Both written under pseudonym, Constance Newland’s My Self and I (1962) and Jane Dunlap’s Exploring Inner Space (1961) are firsthand accounts of psychedelic drug use taken in therapeutic research settings that demonstrate how women’s access to discursive legitimacy was negotiated in mid-twentieth-century life-writing. Newland and Dunlap use realism to connect readers to their psychedelic...
Scholars in the humanities increasingly scrutinize the contemporary significance of cognitive neuroscience in reshaping the contours of the human subject. The essay considers a specific dimension of this new epistemic and ontological frontier—the neuroscience of consciousness as a threshold of life and death—to develop the argument that the biology of consciousness as a cultural problem is part...
Reviewed by: Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere Derek Risse (bio) Richard M. Doyle, Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011, 368 pp. $70.00 cloth, 35.00 paper. Bringing together discourses of rhetoric, information science, and the life sciences, the final text in Richard Doyle’s “Transhuman...
Reviewed by: Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson Jess Keiser (bio) Jonathan Kramnick, Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010, 320 pp. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. Jonathan Kramnick’s Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson is a nuanced and wide-ranging account of consciousness, materialism, and agency in eighteenth-century...
This article explores the work of R. Gordon Wasson, who discovered the use of psilocybin mushrooms among indigenous people in Mexico. I argue that Wasson's writings on these and other psychedelic substances involve two primary moves. First, Wasson seeks to open up processes of scientific research beyond institutional and disciplinary boundaries, thereby constructing deinstitutionalized...
The discourse surrounding psychedelics is problematic on several vectors. The investigation of their effects on human beings is illegal in most circumstances, yet exploration continued after their scheduling in the late 1960s and early '70s. The article examines this problematic from the viewpoints of four leading psychedelic outlaws—Terence McKenna, Philip K. Dick, Timothy Leary, and John...
The author presents a case of self-organizing daimonic mythopoiesis. The spiritual tourist, entheogenic experimenter, and the painter enfold a matrix of inter-developed "sorties" into the allotropic differentials of the autopoietic process. Fieldwork in Mandi, Himashal Pradesh, India provides an introduction to the virtualities of the peripersonal as it manifests in a "darshan" or self-showing...
While William James's investigations into paranormal phenomena, mysticism, and the effects of drugs upon consciousness have been typically dismissed or overlooked by scholars, they actually prove to be consistent with his more reputable philosophical claims about pluralism, radical empiricism, and the role and purpose of science. James's self-experiments with nitrous oxide and other drugs...