Minds, Models and Mechanisms:
Current Trends in Philosophy of Psychiatry
call for papers
In recent years, psychiatry has experienced several turns towards neurophysiology, genetics, and multi-level biological explanations. According to the current state of the art, understanding mental disorders requires looking at a variety of different factors contributing to the development and persistence of, as well as the recovery from, mental disorders. To do justice to the multi-factorial nature of psychopathology, a range of new approaches has recently been proposed. These include, among others, mechanisms, artificial or deep neural networks, computational models, multiplexes or multi-layered network models, predictive processing, functional brain networks, and symptom network models. In order to clarify the theoretical and conceptual foundations of contemporary research on psychopathology, the workshop “Minds, Models and Mechanisms” brings together experts from clinical psychiatry, neuroscience, computational modelling, philosophy of mind and cognition as well as philosophy of science.
The event will take place from April 20th to 22th 2021, both online and locally at Saarland University in Saarbrücken.
Issues and questions we aim to discuss during the workshop include but are not limited to:
- What are mental disorder models?
- How shall we conceptualize “disease” or “disorder”?
- To what extent are mental disorders brain disorders?
- How does constructing general models of psychopathology square with personalized treatment strategies?
- What explanatory approaches to psychopathology may promote epistemically valuable integration?
- What does such integration imply for our understanding of the relation between mind and brain more generally?
- What is the contribution of recent network models in the context of psychopathology research?
- To what extent are recent network models causal models?
- How to capture and assess the significance of clinical interventions?
- What is the potential of computational psychiatry for theory, diagnosis, and treatment of mental disorders?
- What may an enactive perspective or first-person methodology add to understanding mental disorders?
- To what extent is plurality an ineliminable feature of psychiatry?
We invite submission of extended abstracts (1000 words) for talks by January 10th 2021. Please submit your abstracts as an attachment in pdf format to s8mxklei@stud.uni-saarland.de. Please make sure to anonymize your submission appropriately, put “Mind, Models and Mechanisms” as the subject of your email, and indicate your current position and affiliation in the body of your message. Submissions from early-career researchers and underrepresented groups in philosophy are especially encouraged.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to get in touch.