An investigation into mental illness and its comorbidities from the perspective of supervenience physicalism.
Ping Yang, Xinyue Zhang, Hongwen Song, Xiaochu Zhang
Philosophy, ethics, and humanities in medicine : PEHM May 8, 2025 DOI: 10.1186/s13010-025-00174-2 (opens in new tab) via PubMed
Summary
AI-generated from the abstractAnomalous monism, a theory proposed by Donald Davidson in the 1970s, offers a non-reductionist way to understand the mind-body relationship, asserting physicalism without reducing mental phenomena to physical laws. This paper applies anomalous monism's three principles to explore the origin of mental illness and uses supervenience theory to explain comorbidity among mental illnesses. The argument suggests that mental illness and its comorbidities can be understood through a framework that respects both physical causation and the irreducibility of mental states.
Study at a glance
| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Keywords | Comorbidity Mental illness Non-reductive physicalism Supervenience |
| Key finding | Argues that Davidson's anomalous monism and supervenience theory provide a non-reductionist framework for understanding the origin of mental illness and the comorbidity of mental disorders. |
Abstract
The exploration into the origin of human spirituality has always been a hot spot with many unsolved questions in the philosophy of mind, and issues concerning mental illness and its comorbidities are still unclear. In the 1970s, Donald Davidson first proposed anomalous monism with the supervenience concept, a theory that both insists on physicalism and transcends traditional reductionism. This theory provides solid and accessible proof for perceiving the mind-body relationship of spiritual origin in a non-reductionist approach. This paper develops arguments in two aspects. First, three principles of anomalous monism are employed to explore the origin of mental illness. Second, the comorbidity of mental illness is explained with the help of the supervenience theory.