Editors' Introduction

This special issue of Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology is unique in both content and format. Our authors--Thomas Szasz, Jerome Wakefield, Christopher Megone, Tim Thornton, and Bill Fulford--examine an issue that has been a central one in the philosophy of psychiatry. That issue is the conceptual core of mental disorder itself. We are honored to have Professor Szasz contribute his most recent thinking in this area; his 1960s formative work on the concept of mental illness has inspired a generation of thinkers and has drawn innumerable students to the philosophy of psychiatry. Professor Wakefield, on the other hand, has contributed some of the most influential work on this problem in the 1990s; and Professor Megone is in a sense the center of this current debate, having inspired the other two authors through his earlier paper, "Aristotle's function argument and the concept of mental illness" (Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 5.3: 187-201).* In the following paper, Professor Thornton sets the debate particularly in the context of recent work in the philosophy of mind; he offers a third way, a form of nonreductive naturalism, between the traditional polarities of "values in" and "values out" in reference to the concept of mental disorder. Finally, Professor Fulford draws on his work on the value structure of medicine and psychiatry to argue that nonreductive naturalism, although a rich conceptual resource, particularly for psychiatry, in the end collapses to reductive naturalism (of the kind most forcibly espoused by Jerome Wakefield). We hope this issue extends and deepens the discussion about the concept of mental disorder for a new century.

* Publisher's note: This issue is still available. See over.

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