulty of how one accepts one's diagnosis.” — Rachel, online book reviewer

Madness

Madness PDF Author: Justin Garson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197613837
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Since the time of Hippocrates, madness has typically been viewed through the lens of disease, dysfunction, and defect. In Madness, philosopher of science Justin Garson presents a radically different paradigm for conceiving of madness and the forms that it takes. In this paradigm, which he calls madness-as-strategy, madness is neither a disease nor a defect, but a designed feature, like the heart or lungs. The book will be essential reading for philosophers of medicine and psychiatry, historians and sociologists of medicine, and mental health service users, survivors, and activists, for its alternative and liberating vision of what it means to be mad.

Classifying Madness

Classifying Madness PDF Author: Rachel Cooper
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402033451
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
This book is about the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, more commonly known as the D.S.M. The D.S.M. is published by the American Psychiatric Association and aims to list and describe all mental disorders. Within its pages can be found diagnostic criteria for types of depression, types of schizophrenia, eating disorders, anxiety disorders, phobias, sleeping disorders, and so on. Also included are less familiar, and more controversial, conditions: Mathematics Disorder, Caffeine Intoxication, Nicotine Dependence, Nightmare Disorder. It must be admitted that the D.S.M. is not an exciting read. Its pages follow a standard format: Each disorder has a numerical code. This is followed by a description of the disorder, which includes information regarding prevalence, course, and differential diagnosis. Finally explicit criteria that patients must meet to receive the diagnosis are listed. These generally include lists of the symptoms that must be present, restrictions as to the length of time that the symptoms must have been troublesome, and clauses that state that the symptoms must not be better accounted for by some other condition.

Madness and Death in Philosophy

Madness and Death in Philosophy PDF Author: Ferit Guven
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791483568
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Ferit Güven illuminates the historically constitutive roles of madness and death in philosophy by examining them in the light of contemporary discussions of the intersection of power and knowledge and ethical relations with the other. Historically, as Güven shows, philosophical treatments of madness and death have limited or subdued their disruptive quality. Madness and death are linked to the question of how to conceptualize the unthinkable, but Güven illustrates how this conceptualization results in a reduction to positivity of the very radical negativity these moments represent. Tracing this problematic through Plato, Hegel, Heidegger, and, finally, in the debate on madness between Foucault and Derrida, Güven gestures toward a nonreducible, disruptive form of negativity, articulated in Heidegger's critique of Hegel and Foucault's engagement with Derrida, that might allow for the preservation of real otherness and open the possibility of a true ethics of difference.

The Madness of Knowledge

The Madness of Knowledge PDF Author: Steven Connor
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 178914101X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Many human beings have considered the powers and the limits of human knowledge, but few have wondered about the power that the idea of knowledge has over us. Steven Connor’s The Madness of Knowledge is the first book to investigate this emotional inner life of knowledge—the lusts, fantasies, dreams, and fears that the idea of knowing provokes. There are in-depth discussions of the imperious will to know, of Freud’s epistemophilia (or love of knowledge), and the curiously insistent links between madness, magical thinking, and the desire for knowledge. Connor also probes secrets and revelations, quarreling and the history of quizzes and “general knowledge,” charlatanry and pretension, both the violent disdain and the sanctification of the stupid, as well as the emotional investment in the spaces and places of knowledge, from the study to the library. In an age of artificial intelligence, alternative facts, and mistrust of truth, The Madness of Knowledge offers an opulent, enlarging, and sometimes unnerving psychopathology of intellectual life.

Madness and Civilization

Madness and Civilization PDF Author: Michel Foucault
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307833100
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Michel Foucault examines the archeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800 - from the late Middle Ages, when insanity was still considered part of everyday life and fools and lunatics walked the streets freely, to the time when such people began to be considered a threat, asylums were first built, and walls were erected between the "insane" and the rest of humanity.

Philosophizing Madness from Nietzsche to Derrida

Philosophizing Madness from Nietzsche to Derrida PDF Author: Angelos Evangelou
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319570935
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Drawing connections between madness, philosophy and autobiography, this book addresses the question of how Nietzsche's madness might have affected his later works. It also explores why continental philosophy after Nietzsche is so fascinated with madness, and how it (re)considers, (re)evaluates and (re)valorizes madness. To answer these questions, the book analyzes the work of three major figures in twentieth-century French philosophy who were significantly influenced by Nietzsche: Bataille, Foucault and Derrida, examining the ways in which their responses to Nietzsche’s madness determine how they understand philosophy as well as philosophy’s relation to madness. For these philosophers, posing the question about madness renders the philosophical subject vulnerable and implicates it in a state of responsibility towards that about which it asks. Out of this analysis of their engagement with the question of madness emerges a new conception of 'autobiographical philosophy', which entails the insertion of this vulnerable subject into the philosophical work, to which each of these philosophers adheres or resists in different ways.

Hegel's Theory of Madness

Hegel's Theory of Madness PDF Author: Daniel Berthold-Bond
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791425053
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
This book shows how an understanding of the nature and role of insanity in Hegel's writing provides intriguing new points of access to many of the central themes of his larger philosophic project. Berthold-Bond situates Hegel's theory of madness within the history of psychiatric practice during the great reform period at the turn of the eighteenth century, and shows how Hegel developed a middle path between the stridently opposed camps of "empirical" and "romantic" medicine, and of "somatic" and "psychical" practitioners. A key point of the book is to show that Hegel does not conceive of madness and health as strictly opposing states, but as kindred phenomena sharing many of the same underlying mental structures and strategies, so that the ontologies of insanity and rationality involve a mutually illuminating, mirroring relation. Hegel's theory is tested against the critiques of the institution of psychiatry and the very concept of madness by such influential twentieth-century authors as Michel Foucault and Thomas Szasz, and defended as offering a genuinely reconciling position in the contemporary debate between the "social labeling" and "medical" models of mental illness.

Error, Illusion, Madness

Error, Illusion, Madness PDF Author: Bento Prado, Jr.
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509543570
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
This book makes available in English the work of one of the most important Brazilian philosophers and intellectuals of the twentieth century. First published in 2004, Error, Illusion, Madness is an original contribution to the debate about the nature and role of the subject and its forms of expression. In a context where the category of the subject was being at once dismissed by structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers and sidelined by the intersubjective turn of critical theory, Bento Prado Jr.’s book represented a unique intellectual intervention. He mobilized authors as diverse as Wittgenstein and Deleuze to formulate a notion of the subject as both a critique of identity and an affirmation of difference, a notion that dismantled the foundational character usually associated with this category. In this way Bento Prado Jr. opened up a new and distinctive kind of critical thinking that emphasized subjectivity while avoiding both foundationalism and relativism. This important book will be of great interest to those working in philosophy, critical theory, cultural theory, and Latin American studies.