Introduction: Conceptual Challenges in the Characterisation and Explanation of Psychiatric Phenomena

Historically, analytic philosophy has not been as close to psychiatry as the continental tradition. For instance, no analytic philosopher has produced a treatise as important and comprehensive as Karl Jaspers’s General Psychopathology (Jaspers 1963 [1913]), a work deeply infl uenced by phenomenology. Similarly, no analytic philosopher so far has critically engaged with the practice and history of psychiatry as Michel Foucault did in his Madness and Civilization (Foucault 1965 [1961]). As late as in the eighties Anthony Quinton, by referring to analytic thinkers, was justifi ed to claim that it was a “remarkable fact that philosophers, in a sense the experts on rationality, should have taken so little interest in irrationality” (1985). Although at that time some relevant research was done within the philosophy of science (see for instance, Boorse 1976 and Grünbaum 1984) and moral philosophy (see for instance, Margolis 1966 and Glover 1970), philosophy of psychiatry could not be considered a mainstream discipline.