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To Mental Illness via a Rhyme for the Eye

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Extract

The intellectual journey on which I am about to embark, although not an unusual one in philosophy, may at first seem strange to those who are in the habit of looking to science for the answers to their big questions, including their philosophical questions. For I propose to shed light on the problematic relationship between two things, namely, mental illness and physical illness, by comparing their relationship to the relationship between two other things, namely, a rhyme for the eye—which will be explained shortly for the benefit of anyone unfamiliar with this concept—and a rhyme for the ear. Yet these two pairs of things are not related in any way by subject-matter. In philosophy, however, this sort of deliberate dislocation can be beneficial. As Wittgenstein himself once remarked, ‘A philosophical] problem can be solved only in the right surrounding, we must give the problem a new surrounding, we must compare it to cases we are not used to compare [sic] it with.’

Type
Papers
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1996

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References

1 Wittgenstein, L., ‘Notes for the “Philosophical Lecture”, in Klagge, James C. and Nordmann, Alfred (eds.), Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951 (Indianapolis and Cambridge, MA: Hacket Publishing Company, 1993), pp. 447458Google Scholar (p. 457).

2 Poem no 1129 in Johnson, Thomas H. (ed.) The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, MA: The Belnap Press, 1955), 3 volsCrossRefGoogle Scholar

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4 Gittings, Robert, Keats, John (London: Heinemann, 1968), p. 560.Google Scholar

5 See Rollins, Hyder E. (ed.), The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers 1816–1878, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), vol. II, p. 73.Google Scholar

6 Flew, Antony, Crime or Disease? (London: Macmillan, 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Szasz, Thomas S., The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (New York: Hoeber-Harper, 1961)Google Scholar

7 Wittgenstein, L., Culture and Value, ed. Wright, G. H. von in collaboration with Nyman, H. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 54e and p. 55e.Google Scholar

8 Wittgenstein, L., Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, ed. Anscombe, G. E. M. and Wright, G. H. von, trans. Anscombe, G. E. M., 2 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), vol. I, §§591 and 592, p. 110e.Google Scholar

9 Ibid, §646, p. 119e.

10 Bennett, Alan, Writing Home (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), pp. 227240Google Scholar; Macalpine, Ida and Hunter, Richard, George III and the Mad Business (London: Allen Lane, 1969).Google Scholar

11 By Kenny, Anthony in his ‘Mental Health in Plato's Republic’ in the Proceedings of the British Academy for 1969, pp. 229253Google Scholar.

12 Flew, Anthony, Crime or Disease? (London: Macmillan, 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ch. II, ‘Disease and Mental Disease’.

13 Ibid., pp. 75–78.

14 See Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness, Book I; and Flew, Antony, ‘Mental health, mental disease, mental illness: “the medical model”’, ch. 6 in Bean, Philip (ed.), Mental Illness: Changes and Trends (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 1983), p. 131Google Scholar.

15 For example, by Foucault, Michel in his Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Howard, Richard (London: Tavistock Publications, 1967)Google Scholar.

16 Priest, R. G. and Steinert, J., Insanity: A Study of Major Psychiatric Disorders (Plymouth: Macdonald and Evans, 1977), p. 22.Google Scholar