The professional application of ethics often lacks the necessary conceptual tools to
construct adequate theoretical foundations that can be used for practical enterprise.
Health care professionals, such as psychologists and sociologists, education institution
administrators and teachers (among others) , are all, broadly speaking, supposed to be able
to take responsibility for other people’s personal development. This makes the relative
lack of attention given to theoretical foundations for knowledge on mental development
and cognitive sciences all the more puzzling.
This book focuses on an anthropological approach to mental illness, describing how
schizophrenia can distort one’s experience of empathy and of the presence in the
world through pathological indifference. It describes factual and phenomenological
perspectives on a case of schizophrenia, based on the method of Eugène Minkowski
