Philosophical Issues in the Addictions

Abstract

The study of addiction throws up a wide range of philosophical issues, connecting with some of the deepest and longest-running debates in ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of science, to name but a few sub-disciplinary areas. By straddling such a wide range of fields of scientific enquiry, as this Handbook demonstrates, it also throws up numerous conceptual, explanatory, and methodological quandaries between disciplines, of the sort that philosophers have over the years developed many tools to deal with and reconcile. In this chapter, I first summarise some early philosophical treatments of addiction, as well as descriptions of addiction among the ancient philosophers themselves, before considering some of the major philosophical debates with which the study of addiction intersects, and the significance of those debates and intersections for the understanding of addiction in other disciplines.