Philosophy Commons^™

Is Addicted Phenomenology Just Human Phenomenology?, Benji Mahaffey, Tom Seppalainen

McNair Symposium

The phenomenon of addiction precedes, by millennia, our scientific inquiries into its psychological manifestations and neural bases. We did not need psychiatrists to ‘discover’ it; we have long been aware of its dark shadow lurking in our psyches. The discernable, often troubling behaviors of addicts notwithstanding, addiction is not the kind of phenomenon one observes; addiction is experienced, from the first-person perspective. Its defining features are qualitative: a subjective loss of control, an obsession, a compulsion. The overwhelming phenomenological salience of these features—especially of “compulsion”—has led addicts, philosophers, and psychiatrists alike to imagine that addiction is a discrete (phenomenological, natural, …