From Madness to Mental Illness: Psychiatry and Biopolitics in Michel Foucault

Wilhelm Griesinger: Philosophy as the Origin of a New Psychiatry

The Next Hundred Years: Watching our Ps and Q

Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics identify mental health with moral virtue. Are they right? We might be inclined to disagree with him if we believe that mental health is good for the agent, whereas virtues of character are good for other people. These philosophers answer that the mental features of the virtues of character are also features of a person's good. Still, their demands for psychic unity and cohesion might appear to exaggerate reasonable conditions on mental health. In the view of these philosophers, our conception of mental health should make us aware of the aspects of agency that we value. We do not refer to different characteristics when we think of mental health and when we think of moral virtue. The main question is not about whether we choose to confine the expression "mental health" to the minimal condition, but about what makes the minimal condition valuable. It turns out to be difficult to explain why the minimal condition is valuable without also endorsing the moral virtues.

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice ).

T. H. Irwin is Professor of Ancient Philosophy in the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Keble College. From 1975 to 2006 he taught at Cornell University. He is the author of: Plato's Gorgias (translation and notes) (Clarendon Plato Series, Oxford University Press, 1979); Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (translation and notes) (Hackett Publishing Co., 2nd edn, 1999); Aristotle's First Principles (Oxford University Press, 1988); Classical Thought (Oxford University Press, 1989); Plato's Ethics (Oxford University Press, 1995); The Development of Ethics, 3 vols. (Oxford University Press, 2007–2009).

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.