The Philosopher's Medicine of the Mind: Kant's Account of Mental Illness and the Normativity of Thinking

Kant’s conception of mental illness is unlikely to satisfy contemporary readers. His classifications of mental illness are often fluid and ambiguous, and he seems to attribute to human beings at least some responsibility for preventing mental illness. In spite of these apparent disadvantages, I argue that Kant’s account of mental illness can be illuminating to his views about the normative dimensions of human cognition. In contrast to current understandings of mental illness, Kant’s account is what I refer to as “non-pathological.” That is, most mental illnesses are for Kant continuous with normally functioning cognition. Someone with a healthy reason can easily fall into mental illness and someone with mental illness can (perhaps not as easily) re-establish healthy reason. By accepting a non-pathological definition of mental illness, it follows for Kant that humans have more agency and responsibility regarding their mental health than current views allow, which explains why several of his writings aim to prescribe a “diet of the mind” (2:271). Contrary to popular readings of Kant as a champion of reason’s power, Kant’s conception of mental illness shows that he recognizes how fragile human reason can be

Eighteenth Century Classification of Mental Illness: Linnaeus, de Sauvages, Vogel, and Cullen

Classification was an important aspect of the 17th and 18th century development of Western science, epitomized by Linnaeus\u27s 1735 Systema Naturae (Nature\u27s System), in which he divided each kingdom of nature into classes, orders, and species. Linnaeus, a physician in addition to being a renowned taxonomist, endeavored to classify all known human diseases, largely on the basis of symptoms, in his 1759 Genera Morborum (Varieties of Diseases). We focus on his classification of mental disorders, a large subset of the Genera Morborum. We compare and contrast the Linnaean system with François Boissier de Sauvages\u27s 1772 Nosologie méthodique (A Systematic Nosology) and Rudolph Augustin Vogel\u27s 1764 Generum Morborum (Varieties of Diseases). We consider the impact of these nosologies on William Cullen\u27s (1769/1800) Nosology, a popular system of disease classification that persisted through much of the 19th century