Conceptual Analysis and Intellectual History

Abstract

We investigate whether the analysis of the concept of mental disorder, as carried out in analytic philosophy of psychiatry, can contribute significantly to the intellectual history of antisocial personality disorders. We discuss and address possible pitfalls of this interdisciplinary interaction. Using insights from analytic philosophy of psychiatry, we investigate whether there were significant differences in the explicit conceptualisation of the notion of harm in diagnoses of moral insanity in relevant texts of Austrian and Croatian psychiatrists at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. Our finding that different notions of harm were at the core of debates on moral insanity in early Croatian psychiatry indicates the fruitfulness of the interaction between analytic philosophy and intellectual history of psychiatry.