Real Hallucinations - Psychiatric Illness, Intentionality, and the Interpersonal World

In Real Hallucinations, Matthew Ratcliffe offers a philosophical examination of the structure of human experience, its vulnerability to disruption, and how it is shaped by relations with other people. He focuses on the seemingly simple question of how we manage to distinguish among our experiences of perceiving, remembering, imagining, and thinking. To answer this question, he first develops a detailed analysis of auditory verbal hallucinations (usually defined as hearing a voice in the absence of a speaker) and thought insertion (somehow experiencing one''s own thoughts as someone else''s). He shows how thought insertion and many of those experiences labeled as “hallucinations” consist of disturbances in a person''s senseof being in one type of intentional state rather