The concept of "madness" is not one with which psychologists, psychiatrists, or neurologists, of the 21st century have any dealings. Musicians, yes ... see above. Philosophers also still talk about madness, because philosophy is uniquely keyed to its past, still arguing cases litigated by Plato or Philo or Lao-Tsu. Anyway: Justin Garson, a professor of philosophy at CUNY, has written a book simply titled Madness: A Philosophical Exploration . Garson's point is that in ancient times there were two very different views of what the ancients called madness. There was madness as dysfunction, or madness as strategy. When medieval Christian philosophers addressed the point, they tended to combine both ideas. Madness could serve as an earthly purgatory, both punishing and improving. It is early modern thinkers, from Locke to Kant, whom Garson credits/blames for the dominance of madness-as-dysfunction in our own time. A review devoted largely to summari...
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I mentioned in a blog entry a short time ago that certain experimental findings in psychology have been successfully replicated in a way that leaves some hope that psychology may really be a science, that some findings can be properly considered settled. The philosopher/blogger Brian Leiter commented that none of the specific findings on the list are especially "sexy" from the PoV of philosophy. This drew a comment from me on his blog and out of laziness I'll simply paste it here. ----------------------- There was at one time quite a hullabaloo (technical terminology I know, but bear with me) about the "hidden persuaders," about how nasty Madison Avenue folks had figured out subliminal perception and used it to deprive us of free will and get us to buy their products. The height of the scare on subliminal advertising was, I believe, roughly the fictitious Don Draper's heyday. The one fascinating finding among these involves motor priming. A...
My sometimes random web-surfing has just brought me in contact with what seems to be a thing in the world of psychotherapy. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) apparently takes its name as a mutant of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which is well established. David M. Clark of Oxford was a pioneer in CBT, in the 1980s, merging the already established (but until then adversarial) cognitive and behavioral approaches, originally with the idea of helping people cope with trauma and anxiety disorders. That much I knew. What I didn't know until recently was that this, too, gets the dialectical twist from the see-saw brigade. Hegelian badness looms over everything. Just one word: Aaaaargh.
It was J.R.R. Tolkien who first wrote, in a reminiscence of his childhood and of an early effort at fantasy writing, that one cannot refer in English to a "green great dragon." Size must come before color. It must be a great green dragon. He also expressed his continuing puzzlement, as boy and man, about this philological fact. Recently, someone among my FB friends posted a photo of a book, author unspecified and unknown to me, which addresses the point more comprehensively. According to this unsourced book, the proper list is: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose Noun. So one could encounter a terrifying great ancient smooth-lined green demon-sired flesh-and-blood gold-guarding dragon. Then presumably edit down the adjectives to just two, keeping the order. Is this a Chomskyan thing or a Skinnerian thing? If different languages have different preferred adjective orders then we might describe this as a Skinnerian discovery. The 'proper...