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Mind, Brain and Mental Illness
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
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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?
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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.
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