Research | Sanja Dembić

Philosophy of Mental Disorder

This book offers an ability-based view of mental disorders. It contends that an individual has a mental disorder if and only if they are, in the relevant sense, unable to respond adequately to their available reasons in their thinking, feeling or acting.

Winner of the Wolfgang Stegmüller Prize 2025, awarded by the Society for Analytic Philosophy (GAP) for outstanding work in the field of analytic philosophy.

Publications

Book

Articles

Circles of Thought: When Ambivalence Threatens Our Agency. 2025. In René Baston and Martin Weichold (Eds.): Exploring Suicidal Ambivalence. Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, Ch. 10 (pp. 183-198). New York: Routledge.

Philosophical Perspectives on Suicidal Ambivalence (with René Baston). 2025. In René Baston and Martin Weichold (Eds.): Exploring Suicidal Ambivalence. Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, Ch. 2 (pp. 27-45). New York: Routledge.

Paradigm Cases and Epistemic Aims in the Inquiry of Conspiracy Theories. 2025. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 14 (9): 1-6.

Rethinking Conspiracy Theories: Method First! A Reply to Shields. 2024. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 13 (10): 38–46.

Précis zu Philosophy of Mental Disorder. 2024. Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 78(1): 108–113.

Replik zu den Kommentaren. 2024. Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 78(1): 126–129.

Mental Disorder: An Ability-Based View. 2023. Philosophy and the Mind Sciences 4(2): 1-28.

Defining Addictive Disorder – Abilities Reconsidered. 2021. Philosophers’ Imprint 21(24): 1-14.

— Winner of the Prize for Philosophy and Ethics in Psychiatry and Psychotherapy 2021, awarded by the German Society for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Psychosomatics and Neurology (DGPPN).

Other

Modelling Psychiatric Diagnosis: How Does the Psychiatrist Know? On the Epistemology of Psychiatric Diagnostic Reasoning by Adrian Kind, transcript Verlag, 2025, 253 pp., open access, 0,00 €, ISBN 978-3-8376-7674-7. 2025. Philosophical Psychology, 1–5.

Fähigkeiten und Dispositionen im Bereich der epistemischen Verantwortung. Ein Kommentar zu Responsibility for Rationality, von Sebastian Schmidt, Routledge, 2024. 2025. Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 79 (3): 398-402.

Länger freudlos - nicht pathologische Trauer oder doch depressive Störung? 2023. Die Neurologie & Psychiatrie 24: 34–36.

Abhängigkeitsstörung: ein fähigkeitsbasierter Ansatz. 2022. Psyche im Fokus 2: 36–39.

Networks

DIALOGUE

Suicidal Ambivalence

Human Abilities

Human Abilities is a Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe) funded by the DFG and led by Dominik Perler (HU Berlin) and Barbara Vetter (FU Berlin).

The aim of the Human Abilities Centre is to reflect systematically on human abilities and their limits, with a focus on metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of action.

I have been its academic coordinator since 2020.

Workshops

Presentations

[Selection]

06/2026
Knowing One's Limits: The Role of Effort
Workshop "Limits of Abilities", Human Abilities Centre, Berlin

10/2025
Conspiracy Beliefs and Their Epistemic Structure

Philosophy of Mind Colloquium, University of Oxford

09/2025
The Limits of Ability: A Typology of Limiting Factors

Colloquium at the GAP.12, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf

03/2025
Muscle Up: Can Willpower Be Depleted?

Conference "The Cognitive and the Conative: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Rational Powers", University of Basel

10/2024
From Conceptual Explication to Classification

Keynote at the workshop "Philosophical Analysis within Cognitive Science", University of Rijeka

09/2024
Delusions, Conspiracy Theory Beliefs and Pathology

Workshop "Conspiracy Beliefs Between Secret Evidence and Delusion", Human Abilities Centre, Berlin

06/2024
Abilities in Addiction and Responsibility

Workshop "Moral Responsibility in a Strawsonian Key" with Jay Wallace and Paul Russell, FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg

06/2021
The Moral Propriety and Fittingness of Emotions
8th Annual Conference of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions (EPSSE), online

04/2021
Mental Disorder – An Ability-based Approach
Conference "Minds, Models, and Mechanisms", Saarland University, online

10/2015
Mental Disorder as Value-Framed Insufficient Function

17th International Conference on Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology, International Network for Philosophy and Psychiatry (INPP), Frutillar (Chile)

09/2015
Personality Disorders and Legal Responsibility

Third UK Conference on Philosophy and Psychiatry, Royal College of Psychiatrists, London