Christian Perring

In response to recent concerns about the overmedication of children, this paper considers ethical and conceptual issues that arise in the issue of when children who are diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder should be given stimulants such as the psychotropic drug Ritalin as part of their treatment. There is considerable resistance and worry about the possibility of overmedication. This is linked to the worry that the diagnosis of ADHD is overused, and the paper considers some reasons to worry about the overuse of the diagnosis itself. The paper then focuses on the resistance to the use of drugs, which is particularly strong for children in the gray area of diagnosis, where it is dubious whether the children really meet the strict diagnostic criteria. The reasons behind such resistance are often not well articulated, so part of the task of the paper is spell out what they might be. The reasons are given the following labels: side effects, unnaturalness, profit motives, thought control, competitiveness, and doctors' power. The paper ends in taking the polemical position that while there is some legitimate concern about possible short and long term side effects of children taking psychotropic drugs, the other reasons for resistance are not well‐founded.

This dissertation is a philosophical investigation of irrationality. The aim is to provide a conceptual basis for understanding various forms of irrationality, such as psychosis, neurosis, self-deception, repression, and weak-willed behavior. There are six main chapters, focusing on different phenomena, and touching on several fields of inquiry, including moral psychology, value theory, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of science and psychoanalytic theory. The first two chapters are broad in scope, discussing the relation of philosophy to clinical psychology, and the very possibility of the existence of irrationality. The subsequent four chapters explore the particular topics of the disunity of self, unconscious mental states, self-deception, and weakness of will. There is no single overriding thesis being argued for here, but the general theme is that it is possible to understand irrationality in detail, and that the forms of irrationality that we are capable of understanding include extreme ones that many thinkers have deemed conceptually or logically impossible. Chapter One argues for the importance of the interrelation of philosophy and clinical psychology. Chapter Two argues against the necessity of charitable assumptions of rationality in interpreting the language or behavior of others. Chapter Three discusses the various ways in which the disunity of persons have been conceptualized, and argues that homuncularism often confuses different levels of talking about people. Chapter Four argues for a strong ontology of unconscious mental states and processes, giving them equal status to conscious mentality. Chapter Five argues against several so-called 'paradoxes of self-deception' and clears the way for the possibility of intentional self-deception. Finally, in Chapter Six a standard conception of the distinction between valuing and desiring is examined and found wanting. A new model of the nature of valuing is proposed, drawing on Gestalt psychology. On this view, most weak-willed behavior involves not a divergence between what is desired and what is valued at the time, but rather a change in the person's values. If there are occasions where what is valued differs from what is desired, they are rare and demand a special explanation

There is much to admire in Michelle Ciurria’s provocative approach to ascribing moral responsibility. Her work is detailed and spells out explicitly her methodological assumptions. In this commentary, my main focus is on the methodological assumptions she makes. Ciurria’s arguments often depend on our reactions to actual cases and thought experiments. She takes it for granted that we need a theory that matches certain of our intuitions. This is not an unreasonable way to proceed. We definitely need a good reason if we are going to adopt a theory that does not fit with well-established moral intuitions. Nevertheless, we need to be cautious in using these cases to guide our theory choice, especially when our ..

Philosophers and psychologists have long tried to understand people's irrational behaviour through concepts such as weakness of will, compulsion and addiction. The scientific basis of the project has been greatly enhanced by advances in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. However, some philosophers have also been critical of the more general conclusions drawn by the scientists. This is especially true when scientific researchers start making claims that go to philosophical issues, such as free will and responsibility. Conversely, some scientists have been critical of philosophical approaches for not understanding the results of recent research. I examined some of the recent history of scientific claims about addiction, and the rise of the claims from scientists to have shown that addiction is a brain disease and that addictive behaviour is compulsive. Given the well-confirmed evidence that addicts can modulate their behaviour in response to rewards, punishments and context, it is clear that according to normal definitions of compulsivity the behaviour of addicts is not typically compulsive, suggesting that neuroscientists are making an error in their interpretation of data. Since philosophers have expertise in making distinctions between different kinds of action and categorising them as free, weak-willed and compulsive, we will achieve a better interpretation of the neuroscience of addiction when taking this philosophical work into account. Conversely, given the status of science in the modern world, philosophers have to grapple with the latest neuroscientific discoveries and show the compatibility of their philosophical theories with the data for their approaches to maintain credibility

Stephens and Grahamset themselves an apparently modest task, to understand why people who experience alien voices and inserted thoughts do not believe that they themselves are the source of these experiences. However, it soon becomes clear that there are many connected issues here. In eight short chapters, they address the phenomenology and ontology of consciousness, the phenomenology of alien voices, inserted thoughts, obsessive-compulsive thoughts and feelings, and other cases of unusual experience often associated with psychopathology, including brief discussion of multiple personality disorder. They survey some of the main empirical explanations of the phenomenology, set out the shortcomings of these theories, and end by proposing their own schematic account.