The bookshelves of philosophers of psychiatry have recently been colonized by volumes featuring arrangements of boldly colored geometric shapes on a stark black background. These are the constituents of the International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry (IPPP) series, edited by Bill Fulford, Katherine Morris, John Sadler, and Giovanni Stanghellini. Along with a rich variety of monographs the series includes several edited volumes, including The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry, co-branded with the Oxford Philosophy Handbooks series and edited by Fulford, Sadler, and Stanghellini, along with Martin Davies, Richard G. T. Gipps, George Graham, and Tim Thornton. This ambitious volume is doubly radical: it makes manifest a vision, actualized by the IPPP series, for the burgeoning field of philosophy of psychiatry (or, as the editors would have it, philosophy and psychiatry), and it contributes to Oxford's overturning of the very idea of the handbook. For participating institutions, www.oxfordhandbooks.com offers a new mode for research, in which signature contributions from experts are gathered in one place. The volumes in the series are ‘living’: new chapters are added online, and linked through a user-friendly database. Each is accompanied by free online resources, in this case two valuable additions – a manual of descriptive psychopathology assembled by V. Y. Allison-Bolger, and a database of personal narratives of madness edited by Jayasree Kalathil.

The Oxford handbooks aim to collect exciting and timely scholarly contributions rather than to provide introductory summaries, and they have succeeded here. In this short review it is impossible to summarize the content of the 73 chapters, which take a variety of approaches, historical and social-scientific as well as philosophical. But the quality and range of the contributions is spectacular, and anyone interested in psychiatry will find many things to inspire, inform, and challenge. Some of the chapters are more technical, engaging with theorists from Dretske to Davidson, Kristeva to Merleau-Ponty, and will be of interest to philosophers more than the psychiatric researcher, clinician, or the general reader. But the editors have done a nice job of balancing these contributions with more accessible philosophical discussions and more clinically oriented analyses. Perusing the Handbook will serve as a guide not only to traditional crossroads between philosophy and psychiatry – such as the conceptual analysis of disease, the question of natural kinds, or the mind-body problem – but also to more cutting-edge topics, such as neuroethics, the placebo effect, and theory of mind. The size of the collection alone is impressive, although it seems to have taken its toll on the copy-editors: within two pages (pp. 360–361) for example, the given name of one prominent philosopher of psychiatry is mistaken and the male pronoun is incorrectly applied to another (a regrettable oversight in a male-dominated field).

Whether the Handbook serves as a ‘representative cross-section of the new field’ (p. v) or rather of the IPPP collection itself is to some extent moot, since so many working philosophers of psychiatry have published in the series. But the series itself represents a strong stance about what the new field should be, and as the editors recognize, they ‘have ended up being perhaps somewhat too closed with little in the way of dissenting voices’ (p. 8). What is this stance? Emphasized throughout is the co-dependency of philosophy and psychiatry, as the editors encourage clinicians to ‘go deep philosophically’ (p. 3) and philosophers to take seriously the lessons psychopathology can hold for the philosophy of mind and medicine. The editors (and, to varying degrees, the contributors) envision philosophy as engaging with psychiatry in a ‘responsibly product-oriented’ (p. 1) way, with a focus on practice instead of theory. The ‘service user voice’ is at the center of this normative picture, and a partiality towards the clinic and away from biomedical research is apparent in the humanist slant of many of the contributions, as well as in the dedication of only one section to scientific explanation. More than a biomedical discipline, the Handbook presents psychiatry as ‘chiefly about establishing therapeutic relationship and understanding other forms of life’ (p. 217).

The volume aims to put philosophy's shoulder to the wheel on the side of the humanist clinician, while noting that ‘the philosophy of psychiatry, after all, for all its recent burgeoning, remains a minnow to the neuroscientific whale’ (p. 8). While the opposition to neuroscientific approaches holds as a generalization about most professional philosophers, it is worth noting that the implications of neuroscientific (as well as genetic) approaches have been taken up more sympathetically by notable philosophically proficient psychiatrists, including Eric Kandel, Kenneth Kendler, and Steven Hyman. The absence of these viewpoints notwithstanding, the normative critical stance taken by the editors will make the volume of interest to readers of this journal who have suspicions about the biomedical whale in whose belly they labor, and who need resources for thinking critically and creatively about their own commitments. For philosophers or clinicians who aspire to the crucial work of integrating psychosocial and phenomenological approaches into scientific investigation (clearly the book's target audience) it will be an outstanding resource.