Neural Sufficiency, Reductionism, and Cognitive Neuropsychiatry

Neural Sufficiency, Reductionism, and Cognitive Neuropsychiatry

Editorial: in praise of cognitive neuropsychiatry.

I wonder if the readers of this journal remember that time, not so long ago, when functional psychoses such as schizophrenia had nothing to do with the brain? This belief was not limited to antipsychiatrists such as Szasz. When my colleague, psychiatrist Eve Johnstone, published her classic paper in 1976 in the Lancet demonstrating enlarged ventricles in association with chronic schizophrenia (...

Narrowing the Mind and Page: Remedial Writers and Cognitive Reductionism

ly that they are both tools? The Western anthropologist considers concrete reasoning to be less advanced than abstract reasoning, and orality-literacy theorists like to pose literacy as the crucial variable fostering abstract reasoning. It is because the tribesman lacks letters that he is locked into the concrete. This is an appealing conjecture, but, as I hope the previous discussion suggests,...

Hallucinating God? The Cognitive Neuropsychiatry of Religious Belief and Experience

At least since M ARX and F REUD , there has existed a conceptualization of religious belief as pathological. 1 According to this view, religious beliefs result from, and are indicative of, some kind of intellectual flaw or deficiency (P LANTINGA 2000). We might say that religious beliefs are here construed as reflecting doxastic dysfunction (from the Greek word “doxa”, meaning “opinion” or “bel...

Neuropsychiatry

The purpose of this book is to exhaustively review what appears to be a general integration between the subspecialities of neurology and psychiatry. In the Foreward, it is pointed out that practitioners of neurology and psychiatry “have been assigned the uniquely challenging task of treating the most complex disorders of the most complex organ in the body.”p xi The Preface notes that recent beh...