Description

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Mental illness is an issue of great practical importance. Yet, despite sustained inquiry from scientists and philosophers alike, relatively little attention has been paid to the significance of mental disorder to agency and responsibility. While there is some work that touches on the topic, and a few extended treatments of particular disorders, these only scratch the surface. Agency in Mental Disorder seeks to provide a starting point for deeper and broader philosophical analyses.

The 8 new essays in this book address various questions about the relationship between agency and mental disorder. What is the nature of that relationship? In what ways do mental disorders affect capacities for control? How should we understand the mitigations of blame that mental disorders seem to provide, and can we generalize from specific disorders to any interesting claims about disorders as a class? And what makes for a mental disorder in the first place?

About the Author

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Matt King, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Joshua May, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Alabama at Birmingham Matt King is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland and has held previous appointments at Carleton College, Virginia Tech, and UCLA. His main research is on theories of agency and responsibility, as well as related topics in ethics and the law. His work has appeared in Ethics, Philosophical Studies, Criminal Law and Philosophy, and Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility. Joshua May is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He previously taught at Monash University in Australia after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research aims to understand the development, breakdown, and improvement of moral knowledge and virtue. His book Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind (OUP 2018) draws on scientific evidence to show that ethical thought and action are fundamentally rational enterprises. Articles of his have appeared in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Behavioral & Brain Sciences, Cognition, Journal of Medical Ethics, Neuroethics, Philosophical Studies, and Synthese.