Philosophical Psychology
April 27, 2026
Michiel van Elk
Mystical experiences are characterized by ineffability, noetic quality, transiency, and passivity, as outlined by William James. The abstract discusses the long-standing scholarly interest in these experiences within religious studies, noting that they have been a focus of research since James's foundational work. The text describes the key features of such experiences but does not present new empirical findings or a specific argument beyond acknowledging the historical and ongoing academic attention to the topic.
Philosophical Psychology
April 10, 2026
Eric Rundquist, Diego Nicolás Monasterio López, Juan Jonathan Oyarzo Alvarado et al.
A cognitive-linguistic analysis of interviews with a healthy volunteer after moderate-to-high psilocybin doses reveals that the participant consistently used metaphors framing abstract introspective events in terms of concrete, visible, and interpersonal events, instantiating a cognitive frame called the Observer's Model. These metaphors imply cognitive defusion and heightened metacognitive awareness during the sessions. Literal descriptions of hallucinatory visual experiences correlated semantically with metaphorical expressions, suggesting metaphorical thinking plays a role in motivating those experiences. The findings are linked to neuroscientific research on psychedelics and have psychological and therapeutic implications.
Philosophical Psychology
March 17, 2026
Kael Mccormack
Philosophical accounts of object perception typically split between explaining objects as unified wholes through general representations and explaining them as particular individuals through unrepeatable representations. Susanna Schellenberg's capacitism—which treats perception as the exercise of capacities to discriminate concrete perceptual particulars—aims to reconcile these views but struggles to account for perceptual structure without invoking non-perceptual capacities. The author proposes a solution: a distinct capacity to discriminate unity, whose successful exercise yields a representation of an object bound with its properties, enabling direct awareness of an object's unity. This preserves both the particularity and the structured wholeness of perceived objects.
Philosophical Psychology
February 27, 2026
José M. Araya
A commentary on Şerife Tekin's book argues that computational neurophenomenology can complement the MuSe (Multidimensional Self in Experience) framework to address challenges of objectivity in psychiatry. The author proposes integrating mechanistic accounts of self-model dynamics with MuSe's focus on subjective experience, which would strengthen the scientific standing of subjective reports and expand the role of experience-based experts in psychiatric research. This integration offers epistemic advantages and extends MuSe in new directions by grounding its facets in underlying dynamics.
Philosophical Psychology
December 19, 2025
Craig French
Derealization, a symptom of Derealization/Depersonalization Disorder, involves a sense of unreality about one's surroundings despite still perceiving them. This presents a challenge for naive realist theories of perception, which hold that real external objects centrally explain the phenomenology of perception. The author develops this into a new problem for naive realism: the problem of derealization. The naive realist can respond, the author argues, by proposing that perceptual experiences of derealization involve existentially degraded perceptual relations to external objects, where perception makes an object available without its existence. Such degradation occurs when perception is structured by background feelings of unreality.
Philosophical Psychology
June 16, 2025
Eric Schwitzgebel, Sophie R. Nelson
The number of conscious subjects in a given entity might not always be a determinate whole number. On a wide range of naturalistic views, the processes underlying consciousness are complex enough to make it implausible that conscious subjects must always arise in countable, whole-number quantities. Whole-number-countability may be an accident of typical vertebrate biology. The fact that we cannot imagine what it is like to be 7/8 or 1.34 conscious subjects does not count against the possibility; either the imaginative demand is self-contradictory (imagine what it is like to be an entity that does not have a single, determinate what-it-is-like) or imaginability is not an appropriate test of possibility, as with bat echolocation.
Philosophical Psychology
December 19, 2024
Paweł Gładziejewski
Our conscious experience typically includes a subjective sense that time is passing, but some philosophers deny that such a feeling exists. This paper argues that altered temporal experiences during deep meditation and psychedelic states serve as contrast cases that reveal the ordinary experience of time's passage. By examining these acute disturbances of normal temporal experience, the author contends that the elusive feeling of temporal flow can be identified and studied. The argument uses phenomenal contrast to establish that passage phenomenology is a genuine feature of conscious experience, making it a viable subject for philosophical theorizing.
Philosophical Psychology
December 16, 2025
Hüseyin Beyköylü, John Vervaeke, D. Meling
Self-transcendent experiences (STEs), such as flow states and mystical experiences, are profound shifts in cognition and consciousness with transformative potential. A proposed cognitive continuum framework, grounded in enactive cognitive science and complex dynamic systems, treats the embodied person embedded in their world as the unit of analysis. STEs reflect an enhancement of relevance realization—the organism's active engagement with its environment to adaptively frame its world—across increasingly global levels of cognitive organization. Destabilization and complexification are central processes, with entropy as their metric. The Entropy-Fluency hypothesis posits that increased entropy signals destabilization followed by increased fluency, bridging first-person subjective experiences with third-person scientific observations. STEs are dynamic, person-specific, and context-dependent phenomena requiring idiographic and transdisciplinary methods.
Philosophical Psychology
July 10, 2025
Elly Vintiadis
Psychedelic drugs have been used for centuries worldwide for recreational, religious, and healing purposes, often to induce mystical experiences that promote healing and insight. The abstract suggests these substances hold historical and cultural significance across diverse traditions.
Philosophical Psychology
May 29, 2025
T. Dowie
Integration is a crucial but poorly defined part of psychedelic-assisted therapy. This article proposes a new, coherent model of integration that focuses on metacognition and unfolds in three phases. The model is grounded in clinical experience, teaching, research, and philosophical thinking, aiming to clarify the concept and its practical application.
Philosophical Psychology
June 3, 2024
M. Zeller
Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapies may alter patients' metaphysical or mystical beliefs, which some critics argue causes epistemic harm by conflicting with philosophical naturalism. This paper contends that such accusations risk committing epistemic injustice by dismissing non-naturalistic beliefs under a presumption of superiority, thereby invalidating patients' subjective experiences. The authors argue that fostering exotic metaphysical beliefs in these therapies is medically and epistemically benign, as the primary goal is improving mental health, not instilling specific convictions. They advocate for epistemic pluralism over naturalism, emphasizing respect for patients' epistemic agency and cognitive liberty, and conclude that therapeutic outcomes should take priority over the content of beliefs elicited.
Philosophical Psychology
May 27, 2022
S. Smith
Phenomenal consciousness—what it is like to be an organism—is at least partly constituted by the capacity to feel with one's living body. The subjective character of experience, the sense that the world seems a certain way for a subject, is grounded in embodied affect: the ability to feel what happens on and inside the body. This view, called the affectively embodied perspectival view (AEP), argues that hedonic perturbation by the environment is essential to having a perspective. The argument combines empirical findings, phenomenological description, and conceptual analysis to show that subjective character cannot be fully understood without reference to bodily feeling.
Philosophical Psychology
May 3, 2022
J. Hung
The essay argues that phenomenal concept theorists—who hold that concepts of conscious experience are acquired only through firsthand experience—cannot determine which non-human animal species are phenomenally conscious. Because these theorists prohibit any a priori link between phenomenal and non-phenomenal concepts, standard methods such as neuro-identity theory, behaviorism, functionalism, inference to the best explanation, analogical inference, similarity inference, and inference by prototype all fail to establish animal consciousness. The author contends that the very framework of phenomenal concepts makes cross-species attribution of consciousness impossible.
Philosophical Psychology
February 27, 2022
Manuela Kirberg
Dream bizarreness is not a marker of a sharp divide between waking and sleeping consciousness but a common feature of spontaneous offline simulations across the sleep-wake cycle. The author proposes that bizarreness arises from the dynamic, unconstrained, (hyper)associative, and highly variable nature of spontaneous thought. Rather than misrepresenting waking reality, bizarreness can reveal the building blocks of spontaneous cognition. The absence of bizarreness in thought is imposed by automatic and deliberate cognitive constraints; without such constraints, thought and memory processes are inherently marked by different degrees and types of bizarreness.