Content area
Full Text
This book is by a Swedish professor of philosophy who has affiliations with the well-known British psychiatrist and philosopher Professor Fulford of the University of Warwick. It is about the perennial question of what constitutes the essence of a psychiatric disorder, either at the level of descriptive psychopathological entities such as delusion, or nosological entities such as psychopathy or drug addiction.
The first part of the title - rationality and compulsion - refers to his central thesis, which is that irrationality is an insufficient criterion of the essence of a psychiatric disorder which he is seeking, chiefly because all sorts of people behave irrationally during their lives and are not otherwise psychiatrically disordered, whereas in all the psychiatric disorders that he considers - delusion, kleptomania, pyromania, drug addition, 'rigid personality' and psychopathy - the subject is under a compulsion to act as he or she does.
The second part of the title - applying action...