(This abstract was accepted by the North Texas Philosophical Society for the 2018 Conference which will be taking place in Dallas, Texas, March 30-31, 2018. I will be presenting a paper based on this abstract. I am honored to be accepted and eagerly anticipating the conference.)

This paper offers the beginnings of a taxonomy of madness through the analysis of three different approaches, the phenomenological, the historical-structural and the existential-religious. Rather than seeing madness as closed off to human understanding, I argue that insight into madness exposes the diverse forms of the nonrational, which I define as the pre-rational, the irrational and the supra-rational. Each of the forms reveals the reliance on the nonrational in several areas of the human condition including expressions of mental disorders, dynamic structures of society and experiences of extreme faith.