Dominic Murphy

This dissertation examines the conceptual foundations of psychiatric taxonomy. The atheoretical approach of the current taxonomic orthodoxy is faulted, and a new foundation proposed. The basis of the proposed new approach to taxonomy is a view of the human mind which emerges from contemporary evolutionary approaches to the cognitive sciences. It is argued that a revised taxonomy should be based on a theoretical understanding of the ways in which an evolved mind can fail to function as expected. Diverse current explanations of mental disorders are canvassed with a view to showing how they might fit into such an approach. The dissertation concludes with an examination of the concept of mental disorder in the light of these new approaches. It is concluded that no coherent concept of mental disorder exists, and that therefore a now theory should make use of various successor concepts

De Haan has provided a novel and distinctly enactivist solution to the problem of integrating the physiological, experiential, social and existential. We admire her articulation of her fourth "existential" dimension. Not only does it represent a real attempt to bridge, as she says, enactivism's explanatory gap, it is also a potentially useful construct for conceptualizing the way that self-reflexivity seems to go astray in much psychopathology. We think that pinpointing this phenomenon is something that phenomenological accounts excel at. We have, however, two key reservations about her account, which we outline.To begin with, we are unsure that there is any particular scientific research program that derives from...