S10-01 - The Philosophical Understanding of Schizophrenia

Abstract

Schziophrenia is widely considered the most “philosophical” of all mental disorders. One main reason is that many persons with schizophrenia undergo experiences akin to what some philosophers want to attain by the suspension of common-sense attitude and beliefs. This phenomenon is quintessential to the formation of schizophrenic delusions. The typical metaphysical tinge to the contents of schizophrenic delusions is supposed to be the final configuration that this condition eventually comes to take on.

Thus, the clinical characterisation of persons’ with schizophrenia - as it commonly argued by phenomenologically-oriented clinicians - may take profit from a philosophical understanding of the symptoms of this syndrome and from a rigorous and philosophically-informed definition of concepts like ‘consciousness’, ‘self’, ‘subjectivity’, ‘intersubjectivity’ and ‘identity’. A number of recent as well as classic papers and books contributed to establish a model of schizophrenic psychoses as disorders of pre-reflexive self-awareness and other-awareness. This model is now receiving increasing consensus from clinicians as well as from philosophers, and also empirical validation. This symposium will build on and extend these ideas.