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Evaluative Delusions: Their Significance for Philosophy and Psychiatry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 August 2018

K. W. M. Fulford
K. W. M. Fulford*
Affiliation:
University Department of Psychiatry, Warneford Hospital, Oxford OX3 7JX
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Extract

The significance of delusions for psychiatry is well recognised. Scientifically respectable, delusions are reliably identifiable clinically (Wing et al, 1974), widely acknowledged across diverse cultural norms as genuine symptoms of illness (Wing, 1978), and central to the historical notion of insanity (Jaspers, 1913). What is not so well recognised, however, is that delusions are also highly significant for philosophy. This is not well recognised either by philosophers or by doctors. Yet the key to recognising it lies not in some obscure philosophical analysis of delusions but in a feature of their everyday clinical phenomenology.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 159 , Issue S14: Delusions and Awareness of Reality , November 1991 , pp. 108 - 112
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal College of Psychiatrists 

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