Psychological Medicine (2014), 44, 2013–2014.
© Cambridge University Press 2014
Book Review
Psychological Medicine, 44 (2014).
doi:10.1017/S0033291714000907
First published online 17 April 2014
The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry, 1st
edn. Edited by K. W. M. Fulford, M. Davies, R. G. T.
Gipps, G. Graham, J. Z. Sadler, G. Stanghellini and
T. Thornton. (Pp. 1376; ISBN 9780199579563;
$146.00 hb.) USA: Oxford University Press, 2013.
The bookshelves of philosophers of psychiatry have
recently been colonized by volumes featuring ar-
rangements of boldly colored geometric shapes on a
stark black background. These are the constituents of
the International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psy-
chiatry (IPPP) series, edited by Bill Fulford, Katherine
Morris, John Sadler, and Giovanni Stanghellini.
Along with a rich variety of monographs the series in-
cludes several edited volumes, including The Oxford
Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry, co-branded
with the Oxford Philosophy Handbooks series and edi-
ted by Fulford, Sadler, and Stanghellini, along with
Martin Davies, Richard G. T. Gipps, George Graham,
and Tim Thornton. This ambitious volume is doubly
radical: it makes manifest a vision, actualized by the
IPPP series, for the burgeoning field of philosophy of
psychiatry (or, as the editors would have it, philosophy
and psychiatry), and it contributes to Oxford’s over-
turning of the very idea of the handbook. For par-
ticipating institutions, www.oxfordhandbooks.com
offers a new mode for research, in which signature
contributions from experts are gathered in one place.
The volumes in the series are ‘living’: new chapters
are added online, and linked through a user-friendly
database. Each is accompanied by free online re-
sources, in this case two valuable additions – a manual
of descriptive psychopathology assembled by V. Y.
Allison-Bolger, and a database of personal narratives
of madness edited by Jayasree Kalathil.
The Oxford handbooks aim to collect exciting and
timely scholarly contributions rather than to provide
introductory summaries, and they have succeeded
here. In this short review it is impossible to summarize
the content of the 73 chapters, which take a variety of
approaches, historical and social-scientific as well as
philosophical. But the quality and range of the con-
tributions is spectacular, and anyone interested in psy-
chiatry will find many things to inspire, inform, and
challenge. Some of the chapters are more technical,
engaging with theorists from Dretske to Davidson,
Kristeva to Merleau-Ponty, and will be of interest to
philosophers more than the psychiatric researcher,
clinician, or the general reader. But the editors have
done a nice job of balancing these contributions with
more accessible philosophical discussions and more
clinically oriented analyses. Perusing the Handbook
will serve as a guide not only to traditional crossroads
between philosophy and psychiatry – such as the con-
ceptual analysis of disease, the question of natural
kinds, or the mind-body problem – but also to more
cutting-edge topics, such as neuroethics, the placebo
effect, and theory of mind. The size of the collection
alone is impressive, although it seems to have taken
its toll on the copy-editors: within two pages
(pp. 360–361) for example, the given name of one pro-
minent philosopher of psychiatry is mistaken and the
male pronoun is incorrectly applied to another (a re-
grettable oversight in a male-dominated field).
Whether the Handbook serves as a ‘representative
cross-section of the new field’ (p. v) or rather of the
IPPP collection itself is to some extent moot, since
so many working philosophers of psychiatry have
published in the series. But the series itself represents
a strong stance about what the new field should be,
and as the editors recognize, they ‘have ended up
being perhaps somewhat too closed with little in the
way of dissenting voices’ (p. 8). What is this stance?
Emphasized throughout is the co-dependency of
philosophy and psychiatry, as the editors encourage
clinicians to ‘go deep philosophically’ (p. 3) and philo-
sophers to take seriously the lessons psychopathology
can hold for the philosophy of mind and medicine.
The editors (and, to varying degrees, the contributors)
envision philosophy as engaging with psychiatry in a
‘responsibly product-oriented’ (p. 1) way, with a
focus on practice instead of theory. The ‘service user
voice’ is at the center of this normative picture, and a
partiality towards the clinic and away from biomedical
research is apparent in the humanist slant of many
of the contributions, as well as in the dedication of
only one section to scientific explanation. More than
a biomedical discipline, the Handbook presents psy-
chiatry as ‘chiefly about establishing therapeutic re-
lationship and understanding other forms of life’
(p. 217).
The volume aims to put philosophy’s shoulder to the
wheel on the side of the humanist clinician, while not-
ing that ‘the philosophy of psychiatry, after all, for
all its recent burgeoning, remains a minnow to the
neuroscientific whale’ (p. 8). While the opposition to
neuroscientific approaches holds as a generalization
about most professional philosophers, it is worth not-
ing that the implications of neuroscientific (as well as
2014 Book Review
genetic) approaches have been taken up more sym-
pathetically by notable philosophically proficient psy-
chiatrists, including Eric Kandel, Kenneth Kendler,
and Steven Hyman. The absence of these viewpoints
notwithstanding, the normative critical stance taken
by the editors will make the volume of interest to read-
ers of this journal who have suspicions about the
biomedical whale in whose belly they labor, and who
need resources for thinking critically and creatively
about their own commitments. For philosophers or
clinicians who aspire to the crucial work of integrating
psychosocial and phenomenological approaches into
scientific investigation (clearly the book’s target audi-
ence) it will be an outstanding resource.
KATHRYN TABB
(Email: kct5@pitt.edu)