This book offers an engaging philosophical overview of Tibetan Buddhist thought. It shows the way that Buddhist theory informs Buddhist practice across various Tibetan traditions in ways that integrate competing and complimentary perspectives on the nature of mind and reality. The book draws upon a contrast between phenomenology and ontology to highlight distinct starting points of inquiries...
Consolationism is an emergent intellectual current in 21st century African philosophy that presents itself as an alternative constructive framework for metaphysics, with an epistemic foundation in the African thought-world and being universally applicable. In this paper, I trace the influences of consolationism within African philosophy, and argue that this original philosophical system is the...
Contributing to recent scholarly interest in the cognitive and perceptual ideas that informed Romantic interest in transcendence, this paper argues for a common self-experimental method underlying Humphry Davy’s medical experiments with nitrous oxide and the composition of lyric poetry by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Romantic poets and scientists adopted the formal method of...
Since the 2nd part of last century neo-shamanic rituals using mind-altering extracts from plants or animals have become increasingly popular in Europe and the USA. The first rituals coming to the west were based on drinking a special Amazonian tea, Ayahuasca, based on 2 different plants, with active compounds belonging to the class of the beta-carbolines (harmala alkaloids) and tryptamines. The...
We review the involvement of a small molecule, oxytocin, in various effects of physical stimulation of somatosensory organs, mindfulness meditation, emotion and fragrance on humans, and then propose a hypothesis that complex human states and behaviors, such as well-being, social bonding, and emotional behavior, are explained by oxytocin. We previously reported that oxytocin can induce pain...
Buddhism has traditionally focused on epistemological and psychological causes of suffering in individuals: deluded perception, greed, and ill will.Buddhist compassionate action seeks to free people from those inner causes of suffering, through contemplative, ritual and ethical practices.Christian liberation theology focuses on oppressive social systems as main causes of suffering, and on...
This book brings together researchers from a variety of fields to jointly present and discuss some of the most relevant problems around the conscious mind. This academic plurality perfectly characterizes the complexity with which a current researcher is confronted to discuss and work on this topic. The volume is organized as follows: Part I introduces the general problems of Philosophy of Mind...
In contemporary philosophy of mind, the conceivability argument against physicalism is often used to support a form of dualism, which takes consciousness to be ontologically fundamental and distinct from physical matter. Recently, some proponents of the conceivability argument have also shown interest in panpsychism, which is the view that mentality is ubiquitous in the natural world. This...
For a new evolutionary step forward, this study suggests humans need to learn to live from the heart and not only the mind. Here I associate the mind with the Masculine Principle and thinking which with learning, develops into intellect. This is contrasted with intuition which I associate with the Female Principle and the deeper heart-mind. They are different epistemological ways of knowing...
Mindfulness meditation is thought to lead to positive changes in cognitive and affective functioning. However, the mechanisms underlying these changes are not well understood. One reason for this is that so far only very few studies considered the effects of specific meditation practices. We thus investigated the effects of engaging in one specific form of mindfulness meditation for a brief...