Reviews for I Am: A Philosophical Inquiry into First-Person Being

The average rating for I Am: A Philosophical Inquiry into First-Person Being based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-10-10 00:00:00 Damien Williams A great resource for a Social Theory, obliquely Foucaultian perspective on alcohol, abuse, and control, particularly in the English-speaking world, underscoring sociocultural caveats in the cosmopolitan United States in defining exactly what moderate drinking, alcohol abuse, and alcoholism actually are. Our history of temperance sentiment, our perhaps dubious honor of being the birthplace of the 12-step program, and with it, the disease model of addiction and the willful lifelong identity of 'alcoholic', raises fundamental (and ancient) philosophical questions regarding free will, habit, and compulsion, questions that are often ignored or passed over in modern addiction discourse. A well-written postmodern examination of alcohol, justice, and human freedom.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-08-05 00:00:00 Steven Levin Until the late 19th century, 'alcoholism' meant physiological damage - cirrhosis and so on - rather than some kind of predilection. This book describes how political and legal movements were linked with the ebb and flow of its medicalization. Its run as a bona fide disease, sometimes under other names such as dipsomania, lasted until the 1970s, when it was removed from the International Classification of Diseases, and it's currently sometimes thought of as an addiction or dependency, sometimes as an individual's moral choice.