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Podcast: New Books in Popular Culture
Episode: Owen Flanagan, "What Is It Like to Be an Addict?: Understanding Substance Abuse" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Description: A powerful and important exploration of how addiction functions on social, psychological and biological levels, integrated with the experience of being an addict, from an acclaimed philosopher and former addict.What is addiction? Theories about what kind of thing addiction is are sharply divided between those who see it purely as a brain disorder, and those who conceive of it in psychological and social terms. 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 first-hand knowledge...