Neurophenomenology offers a middle path between dualist and idealist views that consciousness is scientifically inexplicable and physicalist views that it can be reduced to physical processes. Rooted in embodied cognition and enactive approaches, it uses subjective reports from meditators trained to purify experience, combined with neural imaging, to investigate the continuity between experience and the external world. The goal is to obtain richer first-person data through systematic phenomenological research and use it to generate new third-person data about neural processes. This paper reviews neurophenomenology's philosophical foundations, evaluates its methods and aims, and discusses whether it constitutes a valid solution to the problem of consciousness.
In contemporary philosophy of mind, physicalism is the dominant position, but it fails to provide a comprehensive account that explains phenomenal consciousness from an objective standpoint. Increasingly, philosophers reject models that reduce phenomenal qualities of inner experience to physical properties, leading to a resurgence of dualism. This resurgence favors property dualism—which holds that the body has both physical and mental properties—over substance dualism. Anti-physicalist arguments are seen as supporting property dualism, which is also considered a solution to the problems of substance dualism. This work examines whether property dualism offers a stronger alternative to physicalism than substance dualism does, first considering whether objections to physicalism support both property and substance dualism, and then discussing whether property dualism resolves the problems posed by substance dualism.
Since antiquity, the existence, nature, immortality, and relation of the soul to the body have been central philosophical problems. In Ibn Sīnā's metaphysics, these issues bridge ontology and epistemology. Although his theory of the soul shares similarities with both Plato and Aristotle, it surpasses both in several respects. Long before Descartes—the first name that comes to mind regarding the mind-body problem—Ibn Sīnā systematically presented the soul-body problematic. This study first evaluates Ibn Sīnā's theory of the soul in terms of its definition, essence, function, and importance, then traces its echoes in modern philosophy of mind.