WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE AN ADDICT?: Understanding Substance Abuse
In What Is It Like to Be an Addict?, Owen Flanagan, an internationally acclaimed philosopher of mind and ethics, offers a state-of-the-art assessment of addiction science and proposes a new integrated model for understanding and explaining substance addiction. Flanagan has deep personal knowledge of what it is like to be an addict. He was one. And he has encyclopedic knowledge of the philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, and the ethics and politics of addiction. At present, addiction theorizing is divided sharply between advocates of the view that addiction is a brain disorder and views that conceive addiction in psychological and social terms. What Is It Like to Be an Addict? offers a way out of this impasse by integrating the testimony of addicts with psychology, neuroscience, sociology, and cultural anthropology. The new model has important implications for the ethics and politics of addiction.
