What Is It Like to Be an Addict?: Understanding Substance Abuse
Owen Flanagan, an acclaimed philosopher of mind and ethics, offers a state-of-the-art assessment of addiction science and proposes a new ecumenical model for understanding and explaining substance addiction.

Flanagan has firsthand knowledge of what it is like to be an addict. That experience informs this important and novel work. He pairs the sciences that study addiction with a sophisticated view of the consciousness-brain/body relation to make his core argument: that substance addictions comprise a heterogeneous set of "psychobiosocial" behavioral disorders. He explains that substance addictions do not have one set of causes, such as self-medication or social dislocation, and they do not have one neural profile, such as a dysfunction in dopamine system.

Flanagan explores the ways addicts sensibly insist on their own responsibility to undo addiction, as well as ways in which shame for addiction can be leveraged into healing. He insists on the collective shame we all bear for our indifference to many of the psychological and social causes of addiction and explores the implications of this new integrated paradigm for practices of harm reduction and treatment. Flanagan's powerful new book upends longstanding conventional thinking and points the way to new ways of understanding and treating addiction.
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What Is It Like to Be an Addict?: Understanding Substance Abuse
Owen Flanagan, an acclaimed philosopher of mind and ethics, offers a state-of-the-art assessment of addiction science and proposes a new ecumenical model for understanding and explaining substance addiction.

Flanagan has firsthand knowledge of what it is like to be an addict. That experience informs this important and novel work. He pairs the sciences that study addiction with a sophisticated view of the consciousness-brain/body relation to make his core argument: that substance addictions comprise a heterogeneous set of "psychobiosocial" behavioral disorders. He explains that substance addictions do not have one set of causes, such as self-medication or social dislocation, and they do not have one neural profile, such as a dysfunction in dopamine system.

Flanagan explores the ways addicts sensibly insist on their own responsibility to undo addiction, as well as ways in which shame for addiction can be leveraged into healing. He insists on the collective shame we all bear for our indifference to many of the psychological and social causes of addiction and explores the implications of this new integrated paradigm for practices of harm reduction and treatment. Flanagan's powerful new book upends longstanding conventional thinking and points the way to new ways of understanding and treating addiction.
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What Is It Like to Be an Addict?: Understanding Substance Abuse

What Is It Like to Be an Addict?: Understanding Substance Abuse

by Owen Flanagan
What Is It Like to Be an Addict?: Understanding Substance Abuse

What Is It Like to Be an Addict?: Understanding Substance Abuse

by Owen Flanagan

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Overview

Owen Flanagan, an acclaimed philosopher of mind and ethics, offers a state-of-the-art assessment of addiction science and proposes a new ecumenical model for understanding and explaining substance addiction.

Flanagan has firsthand knowledge of what it is like to be an addict. That experience informs this important and novel work. He pairs the sciences that study addiction with a sophisticated view of the consciousness-brain/body relation to make his core argument: that substance addictions comprise a heterogeneous set of "psychobiosocial" behavioral disorders. He explains that substance addictions do not have one set of causes, such as self-medication or social dislocation, and they do not have one neural profile, such as a dysfunction in dopamine system.

Flanagan explores the ways addicts sensibly insist on their own responsibility to undo addiction, as well as ways in which shame for addiction can be leveraged into healing. He insists on the collective shame we all bear for our indifference to many of the psychological and social causes of addiction and explores the implications of this new integrated paradigm for practices of harm reduction and treatment. Flanagan's powerful new book upends longstanding conventional thinking and points the way to new ways of understanding and treating addiction.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9798228518636
Publisher: HighBridge Company
Publication date: 07/22/2025
Product dimensions: 5.20(w) x 5.70(h) x (d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Owen Flanagan is an internationally acclaimed philosopher of mind, consciousness, ethics, and comparative philosophy and author of 12 books translated into many languages. He has lectured on every continent except Antarctica, which he has nonetheless visited. Flanagan taught for 16 years at Wellesley College and for 30 years at Duke University.

Table of Contents

Note to Reader
Chapter 1 The addict's point of view
Chapter 2 What is it like to be an addict?
Chapter 3 Explaining addiction
Chapter 4 Identity and addiction
Chapter 5 Willing addiction
Chapter 6 The shame of addiction
Chapter 7 The phenomenal authority of Alcoholics Anonymous
Chapter 8 Hope and addiction
References
Acknowledgments
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