Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-v5vhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-05T21:57:36.817Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - Philosophical Issues in the Addictions

from Part I - Concepts of Addiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2020

Steve Sussman
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
Get access

Summary

The study of addiction throws up a wide range of philosophical issues, connecting with some of the deepest and longest-running debates in ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of science, to name but a few subdisciplinary areas. By straddling such a wide range of fields of scientific enquiry, as this Handbook demonstrates, it also throws up numerous conceptual, explanatory, and methodological quandaries between disciplines, of the sort that philosophers have over the years developed many tools to deal with and reconcile. In this chapter, I first summarize some early philosophical treatments of addiction, as well as descriptions of addiction among the ancient philosophers themselves, before considering some of the major philosophical debates with which the study of addiction intersects, and the significance of those debates and intersections for the understanding of addiction in other disciplines.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Africa, T. W. (1961). The opium addiction of Marcus Aurelius. Journal of the History of Ideas, 22 , 97102.Google Scholar
Ainslie, G. (2000). A research-based theory of addictive motivation. Law and Philosophy, 19, 77115.Google Scholar
Alexander, B. K. (2008). The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in the Poverty of the Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Alexander, B. K., Beyerstein, B. L., Hadaway, P. F. & Coambs, R. B. (1981). Effect of early and later colony housing on oral ingestion of morphine in rats. Pharmacology Biochemistry & Behavior, 15, 571576.Google Scholar
Alexander, B. K. & Schweighofer, A .R. F. (1988). Defining “addiction.” Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne, 29, 151162.Google Scholar
American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th edition). Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Publishing.Google Scholar
Aristotle, . (2004). The Nicomachean Ethics (Penguin Classics Edition), trans. Thomson, J. A. K.. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Atiyah, P. S. (1982). Economic duress and the overborne will. Law Quarterly Review, 98, 197.Google Scholar
St. Augustine, (2002). Confessions (Penguin Classics Edition), trans. Pine-Coffin, R. S.. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Bird, A. & Tobin, E. (2018). Natural kinds. In Zalta, E. N. (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2018 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/natural-kinds/Google Scholar
Bliss, R. & Trogdon, K. (2016). Metaphysical grounding. In Zalta, E. N. (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/grounding/Google Scholar
Boorse, C. (1975). On the distinction between disease and illness. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 5, 4968.Google Scholar
Boorse, C. (1977). Health as a theoretical concept. Philosophy of Science, 44, 542573.Google Scholar
Bowers, J. M. (1990). Augustine as addict: Sex and texts in the Confessions. Exemplaria, 2, 403448.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boyd, R. (1991). Realism, anti-foundationalism and the enthusiasm for natural kinds. Philosophical Studies, 61, 127148.Google Scholar
Boyd, R. (1999). Homeostasis, species, and higher taxa. In Wilson, R. (Ed.), Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 141186.Google Scholar
Brandom, R. B. (2008). Between Saying and Doing: Towards and Analytic Pragmatism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davidson, D. C. (1970). How is weakness of the will possible? In Davidson, D. C. (1980) Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 2142.Google Scholar
Davidson, D. C. (1974). On the very idea of a conceptual scheme. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 47, 520.Google Scholar
Davidson, D. C. (1982). Paradoxes of irrationality. In Davidson, D. C. (2004) Problems of Rationality. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 169187.Google Scholar
Davies, J. B. (1997). The Myth of Addiction (2nd edition). Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.Google Scholar
Dupré, J. (1995). The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Durrant, R., Adamson, S., Todd, F. & Sellman, D. (2009). Drug use and addiction: Evolutionary perspective. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 43, 10491056.Google Scholar
Eliot, T. S. (1922). The Waste Land. New York: Horace Liveright.Google Scholar
Engelhart, H. T. (1976). Ideology and etiology. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 1, 256268.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Epstein, B. (2015). The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Foddy, B. (2010). Addiction and its sciences – philosophy. Addiction, 106, 2531.Google Scholar
Foddy, B. & Savulescu, J. (2010a). A liberal account of addiction. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 17, 122.Google Scholar
Foddy, B. & Savulescu, J. (2010b). Relating addiction to disease, disability, autonomy, and the good life. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 17, 3542.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Glackin, S. N. (2010). Tolerance and illness: The politics of medical and psychiatric classification. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 35, 449465.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Glackin, S. N. (2012). Kind-making, objectivity, and political neutrality; the case of Solastalgia. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 43, 209218.Google Scholar
Glackin, S. N. (2019). Grounded disease: The biological and the social in medicine. The Philosophical Quarterly, 69, 258276.Google Scholar
Godfrey-Smith, P. (2011). Induction, samples, and kinds. In Campbell, J. K., O’Rourke, M. & Slater, M. H. (Eds.), Carving Nature at Its Joints: Natural Kinds in Metaphysics and Science. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 3352.Google Scholar
Goodman, N. (1978). Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett.Google Scholar
Griffiths, M. D. (2013). Is loss of control always a consequence of addiction? Frontiers in Psychiatry, 4, 36.Google Scholar
Griffiths, P. E. (2016). Proximate and ultimate information in biology. In Pfeifer, J. & Couch, M. (Eds.), The Philosophy of Philip Kitcher. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 7493.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hacking, I. (1986). Making up people. In Heller, T., Sosna, M. & Wellberry, D. (Eds.), Reconstructing Individualism. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 222236.Google Scholar
Hacking, I. (1995). The looping effects of human kinds. In Sperber, D. & Premark, A. (Eds.), Causal Cognition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 351394.Google Scholar
Hacking, I. (2004). Historical Ontology. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hammersley, R. & Reid, M. (2002). Why the pervasive addiction myth is still believed. Addiction Research & Theory, 10, 730.Google Scholar
Hare, R. M. (1952). The Language of Morals. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Hare, R. M. (1963). Freedom and Reason. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Heather, N. & Segal, G. (2013). Understanding addiction: Donald Davidson and the problem of akrasia. Addiction Research & Theory, 21, 445452.Google Scholar
Heather, N. & Segal, G. (2015). Is addiction a myth? Donald Davidson’s solution to the problem of akrasia says not. The International Journal of Alcohol and Drug Research, 4, 7783.Google Scholar
Hempel, C. G. (1994). Fundamentals of taxonomy. In Sadler, J. S., Wiggins, O. P. & Schwartz, M. A. (Eds.), Philosophical Perspectives on Psychiatric Diagnostic Classification. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 315331.Google Scholar
Holton, R. (1999). Intention and weakness of will. Journal of Philosophy, 96, 241262.Google Scholar
Holton, R. (2009). Willing, Wanting, Waiting. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Husak, D. (1999). Addiction and criminal liability. Law and Philosophy, 18, 655684.Google Scholar
James, F. A. III (1987). Augustine’s sex-life change: From profligate to celibate. Christian History, 15.Google Scholar
James, W. (1890). Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt.Google Scholar
Kim, J. (1984). Concepts of supervenience. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 45, 153176.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kingma, E. (2007). What is it to be healthy? Analysis, 67, 128133.Google Scholar
Kitcher, P. (2003). Battling the undead: How (and how not) to resist genetic determinism. In In Mendel’s Mirror: Philosophical Reflections on Biology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 283300.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kukla, R. (2014). Medicalization, “normal function,” and the definition of health. In Arras, J. D., Fenton, E. & Kukla, R. (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Bioethics. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Leibowitz, J. O. (1967). Studies in the history of alcoholism II: Acute alcoholism in Ancient Greek and Roman medicine. British Journal of Addiction to Alcohol and Other Drugs, 62, 8386.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Leshner, A. I. (1997). Addiction is a brain disease, and it matters. Science, 278, 4547.Google Scholar
Levy, N. (2011). Addiction, responsibility, and ego depletion. In Poland, J. & Graham, G. (Eds.), Addiction and Responsibility. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 89111.Google Scholar
Levy, N. (2013). Addiction is not a brain disease (and it matters). Frontiers in Psychiatry, 4, 24. In Poland, J. & Graham, G. (Eds.), Addiction and Responsibility. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 89–111.Google Scholar
McLaughlin, B. & Bennett, K. (2018). Supervenience. In Zalta, E. N. (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2018 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/supervenience/Google Scholar
Millikan, R. G. (1989). In defense of proper functions. Philosophy of Science, 56, 288302.Google Scholar
Millikan, R. G. (2017). Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural Information. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Morris, T. (2011). Interview with a Philosopher: Aristotle and Wittgenstein walk into a bar – Philosophy and addiction. Huffington Post. 10/12/2011. www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-morris/philosophy-and-addiction_b_999933.htmlGoogle Scholar
Morse, S. (2000). Hooked on hype: Addiction and responsibility. Law and Philosophy, 19, 349.Google Scholar
Murphy, D. (2017). Philosophy of psychiatry. In Zalta, E. N. (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2017 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/psychiatry/Google Scholar
Nagel, E. (1961). The Structure of Science. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nagel, T. (1979). Moral luck. In Mortal Questions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 2438.Google Scholar
Nordenfelt, L. (2018). Functions and health: Towards a praxis-oriented conception of health. Biological Theory, 13, 1016.Google Scholar
Paul, L. A. (2015a). What you can’t expect when you’re expecting. Res Philosophica, 92, 123.Google Scholar
Paul, L. A. (2015b). Transformative Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Pickard, H. (2009) Mental illness is indeed a myth. In Bortolotti, L. & Broome, M. (Eds.), Psychiatry as Cognitive Science: Philosophical Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 83101.Google Scholar
Pickard, H. (2012). The purpose in chronic addiction. AJOB Neuroscience, 3, 4049.Google Scholar
Pickard, H. (2016). Addiction. In Timpe, K., Griffith, M & Levy, N. (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Free Will. London: Routledge, pp. 454468.Google Scholar
Pickard, H. (2017). Responsibility without blame for addiction. Neuroethics, 10, 169180.Google Scholar
Pickard, H. (2018). The puzzle of addiction. In Pickard, H. & Ahmed, S. H. (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Science of Addiction. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Pickard, H. & Pearce, S. (2014). Addiction in context: Philosophical lessons from a personality disorder clinic. In Levy, N. (Ed.), Addiction and Self-Control: Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 165189.Google Scholar
Plato, (2003). The Republic (Penguin Classics Edition), trans. Lee, H. D. P.. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Plato, (2005). Phaedrus (Penguin Classics Edition), trans. Rowe, C.. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Plato, (2009). Protagoras (Oxford World’s Classics), trans. Taylor, C .C. W.. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Pober, J. M. (2013). Addiction is not a natural kind. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 4, 123.Google Scholar
Quine, W. V. (1969). Natural kinds. Ontological Relativity & Other Essays. New York: Columbia Press.Google Scholar
Radoilska, L. (2013). Addiction and Weakness of Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Ross, D. Sharp, C., Vuchinich, R. E. & Spurrett, D. E. (2012). Midbrain Mutiny: The Picoeconomics and Neuroeconomics of Disordered Gambling: Economic Theory and Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Schaffer, J. (2009). On what grounds what. In Manley, D., Chalmers, D. J. & Wasserman, R. (Eds.), Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 347383.Google Scholar
Segal, G. (2013). Alcoholism, disease, and insanity. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 20, 297315.Google Scholar
Sinnott-Armstrong, W. & Pickard, H. (2013). What is addiction? In Fulford, K. W. M., Davies, M., Gipps, R. T., Graham, G., Sadler, J. Z., Stanghellini, G. & Thornton, T. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 851864.Google Scholar
Soble, A. G. (2002). Correcting some misconceptions about St. Augustine’s sex life. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 11, 545569.Google Scholar
Sripada, C. S. (2018), Addiction and fallibility. Journal of Philosophy, 115, 569587.Google Scholar
Sterelny, K. & Griffiths, P. E. (1999). Sex and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Stotz, K. & Griffiths, P. E. (2016). A niche for the genome. Biology and Philosophy, 31, 143157.Google Scholar
Szasz, T. (1960). The myth of mental illness. American Psychologist, 15, 113118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Szasz, T. (2006). Defining disease: The Gold Standard of Disease versus the Fiat Standard of Diagnosis. The Independent Review, 10, 325336.Google Scholar
Trancas, B., Borja Santos, N. & Patrício, L.D. (2004). O Uso do Ópio na Sociedade Romana e a Dependência do Princeps Marco Aurélio. Acta Médica Portuguesa, 21, 581590.Google Scholar
Virchow, R. (1860). Cellular Pathology as based upon Physiological and Pathological Histology. London: John Churchill.Google Scholar
Vrecko, S. (2010). “Civilizing Technologies” and the control of deviance. BioSocieties, 5, 3651.Google Scholar
Wakefield, J. C. (1992). The concept of mental disorder: On the boundary between biological facts and social values. American Psychologist, 47, 373388.Google Scholar
Watson, G. (1999). Excusing addiction. Law and Philosophy, 18, 589619.Google Scholar
Williams, B. A. O. (1976). Moral luck. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary volumes, 50, 115135.Google Scholar
Whitehead, A. N. (1929). Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927–1928. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Yaffe, G. (2011). Lowering the bar for addicts. In Poland, J. & Graham, G. (Eds.), Addiction and Responsibility. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 113138.Google Scholar
Yaffe, G. (2013). Are addicts akratic? Interpreting the neuroscience of reward. In Levy, N. (Ed.), Addiction and Self-Control: Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 190213.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×