Oxford Scholarship Online
November 22, 2018
Ayon Maharaj
This chapter explores how Sri Ramakrishna’s mystical testimony and teachings enrich contemporary analytic debates about the epistemic value of mystical experience. These debates center on a key question: are we warranted in taking mystical experiences—either our own or those of others—to be veridical? After briefly delineating Sri Ramakrishna’s views on the scope of theological reason, Maharaj...
Oxford Scholarship Online
November 22, 2018
George Pattison
This chapter sets out the rationale for adopting a phenomenological approach to the devout life literature. Distinguishing the present approach from versions of the phenomenology of religion dominant in mid-twentieth-century approaches to religion, an alternative model is found in Heidegger’s early lectures on Paul. These illustrate that alongside its striving to achieve a maximally pure...
Oxford Scholarship Online
November 22, 2018
Jaime Kucinskas
This chapter introduces the contemplative mindfulness movement, its successes in legitimizing and popularizing mindful meditation, and its shortcomings. This case demonstrates how elite movements can initiate widespread cultural change by combining elements of social movement mobilization, institutional entrepreneurship, field theory, and cultural diffusion. Investigating the contemplatives...
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
Jens Schlieter
3 citations
The similarities between the experiences near death and drug experiences have often been stressed. This chapter goes a step further in providing evidence that the consumption of morphine, hashish, and especially more potent hallucinogens such as LSD in the 1960s and 1970s are to be identified as a major component, or “push factor,” of the emerging discourse on near-death. Not only were several...
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
Jens Schlieter
1 citation
This chapter focuses on a long-term development in Western societies addressed as “privatized death,” namely, the assignment of the dying into hospitals and other institutions. This trend, mirrored in the works of French historian Philippe Ariès and psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, so the chapter argues, served as a “push factor” for articulating near-death experiences. Near-death...
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
Jens Schlieter
1 citation
A second “push factor” for the increase of near-death experiences (and their reporting), emerging in the 1960s and 1970s, is the introduction of new reanimation techniques that increased the relative and absolute numbers of individuals surviving critical situations (such as heart attacks). In addition, the chapter discusses the impact of the broadly accepted new definition of death, namely,...
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
Michael N. Forster
Herder developed a very powerful and influential philosophy of mind. He was the source of Hegel’s famous threefold distinction between subjective, objective, and absolute mind (or Geist). Concerning the fundamental mind–body question he wavered between neutral monism and materialism, but developed a theory that has marked advantages over rival theories such as dualism, mind–brain identity, and...
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
Jens Schlieter
The final chapter of the discursive history outlines how Robert Crookall’s and Robert A. Monroe’s books on “astral projection,” but also C. G. Jung and other researchers discussing paranormal and parapsychological phenomena in the 1960s and early 1970s, already assembled almost all phenomena that Moody could bundle in 1975 under the new term “near-death experiences.” However, the chapter points...
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
Jens Schlieter
This book offers a modern genealogy of “near-death experiences,” outlining the important functions of these experiences in the religious field of Western modernity. Emerging as autobiographical narratives in the legacy of Christian deathbed visions, narratives of near-death experiences were used in Western religious metacultures (Christian, Esoteric, and Spiritualist–Occult) as substantial...
Oxford Scholarship Online
July 19, 2018
J. Christopher Maloney
Representationalism rightly treats perception as a type of cognitive representation. However, it wrongly proposes that perceptual content determines phenomenal character. Rather, it is the form, not the content, of a perceptual representation that constitutes phenomenal character. For direct realism is true: Perception is that form of cognition in which representation and represented are the...
Oxford Scholarship Online
July 19, 2018
Samuel Newlands
This chapter shows how Spinoza’s ethics completes his conceptualist metaphysics, arguing that Spinoza privileges some of the plentiful ways of conceiving things over others on broadly practical grounds. It is in the self-interest of agents to conceive other things, as well as themselves, in the broadest, most inclusive ways. Spinoza thinks that the way to become a more virtuous agent is to...
Oxford Scholarship Online
July 19, 2018
Ursula Renz
This chapter discusses the issue of Spinoza’s so-called panpsychism, which is the view, often ascribed to him, that all entities are endowed with minds. In particular, the chapter takes a closer look at the scholium following 2p13, which is usually taken as the textual evidence for this reading. In contrast to the panpsychist interpretation, the chapter shows that, by claiming universal...
Oxford Scholarship Online
July 3, 2018
Gregory Shushan
Near-death experiences (NDEs) are indisputably part of human experience, known from accounts from around the world and throughout history. This book examines the role culture plays in how people experience and interpret NDEs, and reveals how afterlife beliefs often originate in such extraordinary experiences. It also explores the relationship between shamanism and NDEs. The book focuses on...
Oxford Scholarship Online
June 21, 2018
Thomas Crowther
10 citations
This chapter works towards a better understanding of the contribution made by the state of wakeful consciousness to the stream of consciousness over time. It does this through reflection on what is missing in certain cases of non-wakeful consciousness. Granting the assumption that dreaming is a mode of perceptual imagination, the chapter contrasts perceptual imagination in the wakeful condition...
Oxford Scholarship Online
June 21, 2018
J. Jørgensen
This chapter identifies and highlights aspects of Buddhist thought that Zhu Xi appropriated and adapted to bolster and develop his philosophy of mind. The author argues that even though Zhu Xi repudiated the Buddhism he had been trained in as a youth, he continued to mirror many Buddhist doctrines as he responded to agendas already well-established in Buddhist circles. The chapter’s focus is...
Oxford Scholarship Online
June 21, 2018
Michael A. Wheeler
According to one prominent view in contemporary epistemology, the correct application of one’s cognitive abilities in believing truly is necessary and sufficient for a kind of credit that is, in turn, necessary for knowledge. Epistemologists who hold this view typically take the cognitive abilities concerned to be based in states and processes that are spatially located inside the head of the...
Oxford Scholarship Online
June 21, 2018
Elizabeth Schechter
This chapter offers a preliminary defense of the claim that the two hemispheres of a split-brain subject are associated with distinct subjects of experience. The empirical basis of this 2-subjects claim is that, while both hemispheres are the source or site of elements of experience, these elements are unified only within each hemisphere system, and not across them. In other words,...
Oxford Scholarship Online
May 30, 2018
Marcello Massimini, Giulio Tononi
Sizing up Consciousness explores, at an introductory level, the potential practical, clinical, and ethical implications of a general principle about the nature of consciousness. Using information integration theory (IIT) as a guiding principle, the book takes the reader along a scientific trajectory to face fundamental questions about the relationships between matter and experience. What is so...
Oxford Scholarship Online
May 24, 2018
Christopher Partridge
This chapter discusses the significance of opium during the early nineteenth-century and its relationship to Romanticism. While the chapter is organized around the influential work of Thomas De Quincey, particularly his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, it also discusses the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It discusses Romantic theories about the significance of dreams and their...
Oxford Scholarship Online
March 22, 2018
Trude Fonneland
Religion is a core unit in terms of how gender stereotypes are produced and realized. By exploring how shamans in Norway use the past to construct narratives of gender in the present, my presentation in this chapter represents an attempt to localize religion and culture in a social and gendered reality.
Oxford Scholarship Online
March 22, 2018
Trude Fonneland
The figure of the shaman seems to fit exceptionally well into contemporary structures of needs and motivations in different cultural areas beyond the religious-spiritual field. By exploring the stories and images that are the focus of the spiritual entrepreneur Esther Utsi, I elaborate how, in the wake of Sámi shamanism, a variety of hybrid products have been established, catering for broader...
Oxford Scholarship Online
March 22, 2018
Trude Fonneland
The cultural creation developed by practitioners of shamanism in Norway provides insight into processes of religious creation and creativity. These developments and increasing spiritual inventiveness are the focus of this chapter. I am particularly interested in how and what happens when the global culture of shamanism interacts with a specific local culture, in this case, Norwegian society....
Oxford Scholarship Online
March 22, 2018
Wayne Glausser
This final chapter compares the Catholic sacrament of extreme unction with modern experiments in psychedelic therapy for the dying. Extreme unction has an unusual history within Christianity: Catholics embrace it as a last, crucial fortification of the soul that prepares someone for heaven, but Protestants, going back to Calvin, view it as a fraudulent mystification. Secular scientists have...
Oxford Scholarship Online
March 22, 2018
Uriah Kriegel
Chap. 1 concerned Brentano’s theory of consciousness, and Chap. 2 his theory of intentionality, the mark of the conscious. This chapter lays the foundations for the rest of the book by discussing the three fundamental modes of conscious intentionality in Brentano’s theory of mind. This three-way distinction is crucial, as will later be seen, to Brentano’s metaphysics and value theory.
Oxford Scholarship Online
March 22, 2018
Uriah Kriegel
It is argued that for Brentano, a conscious perception of a tree is a single mental state that can be (accurately) conceived of, or framed, either as a perception of a tree or as a perception of a perception of a tree. It is further argued that this interpretation casts Brentano’s theory as quite a bit more plausible than it is commonly taken to be, indeed more plausible than many modern...