Oxford Scholarship Online
August 24, 2017
Shaun Gallagher
12 citations
An enactivist approach to the mind goes beyond action and sensory-motor processes, incorporating affectivity and intersubjectivity. Affectivity in a broad sense—including hunger, fatigue, pain, respiration, and emotion—influences perception, attention, and judgment, as shown by empirical studies. Intersubjective factors such as bodily postures, movements, gestures, gaze, facial expressions, and dynamic interactions similarly affect cognition. This richer embodied view also has implications for understanding brain function.
Oxford Scholarship Online
June 21, 2018
Thomas Crowther
10 citations
Wakeful consciousness contributes something distinctive to the stream of consciousness that is absent during non-wakeful states like dreaming. Assuming dreaming is a form of perceptual imagination, the chapter contrasts perceptual imagination when awake with that during dreaming sleep. Drawing on Brian O'Shaughnessy's ideas, it suggests that what is missing in dreaming is intentional mental action accompanied by non-inferential self-awareness. After critiquing O'Shaughnessy, the chapter proposes a 'Capacitation Thesis': wakefulness is a state of being capacitated with respect to relevant capacities. Dream imagination is then examined in light of this thesis.
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
Jens Schlieter
3 citations
The consumption of hallucinogens like LSD in the 1960s and 1970s was a major factor, or "push factor," in the emerging discourse on near-death experiences. Several near-death experiences were triggered by drugs, and the chapter observes shared beliefs between users of psychedelics and Gnostic–Esoteric near-death experiencers.
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
Jens Schlieter
1 citation
A long-term shift in Western societies toward 'privatized death'—dying in hospitals and institutions—served as a 'push factor' for the articulation of near-death experiences. The chapter argues that near-death experiences can be partly read as a 'spiritual protest' against alienated, anonymous dying in institutions and the materialist approach of modern biomedicine that merely prolongs life. This protest is also present in criticisms of the 'denial of death.'
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
Jens Schlieter
1 citation
A second factor driving the rise in near-death experiences and their reporting during the 1960s and 1970s was the development of new reanimation techniques, which increased the number of people surviving critical events like heart attacks. The chapter also examines how the widely accepted redefinition of death as irreversible coma influenced near-death experiences and the surrounding discourse. This impact is evident in the work of Raymond Moody, who remained skeptical of the brain-death definition.
Oxford Scholarship Online
November 22, 2018
Ayon Maharaj
Sri Ramakrishna's mystical testimony strengthens the case for taking mystical experiences as veridical. The chapter argues that his views support Robert Oakes's position that self-authenticating experiences of God are possible. It also uses Sri Ramakrishna's teachings to defend the argument from experience—the claim that God's existence can reasonably be inferred from the testimony of those who report experiencing Him. The author contends that this approach addresses two major objections to that argument: the lack of adequate cross-checkability and the problem of conflicting claims among different religious traditions.
Oxford Scholarship Online
March 22, 2018
Wayne Glausser
This chapter compares the Catholic sacrament of extreme unction with modern psychedelic therapy for the dying. Extreme unction, a final ritual fortifying the soul for heaven, is embraced by Catholics but viewed by Protestants as fraudulent. Since the 1960s and recently, psychiatrists have used LSD and psilocybin to help terminal cancer patients with anxiety and depression. The chapter explores how this psychedelic therapy shares the high purposes of extreme unction and some of its surrounding problems.
Oxford Scholarship Online
March 22, 2018
Trude Fonneland
Shamans in Norway draw on historical narratives to shape contemporary understandings of gender, revealing how religion and culture are embedded in social and gendered realities. The chapter argues that religion serves as a key mechanism for producing and enacting gender stereotypes, and by examining these practices, it localizes abstract religious concepts within concrete social contexts.
Oxford Scholarship Online
March 22, 2018
Trude Fonneland
The shaman figure appeals to contemporary desires across cultural domains beyond religion and spirituality. Through the stories and imagery promoted by spiritual entrepreneur Esther Utsi, hybrid products inspired by Sámi shamanism have emerged that serve tourism, entertainment, and regional development, reaching diverse audiences with varied needs.
Oxford Scholarship Online
March 22, 2018
Trude Fonneland
The chapter examines how shamanism in Norway evolves through the interaction of global spiritual currents with local culture. It focuses on the creative processes that occur when practitioners blend American Indian symbolism with perceived local traditions, sparking spiritual seekers to develop new religious movements. The analysis highlights how global shamanic culture influences and is adapted within Norwegian society, leading to innovative spiritual expressions that bridge the local and the global.
Oxford Scholarship Online
December 21, 2017
Kélina Gotman
Anti-colonial uprisings in Madagascar and Brazil were diagnosed as choreomania by missionary physicians and neuroscientists, who framed trance-like demonstrations—involving shaking, frothing, falling, and visions—as pathological movement disorders. Unlike earlier cases, these large-scale protests entered government administration, with physicians arguing that choreomania spread by pathological sympathy. In Madagascar, demonstrators angered at missionaries' black hats gathered at sacred sites, convulsing, and unseated a pro-European king, representing a form of ecstasy-belonging and a choreopolitics of revolt. In Brazil, revolutionary underclasses were dismissed as suffering a choreomaniacal epidemic of religious psychosis.
Oxford Scholarship Online
November 23, 2017
Michelle Sizemore
A largely overlooked tradition of mysticism in post-revolutionary U.S. society, termed civil mysticism, involves nonsectarian practices of transcendence that engender the people through political and social rituals like maypole ceremonies, presidential inaugurations, and literary pilgrimages. The chapter elaborates on civil mysticism's conditions and techniques, emphasizing the sacred interval of ritual with its embodied practices, sensuous objects, and cognitive states. Drawing on Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Maypole of Merry Mount" and other nineteenth-century depictions, it argues that civil mysticism managed the democratic representational conundrum of being plural at the same time as being one.
Oxford Scholarship Online
October 19, 2017
David L. Mcmahan
Meditation is often described as producing internal states that arise from diligent practice, but these practices only function within specific social and cultural contexts, and their effects vary across different settings. McMahan theorizes meditation as cultivating ways of being within particular social imaginaries, which are shaped by cultural repertoires of concepts, attitudes, social practices, ethical dispositions, institutions, power relations, identities, authority structures, and cosmic conceptions. This theory draws on studies of historical psychosomatic illnesses, which show that eras generate specific symptom pools. Recontextualizing meditation as a cultural practice highlights the need for humanistic study and shows that a totalizing neurophysiological explanation of meditation is impossible.
Oxford Scholarship Online
August 24, 2017
Shaun Gallagher
A range of embodied cognition (EC) theories are mapped, from 'weak EC'—which retains traditional cognitivist ideas by focusing on body-formatted representations and neural reuse—to functionalist extended-mind proposals, a biological model, and enactivist views. Each approach is examined alongside supporting empirical evidence. The chapter argues that weak EC's representationalist view of brain function is incompatible with more radical EC theories, which reconceive the brain as part of a dynamic brain–body–environment system.
Oxford Scholarship Online
June 22, 2017
Frédéric Pouillaude
Erwin Straus argues that dance belongs to smooth, acoustic space, which contrasts with the optical space of directed, purposeful movement. Music enables dance by creating a homogeneous, nebulous acoustic space where the directionality of praxis is obliterated. Optical space is described as historical, while acoustic space is presentic. Dance, as an extension of music, allows a presentic relation to space called ecstasy or becoming one, which is most apparent in dances that are not yet dances, such as children's dances, social dances, or primitive dances.
Oxford Scholarship Online
November 22, 2018
Jaime Kucinskas
This chapter examines the contemplative mindfulness movement, detailing its success in legitimizing and popularizing mindful meditation while noting its limitations. The authors argue that elite movements can drive widespread cultural change by blending social movement mobilization, institutional entrepreneurship, field theory, and cultural diffusion. They contend that such movements are effective for elites' and professionals' reform initiatives because these actors leverage social networks, institutional resources, and symbolic power in their daily work. However, the authors propose that while these movements spread new cultures effectively, they often fail to achieve deeper structural social reforms.
Oxford Scholarship Online
November 22, 2018
George Pattison
A phenomenological approach to the devout life literature is justified by drawing on Heidegger's early lectures on Paul, which show that phenomenology is necessarily interpretive and existential, not merely intuitive. While phenomenology cannot judge whether God exists, it can examine how God appears in human activity and passivity. Since Hegel, phenomenology has also understood the self as twofold and spiritual, not merely a subjective agent.
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
Jens Schlieter
The term 'near-death experiences' was introduced by John C. Lilly in 1972, earlier than commonly thought, before being popularized by Raymond Moody in 1975. Books on astral projection by Robert Crookall and Robert A. Monroe, along with C. G. Jung and other researchers discussing paranormal phenomena in the 1960s and early 1970s, had already assembled almost all the phenomena Moody later bundled. LSD use sometimes triggered such experiences, and psychologists and psychotherapists like Russell Noyes, Roy Kletti, and Stanislav Grof showed growing interest. The post-Moodian 'Greyson scale' institutionalized the term, reflecting a still-dominant religious interest focused on mystic, esoteric, and transformative qualities.
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
Michael N. Forster
Herder's philosophy of mind offers a powerful alternative to dualism, mind-brain identity, and behaviorism by wavering between neutral monism and materialism. He reconceived immortality in naturalized terms, argued for the unity of the mind's faculties, and held that minds are fundamentally social yet include individuality. He also developed a rich theory of the unconscious. These ideas influenced Hegel, Schleiermacher, and Nietzsche.
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
Jens Schlieter
Near-death experiences emerged as autobiographical narratives in the legacy of Christian deathbed visions and were used in Western religious metacultures as proof for survival after death. Certain features, such as panoramic life review and autoscopic out-of-body experiences, appeared in Occult and Esoteric circles in the 19th and 20th centuries through experiments with astral projection, drugs, and clairvoyant states. Only in the 1970s did Raymond Moody popularize the term "near-death experience," introduced by John C. Lilly, to unify these features into a single phenomenon. The study argues that these experiences reassure modern individuals that religious experience remains possible and may initiate new spiritual orientations, while also offering evidence for transcultural validity of afterlife visions.
Oxford Scholarship Online
July 19, 2018
Ursula Renz
Spinoza's claim that all things are animated is often taken as evidence that he believed every entity has a mind, a view called panpsychism. This chapter examines the key passage usually cited for that interpretation and argues instead that Spinoza meant something different: that rational intelligibility extends throughout the universe without exception. The author contends that Spinoza's universal animation does not ascribe minds to every being but rather asserts that everything is understandable through reason, closing any gap in the rational order of nature.
Oxford Scholarship Online
July 19, 2018
Samuel Newlands
Spinoza's ethics completes his conceptualist metaphysics by privileging certain ways of conceiving things over others on practical grounds. It is in agents' self-interest to conceive themselves and other things in the broadest, most inclusive ways. Becoming more virtuous requires reconceiving oneself, leading to fundamental changes in self-identity. Drawing on Harry Frankfurt's work, the chapter argues that Spinoza's moral transformation is a call to a new, more powerful and stable self-identity, possibly eternal. Spinoza holds out hope for salvific transformation but remains pessimistic that people will achieve much of it.
Oxford Scholarship Online
July 19, 2018
J. Christopher Maloney
Representationalism, the view that perception is a type of cognitive representation, is correct in treating perception as representation but wrong to claim that perceptual content determines phenomenal character—the subjective feel of experience. Instead, the form of a perceptual representation constitutes phenomenal character. Direct realism is true: perception is a form of cognition in which the representation and the represented object are identical. Other cognitive representations are distinct from what they represent, but perceptual representation extends the mind into the world by casting the perceived object as a self-referential demonstrative. This fusion provides direct acquaintance with what is seen exactly as it is seen, thereby determining phenomenal character.
Oxford Scholarship Online
July 3, 2018
Gregory Shushan
Near-death experiences (NDEs) occur across cultures and throughout history, but how people experience and interpret them is shaped by their cultural background. This book examines historical reports from explorers, missionaries, and ethnologists about traditional indigenous societies in Africa, North America, and Oceania, showing that while NDEs are universal, their content and meaning vary by region. Shamanic practices across different cultures often involve elements similar to NDEs, such as leaving the body, traveling to other realms, meeting deceased relatives, and returning with new insight. The book draws on anthropology, philosophy, psychology, and cognitive evolutionary science to explain the similarities and differences between these phenomena, presenting dozens of previously unrecognized NDE accounts and exploring themes like possession, burial practices, lucid dreams, religious revitalization movements, and out-of-body experiences.
Oxford Scholarship Online
June 21, 2018
Elizabeth Schechter
Split-brain subjects may have two distinct subjects of experience, one per hemisphere, because consciousness is unified within each hemisphere but not across them. The empirical basis is that elements of experience are present in both hemispheres yet are not integrated between them. This suggests each hemisphere has its own subjective perspective, making it impossible for a single subject to have multiple perspectives in the same way another subject has one. Therefore, the two hemispheres likely correspond to separate subjects of experience, each related to its perspective as a normal person is to theirs.