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July 28, 2011
Ansuman Biswas
6 citations
A significant lacuna in academic and scientific studies of consciousness is a description of how it actually feels to be here. The study of consciousness has proved to be extremely elusive when using the traditional third-person methodology of science. Any description of qualia — by definition lived, subjective experience — seems to necessitate the admission of first-person data, which has...
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July 28, 2011
Benny Shanon
3 citations
Abstract This chapter examines the musical facets of the special state of mind induced by ayahuasca, a powerful Amazonian psychoactive brew especially famous for the vivid hallucinations that it induces. The chapter is divided into three parts. The first presents background information concerning ayahuasca and its scientific study, and discusses the use of music in ayahuasca rituals. The second...
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July 18, 2011
Rüdiger Seesemann
This chapter offers a micro-history of the early community in Senegal, drawing on letters by Ibrahim Niasse that give unique insights into the movement's formative years. The sources show how Niasse was forced to reign in the excesses of a few overzealous followers, whose flouting of the rules of the Sufi path invited much criticism from outsiders. The mounting tensions lead to the next...
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July 18, 2011
Rüdiger Seesemann
This chapter introduces Ibrahim Niasse on the basis of hagiographical sources, offering insights into both scholarly and popular representations of Niasse's career. It focuses on the first three decades of his life, using accounts of his childhood and training to highlight the milieu in which he grew up. It then discusses the “emergence of the flood (fayda),” the pivotal moment that triggered...
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July 7, 2011
Leslie Stevenson
This essay examines various kinds of unity in our experience based on the idea that these forms of unity are produced by mental processes of synthesis. It suggests that Immanuel Kant was asking questions about the relation between preconceptual and conceptual levels of mental functioning that are still of fundamental importance in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. The...
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June 24, 2011
John Kevin O'Regan
This chapter looks at the progress that scientists have made so far in making machines that think, perceive, learn, use language, and that have the notion of self. It discusses the development of artificial intelligence, the cognitive self, and the societal self. It argues that to give a scientific account of the self, at least as concerns the cognitive and social aspects, no magical, as yet...
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June 15, 2011
Georges Dicker
This chapter surveys, formulates, and evaluates Berkeley's main arguments for the foundational doctrine of his philosophy, namely that we perceive only our own ideas or, as he puts it, that sensible qualities are only ideas or sensations in the mind: the pleasure-pain argument, two subtly different versions of the argument from perceptual relativity (one of which invokes, in effect, the...
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June 1, 2011
Georg Northoff
1 citation
Abstract Chapters 11 and 12 focus on psychosis. Due to the complexity of psychosis, I have devoted the whole of Chapter 11 to a discussion of its psychodynamic key features, including object loss, abnormal projection, and the splitting and fragmentation of the self.
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March 2, 2011
Derk Pereboom
Chapter 3 develops a response to David Chalmers’s conceivability argument against (ordinary) physicalism analogous to the objection to the knowledge argument set out in Chapter 1. The conceivability argument hinges on the claim that it is conceivable, in an appropriately sophisticated way, that a world that is (nothing but) an exact physical duplicate of the actual world feature no phenomenal...
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February 2, 2011
Nevill Drury
1 citation
Abstract If we are to understand the nature of contemporary magical practice and its relationship with the "virtual" world of the Internet, it may well be that new paradigms are required—new paradigms for research into altered states of consciousness and new paradigms for the study of magic, as well. This chapter explores magic in the digital age, commencing with Terence McKenna's "cyberdelic"...
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February 2, 2011
Nevill Drury
Abstract This chapter profiles three notable twentieth-century occultists—Dion Fortune, Austin Osman Spare, and Rosaleen Norton. All three can be regarded as key bridging figures linking earlier generations of magical practitioners with the contemporary neopagan movement. Dion Fortune (1890–1946) studied psychoanalysis at the University of London. Through her friend Maiya Curtis-Webb, Violet...
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February 2, 2011
Nevill Drury
Much of the current interest in Western occultism, and contemporary paganism in particular, is directly related to the rise and importance of feminism as a contemporary social movement. Contemporary witchcraft—often referred to as Wicca—and its more eclectic variant, Goddess worship, both focus on the veneration of the sacred Feminine—the Universal Goddess—in her myriad manifestations. There...
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February 1, 2011
Kevin Kimble, Timothy O'Connor
8 citations
The argument from consciousness maintains that correlations between brain states and conscious states of persons require explanation but cannot be given an adequate scientific explanation. The chapter then argues that the best explanation of these correlations is that they are the result of the work of a purposeful supernatural agent. The aim is two-fold. First, the chapter considers and rebuts...
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January 27, 2011
Sean C. Kim
3 citations
The growth of pentecostalism in South Korea since the 1950s, fueled largely by divine healing practices, is symbolized by the Yoido Full Gospel Church, the world’s largest Christian congregation, founded by David Yonggi Cho. Korea is second only to the United States in number of overseas missionaries. Ironically, divine healing first emerged in Presbyterian churches founded by “cessationist”...
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January 6, 2011
Robin Le Poidevin
35 citations
One of the many mysteries surrounding the Christian doctrine of incarnation is the so—called ‘scandal of particularity’: if becoming incarnate was necessary for God to enter into the closest possible union with us, why was the incarnation a unique event, not replicated elsewhere? Brian Hebblethwaite has suggested that the grounds for the uniqueness of the incarnation are metaphysical: God the...
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January 6, 2011
Anna Marmodoro
10 citations
The human mind often relies on external mechanisms for carrying out its cognitive processes, for example by using a calculator. Vehicle externalism and in particular the Extended Mind theory (Clark and Chalmers 1998) explore whether such external mechanisms, under specified conditions, are more than mere instruments for the mind; the claim is that they are parts of the mind and thus extend it...
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December 3, 2010
Andrea Knutson
Chapter 4 examines the impact that Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species and its demonstration of probabilistic thinking had on William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (Varieties) and demonstrates the central role the conversion dynamic plays in James’s work, focusing on his development of a psychology of religious experience in the Varieties and of pragmatism as a philosophy...
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December 1, 2010
Dan Zahavi
80 citations
This chapter first outlines a view regarding the relationship between consciousness, self-consciousness, and a minimal notion of self that is widespread in the phenomenological tradition. It then discusses some of the motivations behind this proposal, and then in the main part of the chapter critically engages with various objections that have recently been raised against this view by Albahari...
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December 1, 2010
Miri Albahari
49 citations
Abstract Buddhists maintain that the enlightened person is freed from the illusion of 'self' with its ideas of 'me' and 'mine'. What notion of self is at stake here? What must be the case, with regard to the self and consciousness, for nirvana to be psychologically possible? Is the picture that emerges a plausible one in the philosophy of mind? Part One outlines the notion of self under...
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December 1, 2010
Georges Dreyfus
36 citations
This chapter uses insights of the Yogācāra Buddhist tradition to explore some questions concerning consciousness. It is first argued that the Yogācāra view of consciousness provides a middle ground between the extremes of eliminativism and Cartesianism. It is then shown that the Yogācāra view, which emphasizes the close link between the phenomenal aspect of consciousness and reflexivity, is...
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December 1, 2010
Joel Krueger
16 citations
This chapter argues for the counter-intuitive thesis that consciousness does not require a self. Granted, a central feature of conscious states is that their mode of appearance exhibits an irreducibly first-personal nature, and this ‘how’ of consciousness is what secures its phenomenal character. It seems natural to assume that this ‘how’ points back to a ‘who’. This chapter argues, however,...
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December 1, 2010
Jonardon Ganeri
5 citations
Subjectivity, Selfhood and the Use of the Word 'I' JONARDON GANERI I. Asan ˙ga and Vasubandhu on Self-Consciousness and Conscious Attention to Oneself A well-known Buddhist philosophy of mind has it that conscious experience is a synthesis of five forms of activity: the processes of registering, appraising, stereotyping, readying, and consciously attending.1These philosophers say that the last...
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December 1, 2010
Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad
2 citations
This chapter looks at the way Advaita Vedānta both affirms a unified consciousness (which might be called a self), and rejects the intuition that ‘I’ picks out that self. Its position is situated cross-culturally through relating it to two contemporary and seemingly opposed positions. On one hand there is Zahavi's theory of a minimal self that, while being only a phenomenological core,...
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November 24, 2010
Ernest L. Hartmann
1 citation
Dreaming, daydreaming, and thinking are done by people, and people differ in all sorts of ways. Different people think differently and they dream differently as well. This is so obvious as to hardly be worth mentioning. But are there systematic differences? Can aspects of personality be related to dreaming? Early studies suggested little relation between dreaming and measures of personality....
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October 28, 2010
Tim Bayne
The chapter examines an account of phenomenal unity that appeals to the closure of phenomenal content under conjunction—‘closure,’ for short. The chapter begins by locating closure within the context of representational treatments of phenomenal consciousness. Four objections to closure are then examined. A first objection involves the claim that inconsistent states can be phenomenally unified....