Somogy Varga

While many profound philosophical questions arise about psychopaths, I wish to draw attention to two limitations in current debates. First, philosophers mainly deal with offender and forensic populations neglecting so-called ‘successful’ psychopaths. Second, philosophers mainly focus on the issue of empathy and responsibility, while relatively little attention is paid to volitional aspects. I address these two limitations together and argue that ‘successful’ psychopaths are volitionally constrained. In order to grasp and explore this deficiency, I argue in favour of a more refined and fine-grained understanding of identifications.

In the last few decades, there has been a genuine ‘adaptive turn’ in psychiatry, resulting in evolutionary accounts for an increasing number of psychopathologies. In this paper, I explore the advantages and problems with the two main evolutionary approaches to depression, namely the mismatch and persistence accounts . I will argue that while both evolutionary theories of depression might provide some helpful perspectives, the accounts also harbor significant flaws that might question their authority and usefulness as explanations.

Psychotic and prodromal states are characterized by distortions of intersubjectivity, and a number of psychopathologists see in the concrete I-You frame of the clinical encounter the manifestation of such impairment. Rümke has coined the term of ‘praecox-feeling’, designated to describe a feeling of unease emanating in the interviewer that reflects the detachment of the patient and the failure of an ‘affective exchange.’ While the reliability of the praecox-feeling as a diagnostic tool has since been established, the explanation and theoretical framing of the phenomena is still lacking. By drawing on enactivist approaches to social cognition, the paper will attempt to provide such an explanation. This is relevant, since such an explanation could contribute to a more precise understanding of the phenomena in question and possibly add to our knowledge regarding the link between experiential vulnerability to psychosis and disturbed I-Thou intersubjectivity

Cognitive theory (CT) is currently the most widely acknowledged framework used to describe the psychological processes in affective disorders like depression. The purpose of this paper is to assess the philosophical assumptions upon which CT rests. It is argued that CT must be revised due to significant flaws in many of these philosophical assumptions. The paper contains suggestions as to how these problems could be overcome in a manner that would secure philosophical accuracy, while also providing an account that is better suited to explaining some of the cognitive, emotional, and bodily manifestations of affective disorders

The relationship between self‐realization, and so what I really wholeheartedly endorse and owe to myself, and morality or what we owe to others is normally thought of as antagonism, or as a pleasant coincidence: only if I am indebted to such relations as my fundamental projects that I care wholeheartedly about does morality have a direct connection to self‐realization. The aim of this article is to argue against this picture. It will be argued that the structure of self‐realization and the caring activity involved commits the person to values that are beyond the object of his wholehearted caring, in a way that might just pave the way to morality.