Philosophical Psychology
December 19, 2024
Paweł Gładziejewski
Our conscious experience seemingly involves the subjective sense or feeling of the passage of time. However, in recent years, several authors have denied that such an aspect or feature of experience can be found. If the experience of the flow of time exists, it remains elusive and intangible. My aim here is to try to pin it down. For this purpose, I will investigate acute disturbances of normal...
Philosophical Psychology
November 29, 2024
H. Taylor
ABSTRACT Dennett’s work has had a profound impact on philosophical and scientific understanding of consciousness. However, interpreting Dennett’s work on consciousness is notoriously challenging. Some have even suggested that his ideas are contradictory. This paper develops and defends an interpretation of Dennett’s views, on which consciousness is a real pattern. I argue that this...
Philosophical Psychology
November 25, 2024
Riccardo Miceli Mcmillan, Jack Reynolds, Anthony Vincent Fernandez
3 citations
Current evidence suggests that the efficacy of psychedelic therapy depends, in part, on the character of psychedelic experiences themselves. One pronounced aspect of psychedelic experiences is alterations to the experience of time, including reports of timelessness or transcending time. However, how we should interpret such reports remains unclear, and this lack of clarity has philosophical and...
Philosophical Psychology
October 9, 2024
Floris Benjamin Tijhuis, Sabrina Coninx, Leon De Bruin
7 citations
This article provides a phenomenological account of the role of existential feelings in the acute and lasting effects of psychedelic therapy and attempts to elucidate phenomenologically why certain psychedelic experiences in specific contexts have the potential of providing long-term relief from mental suffering. First, we explain Matthew Ratcliffe’s theory of existential feelings and use it to...
Philosophical Psychology
September 26, 2024
Aleš Oblak, Liam Korošec Hudnik, Anja Levačić et al.
1 citation
There are profound methodological challenges facing microdosing research. One way we can address some of these methodological issues is by understanding how psilocybin microdosing fits in the broader existential context of people’s lives. We recruited participants who underwent psilocybin microdosing on their own and consented to being monitored for harm mitigation purposes. We combined...
Philosophical Psychology
August 20, 2024
Emiliano Loria, Elisabetta Lalumera, Ambra D’imperio
1 citation
The resurgence of interest in psychedelic substances for psychiatric treatment has sparked both excitement and scepticism within the scientific community. This paper addresses the moralisation and hype surrounding psychedelic therapies. Through a systematic review of the literature and a detailed case study, we illustrate that the therapeutic effect of psychedelics is not solely pharmacological...
Philosophical Psychology
August 14, 2024
Jussi Jylkkä
8 citations
Psychedelics can facilitate mystical-type insights and beliefs, such as the belief that the fundamental nature of reality is loving consciousness. These belief changes could underlie the positive effects of psychedelics on wellbeing. However, mystical-type beliefs have been criticized of being delusional, as they contradict naturalism. Here I argue that naturalism is one metaphysical position...
Philosophical Psychology
July 25, 2024
Umair Khan
1 citation
ABSTRACT Psychedelics have shown promise as a treatment for depression. Although there is some debate, a popular view is that psychedelics produce their benefits in an experience-dependent manner. This is the view that a depressed person gets better, inter alia, because of the experience she has had on psychedelics. Among the various questions that treatment for depression with psychedelics...
Philosophical Psychology
July 1, 2024
Sidney Carls-Diamante
ABSTRACT It is commonly assumed that where consciousness is present, it is a single stream. This notion is bolstered by functions attributed to consciousness, particularly providing multi-faceted experience of a perceptual scene and contributing to the production of coherent behavior, which supposedly require consciousness to be unitary. It is believed that were the unitary structure of...
Philosophical Psychology
June 27, 2024
Christopher Kochevar
5 citations
This paper attempts to integrate ongoing conversations about the nature and ethics of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy (PAP) in order to clarify some outstanding ethical questions. First, I address a debate about whether informed consent is possible for “transformative” therapies like PAP, and I conclude that reasonable approaches to informed consent should not be considered especially...
Philosophical Psychology
June 27, 2024
M. Pedersen, Asbjørn Steglich‐petersen
5 citations
ABSTRACT Both traditional and recent accounts of the beneficial and therapeutic effects of psychedelic experiences tie these effects to specifically epistemic changes, for example the enabling of spiritual or psychological insight, or disruption of problematic beliefs or thought patterns. While these alleged benefits have sometimes been thought to be facilitated by false or even delusional...
Philosophical Psychology
June 3, 2024
M. Zeller
ABSTRACT Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapies (PAPs) have shown promise in treating mental health disorders, but concerns persist regarding their potential to elicit “false beliefs” through altered states of consciousness. Some argue that metaphysical or mystical beliefs conflicting with philosophical naturalism could signify “epistemic harm” in patients. We contend that such accusations may...
Philosophical Psychology
April 8, 2024
Joseph Gough
ABSTRACT Intuitively, there is a close link between moral status and phenomenal consciousness. Taking the link seriously can serve as the basis of a proposal that appears to have a surprising number of theoretical benefits. This proposal is the moral option, according to which moral status is partly determinative of phenomenal consciousness, and phenomenal consciousness is sufficient for...
Philosophical Psychology
March 26, 2024
Pablo López-silva
2 citations
ABSTRACT Patients suffering from delusions of thought insertion (TI) report that external agents of different nature have placed thoughts into their minds. The symptom involves distressing feelings of intromission and exposition, loss of mental privacy, diminished ego boundaries, and a – often neglected – peculiar “physicality”. A dominant approach within cognitive sciences characterizes TI as...
Philosophical Psychology
February 14, 2024
Jonny Lee, B. Millar
2 citations
ABSTRACT The mechanistic model depicts scientific explanations as involving the discovery of multi-level, organized components that constitute a target phenomenon. Meanwhile, sensorimotor enactivism purports to offer a scientifically informed account of perceptual experience as a skill-laden interactive relationship, constitutively involving both perceiver and world, rather than as an...
Philosophical Psychology
January 25, 2024
Catherine A. Marple, A. Jeffrey, Sarah A. Schnitker
ABSTRACT Recent work in positive psychology demonstrates the importance of self-transcendence: understanding oneself to be part of something greater than the self, such as a family, community, or tradition of sacred practice. Self-transcendence is positively associated with wellbeing and a sense of meaning and purpose. Philosophers have argued that self-transcendent motivation has a central...
Philosophical Psychology
September 25, 2023
Héloïse Athéa
1 citation
Dating back to the late 1990s, the growing popularity of psychedelics is not a recent trend. Psychiatrists, psychologists, and neuroscientists are paying increasing attention to these hallucinogeni...
Philosophical Psychology
May 27, 2022
S. Smith
ABSTRACT This paper treats of phenomenal consciousness and its relation to an organism’s capacity to be hedonically perturbed by its environment. This paper offers an empirically informed, phenomenologically descriptive conceptual analysis of subjective character in terms of an organism’s ability to feel with its body. The subjective character of phenomenal consciousness is at least partially...
Philosophical Psychology
May 3, 2022
J. Hung
ABSTRACT A phenomenal concept is a concept that one possesses only if one has the relevant experience. In this essay, I argue that phenomenal concept theorists, namely, those who believe that we acquire phenomenal concepts through being acquainted with the relevant experience, can never succeed in determining which species of non-human animals are phenomenally conscious because they prohibit...
Philosophical Psychology
March 29, 2022
Nin Kirkham, Chris Letheby
15 citations
The urgent need for solutions to critical environmental challenges is well attested, but often environmental problems are understood as fundamentally collective action problems. However, to solve these problems, there is also a need to change individual behavior. Hence, there is a pressing need to inculcate in individuals the environmental virtues – virtues of character that relate to our...
Philosophical Psychology
February 27, 2022
Manuela Kirberg
ABSTRACT Although we are beginning to understand the neurocognitive processes that underlie the emergence of dreaming, what accounts for the bizarre phenomenology of dreams remains debated. I address this question by comparing dreaming with waking mind wandering and challenging previous accounts that utilize bizarreness to mark a sharp divide between conscious experiences in waking and...
Philosophical Psychology
October 11, 2021
Jae Ryeong Sul
3 citations
Delusional mood is a well-recognized psychological state, often present in the prodromal stage of schizophrenia. Various phenomenological psychopathologists have proposed that delusional mood may not only precede but also contribute to the later formation of schizophrenic delusion. Hence, understanding experiential abnormalities involved with the delusional mood have been considered central for...
Philosophical Psychology
April 27, 2021
David B. Yaden, Derek Anderson
31 citations
ABSTRACT Do psychological traits predict philosophical views? We administered the PhilPapers Survey, created by David Bourget and David Chalmers, which consists of 30 views on central philosophical topics (e.g., epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language) to a sample of professional philosophers (N = 314). We extended the PhilPapers survey to measure a...
Philosophical Psychology
December 5, 2020
Y. Ataria, O. Horovitz
13 citations
ABSTRACT This paper argues that severe and ongoing trauma (SOT) can lead to impairment at the level of the minimal self (MS), which is the core element in the structure of subjectivity. In the long-term, such impairments can result in complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) and schizophrenia. The paper tackles this issue while trying to create meaningful bridges between phenomenology and...
Philosophical Psychology
November 2, 2020
J. Aagaard
68 citations
ABSTRACT In recent years, we have witnessed the rise of a contemporary approach to cognitive psychology known as 4E cognition. According to this ‘extracranial’ view of cognition, the mind is not ensconced in the head, but dynamically intertwined with a host of different entities, social as well as technological. The purpose of the present article is to raise a concern about 4E cognition. The...