CFCUL Book: Psychosurgery. The Birth of a New Scientific Paradig, by Zbigniew Kotowicz

Centre for Philosophy of Science of the University of Lisbon (CFCUL) presents:

The conviction that mental illness is a sign of a malfunctioning brain leads to a call for merging psychiatry and neurology. The author argues that this is conceptually incoherent, and he does so by demonstrating that the reason psychiatry and neurology are distinct is because, from the medical point of view, their terrains are different and because they pose different sets of methodological, epistemological and philosophical questions. The author also argues that the new vision of a unified neurology and psychiatry is clinically damaging.

Zbigniew Kotowicz

Zbigniew Kotowicz spent some fifteen years as a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist, mostly with R.D.Laing’s Philadelphia Association. Subsequently, in 1993, he took a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Warwick, writing a thesis entitled Gaston Bachelard: Multiplicity, Movement, Well-Being. He was Wellcome Research Fellow in the History of Medicine in the Department of History, Goldsmiths College, University of London between 2002 and 2005 and remained in the College until 2009. He is a member of CFCUL and a recipient of POS-DOC grant for the project Gaston Bachelard.  A Theory of the Subject and Epistemological Thought (Studies of Atomism). He is head of the Centre’s internal project Bachelard: Science and Poetics.