The phenomenon of addiction has been a subject of investigation for a number of
academic disciplines, but little has been written about addiction from a philosophical
perspective. This dissertation inserts philosophy into the conversations taking place
within the multi-disciplinary field of “Addiction Studies.” It contends that the
philosophical accounts of human action given by Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas
provide means for an analysis of many of the conceptual confusions in the field of
Addiction Studies, including those surrounding the concepts of choice, compulsion, and
habit. It argues that the category of habit in these two thinkers is richer and more
complex than contemporary conceptions of habit and that the category of habit in its
Aristotelian and Thomistic guises is indispensable for charting an intelligible path
between the muddled polarities that construe addiction as either a disease or a type of
willful misconduct. Furthermore, it suggests that recognizing the distance between
Aristotle’s social context and the modern social context affords powerful insight into the
character of modern addiction, and that an exploration of the parallels between the habit
of addiction and Aquinas’s development of the habit of charity offers suggestive inroads
for thinking about addiction as a moral strategy for integrated and purposive action.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-1593 |
| Date | 15 May 2009 |
| Creators | Dunnington, Kent J. |
| Contributors | McDermott, John J. |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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