Oxford Scholarship Online
August 23, 2018
Gregory Shushan
Near-death experiences (NDEs) share many common elements worldwide, indicating that they originate in phenomena that are independent of culture. They also have many elements unique to the individual experiencers and their cultures, demonstrating a symbiotic relationship between experience and belief. There are numerous examples worldwide of religious beliefs originating in NDEs and other...
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 19, 2018
Marcello Massimini, Giulio Tononi
This chapter describes a preliminary exploration in search of criteria for consciousness in the biological and physical world beyond the human skull, including dolphins, octopuses, parrots, bees, and computers. It argues that assessing the complexity of behavior and measuring the size of the brain may not provide a reliable estimate in animals. Likewise, it explains why some artificial systems,...
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
J. Gatta
“Imagination,” a word evidently central to the vocation and sensibility of English Romantic poets, is likewise invoked often as a defining term in American literary history. But what are the theological implications of this crucial category, beginning with Coleridge’s seminal statements about it? How might the human faculty of imagination—often but doubtfully associated with an abstractly...
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
Elizabeth Schechter
This chapter introduces the major philosophical debate about the split-brain phenomenon. Split-brain surgery severs the major white matter fiber tract connecting the two cerebral hemispheres. A number of individuals who underwent this surgery later agreed to act as participants in experiments designed to reveal its psychobehavioral consequences. The basic finding is that, after they are...
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
Jérôme Dokic
Many philosophers from the traditions of both phenomenology and analytic philosophy have observed that our perceptual (e.g. visual) experience involves a certain duality. In the terminology used in this chapter, we seem to be visually aware of more than what is visually apparent to us. Such duality is present in various cases, from the perception of opaque volumetric objects to that of natural...
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
June 21, 2018
Angela Mendelovici
This chapter introduces the phenomenal intentionality theory ( PIT ), on which all original intentionality arises from phenomenal consciousness. It argues that PIT succeeds precisely where its main competitors, the tracking and functional role theories discussed in previous chapters, fail. The version of PIT that this chapter and the remainder of the book defends is strong identity PIT , on...
Oxford Scholarship Online
June 21, 2018
Fabian Dorsch
This chapter provides an overview of the debate about the phenomenal presence of features in perceptual experience. First, it delineates the theme of the volume by characterizing phenomenal presence and drawing four important related distinctions: (i) between the phenomenal presence of features pertaining to the objects of experience and features pertaining to the experiences themselves; (ii)...
Oxford Scholarship Online
June 21, 2018
Derek H. Brown
Projectivism asserts that we project subjective aspects of perception into what we experience as the world outside ourselves. It is minimally familiar from various phantom pains, afterimages, and hallucinations. Views like sense-datum theory arguably assert a more global, Strong Projectivism: all perceptual experiences involve and only involve direct awareness of projected elements. Strong...
Oxford Scholarship Online
June 21, 2018
Angela Mendelovici
Some mental states seem to be "of" or "about" things or to "say" something. For example, a thought might represent that grass is green, and a visual experience might represent a blue cup. This is intentionality. The aim of this book is to explain this phenomenon. Once we understand intentionality as a phenomenon to be explained, rather than a posit in a theory explaining something else, we can...
Oxford Scholarship Online
June 21, 2018
Declan Smithies
The main goal of this chapter is to argue that accessibilism in epistemology is incompatible with vehicle externalism in the philosophy of mind (also known as “the extended mind thesis”). As we shall see, however, there are strong arguments for both of these positions. On the one hand, there is a compelling argument for vehicle externalism: the parity argument from Clark and Chalmers (1998). On...
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
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
May 24, 2018
Christopher Partridge
This chapter introduces the book’s core ideas and some of the principal issues raised. Beginning with a discussion of Michel Foucault’s understanding of “technologies of the self,” it explores how drugs might be understood as “technologies of transcendence”—technologies that have the power to subvert dominant readings of reality. As such, they are always countercultural. By inducing the...
Oxford Scholarship Online
April 19, 2018
Joseph Levine
This paper presents a sketch of a theory of phenomenal consciousness, one that builds on the notion of a “way of appearing,” and draws out various consequences and problems for the view. I unabashedly endorse a version of the Cartesian Theater, while assessing the prospects for making such a view work. As I treat phenomenal consciousness as a relation between a subject and what it is she is...
Oxford Scholarship Online
April 19, 2018
Joseph Levine
In this paper I address the debate over the existence and nature of “cognitive phenomenology,” the alleged contribution to phenomenal consciousness made by non-sensory, cognitive states. I distinguish various versions of the position that there is cognitive phenomenology, evaluate what I take to be the two principal arguments for its existence, and then conclude that only one of the weaker...
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
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....