Reasons and causes in psychiatry
ideas from Donald Davidson's work
pp. 281-296
in: Annalisa Coliva, Paolo Leonardi, Sebastiano Moruzzi (eds), Eva Picardi on language, analysis and history, Berlin, Springer, 2018Abstract
Though the divide between reason-based and causal-explanatory approaches in psychiatry and psychopathology is old and deeply rooted, current trends involving multi-factorial explanatory models and evidence-based approaches to interpersonal psychotherapy, show that it has already been implicitly bridged. These trends require a philosophical reconsideration of how reasons can be causes. This paper contributes to that trajectory by arguing that Donald Davidson's classic paradigm of 1963 is still a valid option.
