This paper aims to contribute to an integrated understanding of what goes missing in adverse meditation experiences and in cases of depersonalization disorder. Depersonalization disorder is characterized by distressing alterations in, and sometimes the complete disappearance of, the 'I'-sense. This paper examines the nature of the 'I'-sense and what it means to lose it from a Buddhist...
Abstract: Abhidharma Buddhist philosophy presents a version of what is now often called “panprotopsychism.” The most pressing group of problems for the Abhidharma panprotopsychism, like all other panpsychist views, is what Seager calls “the combination problem.” There are at least three versions of the problem: the subject-combination problem; the quality-combination problem; and the...
Jonardon Ganeri has written an impressive book that is a must-read for anyone interested in cross-cultural philosophy. Attention, Not Self moves Buddhist philosophy further into the center of contemporary philosophical debates about self, personhood, agency, action, perception, attention, and the kinds of mental content. The book is focused on work attributed to a single philosopher, the...
Jonardon Ganeri's Attention, Not Self is groundbreaking. It shows a way to transform the rich theoretical vocabulary in Pāli commentarial tradition for concepts of mind, consciousness, and conscious states into an empirically informed philosophy of mind. The book is focused on commentaries attributed to a single philosopher, the fifth-century Theravāda monk Buddhaghosa. The title of the book...
One of the major aims of this article is to provide the theoretical account of mindfulness provided by the systematic Abhidharma epistemology of conscious states. I do not claim to present the one true version of mindfulness, because there is not one version of it in Buddhism; in addition to the Abhidharma model, there is, for example, the nondual Mahāmudrā tradition. A better understanding of...