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Associate Professor Dominic Murphy

Director, Unit for History and Philosophy of Science

MPhil London University; PhD Rutgers University
Room 432 Carslaw

+61 2 9351 3762

Dominic's main areas of interest are in the philosophy of the cognitive and biological sciences, especially issues in psychiatry and cognitive neuroscience. He has further interests in evolutionary theory, the history and philosophy of biology and medicine, moral psychology, epistemology and bioethics.

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Current projects

Dominic's main current project is a book on self-representation. This looks at recent work on the self in the cognitive neurosciences and social psychology and considers the implications of this work for some philosophical ideas about the nature and function of the self and its relation to theories of cognitive architecture. He is also working on delusions, psychopaths and the role of model-building in the inexact sciences.

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KEY THINKERS SERIES

EMIL KRAEPELIN AND THE ORIGINS OF MODERN PSYCHIATRY
20TH OCTOBER 2010

One hundred years ago, Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926) was the most influential psychiatrist in the world, revered as the man whose system of classification put the study of mental illness on firm scientific foundations. We owe to Kraepelin the distinction between schizophrenia (which he called premature dementia) and manic-depressive illness. Kraepelin saw mental illnesses as distinct processes with characteristic outcomes, ultimately rooted in the biology of the brain. His ideas were eclipsed by psychoanalysis, but have returned to serve as the basis of contemporary psychiatry, which is often called neo-Kraepelinian. This lecture will explain Kraepelin's approach to psychiatry and his influence on modern psychiatry, and discuss why some contemporary theorists think that his influence is keeping psychiatry on the wrong track. Listen to Podcast

Grants

  • Sydney University Bridging Grant ($40,000 2009-10)
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Selected publications

  • Complex Mental Disorders: Representation, Stability and Explanation. European Journal of Analytical Philosophy 6:1 (2010) 28-42.
  • Philosophy of Psychiatry. Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (2010) on-line.
  • Explanation in Psychiatry. Philosophy Compass 5:7 (2010) 602-610.

  • "Psychiatry and the Concept of Disease as Pathology". Forthcoming in M.Broome & L. Bortolotti (eds) Psychiatry as cognitive neuroscience: philosophical perspectives. Oxford University Press.
  • Psychiatry in the Scientific Image. MIT Press, 2006.
  • "Concepts of Health and Disease". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2008.
  • "On Fodor's Analogy: Why Psychology is LIke Philosophy of Science After All." Mind and Language 21, no.5 (2006): 553-564.
  • "From My Lai to Abu Ghraib: The Moral Psychology of Atrocity." Midwest Studies in Philosophy 31 (2007): 25-55.
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Areas of teaching and supervision

Philosophy of Psychology, Philosophy of Biology, Philosophy of Neuroscience, Moral Psychology.

Dominic is the honours co-ordinator in the Unit for HPS.