82 papers in the library · 27 citations · publishing 2017-2018
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
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 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...
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 January 18, 2018 Arif Ahmed
The central claim of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction is that unity of consciousness entails objectivity of experience. This chapter defends an interpretation of that claim that has nothing especially to do with imagination, thought, language, or ‘categories.’ It is a general truth about signaling systems. More specifically, there is a precise sense in which (i) a signaling system may detect...
Oxford Scholarship Online January 18, 2018 Dan Zahavi
Husserl’s turn from a descriptive phenomenology to a transcendental phenomenology is linked to his methodological employment of the reduction and the epoché. But how should one interpret these notions? Are they crucial to phenomenology, do they enable phenomenology to become metaphysically committed, or are they tools that reveal Husserl’s commitment to a form of methodological solipsism?...
Oxford Scholarship Online December 21, 2017 Kélina Gotman
Choreomania became distinctly political. Missionary physicians and neuroscientists stationed in Madagascar and Brazil compared trance-like revolutionary uprisings to the literature on choreomania. Unlike earlier cases, however, these ‘movement disorders’, large-scale anti-colonial demonstrations characterized by shaking, frothing, falling, and visions—as well as, in Madagascar, ancestor...
Oxford Scholarship Online November 23, 2017 Michelle Sizemore
This theoretical chapter introduces a largely overlooked tradition of mysticism in the politics, art, religion, and culture of post-revolutionary U.S. society. Civil mysticism refers to nonsectarian practices of transcendence that engender the people, namely political and social rituals such as maypole ceremonies, presidential inaugurations, and literary pilgrimages. This chapter elaborates on...
Oxford Scholarship Online October 19, 2017 David L. Mcmahan
Meditation is often described in terms of internal “states” that presumably arise in anyone who practices them diligently. These practices, however, only “work” in specific social and cultural contexts, and the work they do may be quite different in divergent contexts. McMahan theorizes meditation practices as cultivating ways of being in specific social imaginaries constituted by a cultural...
Oxford Scholarship Online October 19, 2017 Steve Bruce
Examination of the fortunes of various Hinduism-inspired new religious movements (such as Rajneeshism and Transcendental Meditation) shows that the most successful were world affirming rather than world rejecting, and that their relative success was bought at the price of becoming patently more secular. Transcendental Meditation’s project to create the core of an alternative society in...
Oxford Scholarship Online October 19, 2017 William Edelglass
The widespread discourse of happiness and meditation is part of a “happiness turn” in contemporary Western Buddhism, in which meditation is presented as a path to happiness. This turn is justified, in part, by empirical research on happiness, which appears to be a straightforward scientific inquiry into the causes and conditions of happiness. The two most widespread methods for measuring...
Oxford Scholarship Online October 19, 2017 Evan Thompson
Cognitive neuroscience tends to conceptualize mindfulness meditation as inner observation of a private mental realm of thoughts, feelings, and body sensations, and tries to model mindfulness as instantiated in neural networks visible through brain imaging tools such as EEG and fMRI. This approach confuses the biological conditions for mindfulness with mindfulness itself, which, as classically...
Oxford Scholarship Online October 19, 2017
This volume discusses modern transformations of Buddhist and Buddhist-derived meditation and the scientific studies of these practices from the humanistic perspective of scholars in the interdisciplinary field of Buddhist Studies. Meditation, particularly “mindfulness” meditation, has garnered enormous attention in recent years as the object of scientific study, to the point of redefining the...
Oxford Scholarship Online October 19, 2017 Thomas G. Bever
Every language-learning child eventually automatically segments the organization of word sequences into natural units. Within the natural units, processing of normal conversation reveals a disconnect between listener’s representation of the sound and meaning of utterances. A compressed or absent word at a point early in a sequence is unintelligible until later acoustic information, yet...
Oxford Scholarship Online September 21, 2017 G. William Domhoff
This chapter provides the most detailed critical analysis yet developed of the neurophysiological theory of dreaming called activation-synthesis theory, a bottom-up theory that rejects a top-down neurocognitive approach because rigorous studies of dream content allegedly cannot be carried out, especially on the basis of dream reports collected in the sleep lab. This theory suggests that dreams...
Oxford Scholarship Online September 21, 2017 Peter B. Reiner, Saskia K Nagel
Living in the modern world entails substantial interaction with information technologies. The ways in which people interact with these devices—how they enter into daily practices—has become so profound that they qualify as technologies of the extended mind. This chapter distinguishes between these devices acting as cognitive support versus becoming bona fide extensions of our minds, and argues...
Oxford Scholarship Online September 21, 2017 G. William Domhoff
This book presents a new neurocognitive theory of dreams that documents the similarities of dreaming to waking thought, demonstrates that personal psychological meaning can be found in a majority of dream reports, has a strong developmental dimension based on excellent longitudinal and cross-sectional studies carried out in sleep labs with children ages 3–15, locates the neural substrate for...
Oxford Scholarship Online September 21, 2017 G. William Domhoff
The fifth chapter presents the evidence for the novel idea that the neural substrate that enables dreaming is based in subsystems within the waking default network. The evidence for this hypothesis includes neuroimaging studies of representative samples of children and adults as well as studies of neurological patients who report they have experienced alterations in their dreaming, or even lost...
Oxford Scholarship Online September 21, 2017 G. William Domhoff
Chapter 1 highlights the most important and enduring findings from systematic studies of dreaming in sleep laboratories, then discusses their implications. Most importantly, these frequently replicated studies show that dreams are a reasonable simulation of waking life that are only rarely highly unusual or “bizarre” in their structure or content. These studies also show that dreaming happens...
Oxford Scholarship Online August 24, 2017 Shaun Gallagher 12 citations
An enactivist approach to understanding the mind, in its fullest sense, is not just a matter of action-oriented processes; enactivism is about more than action and sensory–motor contingencies. To understand cognition as richly embodied this chapter considers factors involving affectivity and intersubjectivity. Empirical studies show that affectivity, in a wide sense that includes hunger,...
Oxford Scholarship Online August 24, 2017 Shaun Gallagher
This chapter maps out a range of embodied cognition (EC) theories, starting with ‘weak EC’, which focuses on body-formatted representations and the neural reuse hypothesis, and remains close to traditional cognitivist conceptions of the mind. This approach to EC is then contrasted to functionalist proposals for extended mind, to a biological model of EC, and finally to enactivist proposals....
Oxford Scholarship Online August 24, 2017 Susan A. J. Stuart
Every action, touch, utterance, and look, every listening, taste, smell, and feel is a living question. But it is no ordinary propositional one-by-one question, rather it is a plenisentient sensing and probing non-propositional enquiry about how our world is and how we anticipate its becoming. Using the notion of enkinaesthesia, this paper explores the ways in which an agent’s affectively...
Oxford Scholarship Online August 24, 2017 Philip Goff
This is the first of two chapters discussing the most notorious problem facing Russellian monism: the combination problem. This is actually a family of difficulties, each reflecting the challenge of how to make sense of everyday human and animal experience intelligibly arising from more fundamental conscious or protoconscious features of reality. Key challenges facing panpsychist and...
Oxford Scholarship Online August 24, 2017 Philip Goff
This chapter explores and defends a form of cosmopsychism: the combination of panpsychism and priority monism (the latter being the view that there is only one fundamental individual). The crucial advantage of cosmopsychism is that it offers a solution to the Subject Irreducibility Problem, discussed in the last chapter. After developing the view in response to various challenges, an empirical...
Oxford Scholarship Online August 24, 2017 Kenneth Borris
This book defines Platonism’s roles in early modern theories of literature, then turns to reappraise the Platonizing major poet Edmund Spenser. Platonic concerns and conceptions profoundly affected early modern English and continental poetics, yet the effects have had little attention. Literary Platonism energized pursuits of the sublime, and knowledge of this approach to poetry yields cogent...