This paper is an opinionated overview of major developments in philosophy of mind during the past seventy years, with emphasis on the issue of mental causation. Its most prominent positions all embrace a broadly “naturalistic” or “materialistic” conception of human beings, and of mentalityand its place in nature. Included in this paper are discussions of analytical behaviorism, the...
This paper explores one way of putting selves and values back into the world. I analyze Charles Taylor’s, Iris Murdoch’s, and Donald Walhout’s arguments showing that to be a self is to relate to being as a value. I show that the intentional relation of world-directedness that is central to self discloses being first as a value. I argue that our best account of what it is to be a self commits us...
Le present article interprete la lecture heideggerienne de la phenomenologie de l'esprit de Hegel comme une critique voilee de la phenomenologie de la conscience de Husserl. Je defends l'idee qu'en dernier ressort, Heidegger affirme l'insuffisance des deux phenomenologies, exclusivement preoccupees par l'etre ou les etants, et montre la voie pour une troisieme phenomenologie, celle de la...
Herder developed a very powerful and influential philosophy of mind. He was the source of Hegel’s famous threefold distinction between subjective, objective, and absolute mind (or Geist). Concerning the fundamental mind–body question he wavered between neutral monism and materialism, but developed a theory that has marked advantages over rival theories such as dualism, mind–brain identity, and...
Our in-the-moment experience of the world can feel vivid and rich, even when we cannot describe our experience due to limitations of attention, memory or other cognitive processes. But the nature of visual awareness is quite sparse, as suggested by the phenomena of failures of awareness, such as change blindness and inattentional blindness. I will argue that once failures of memory or failures...
What is a practical intention, particularly an evaluating intention? Are values representational states that work differently from epistemological truths? Are our perceptual experiences representational states? To simplify the inquiry, I will theoretically divide the questions into two groups: the former concerning the distinction between signitive and practical intention and the latter...
In this paper, I shall focus on the role of bodily self-displacement in Stein’s account of empathy, pointing out its relevance in the general dimension of affectivity. In my view, Stein grounds empathy on a dynamic model of embodied self-experience, which shares significant similarities with Varela & Depraz’s neurophenomenology. However, I shall argue that Stein’s view of empathy cannot be...
For people living with multiple sclerosis (MS), one's own body may no longer be taken for granted but may become instead an insistent presence. In this article, we describe how the body experience of people with MS can reflect an ongoing oscillation between four experiential dimensions: bodily uncertainty, having a precious body, being a different body, and the mindful body. People with MS can...
Qualitative research methodologies focus on meaning and although use similar methods have differing epistemological and ontological underpinnings, with each approach offering a different lens to explore, interpret or explain phenomena in real-world contexts and settings. In this article, we provide a brief overview of phenomenology and outline the main phenomenological approaches relevant for...
The hard problem of consciousness is the question how subjective experience arises from brain matter. I suggest exploring the possibility that quantum physics could be part of the answer. The simultaneous unity and complexity of subjective experience is difficult to understand from a classical physics perspective. In contrast, quantum entanglement is naturally both complex and unified. Moreover...
Religious experience and the experiential dimension of religious practice have come to constitute a fruitful area of enquiry for anthropology. This entry discusses the phenomenological school of philosophy as a source for the anthropology of religion. Concepts from this school that have been taken up within the anthropology of religion, such as bracketing, intentionality, embodiment, and...
ABSTRACT This article analyzes the moral-psychological stakes of Jay Garfield's reading of Buddhist ethics as moral phenomenology and applies that thesis to the pedagogical mechanisms of the Tibetan Buddhist lojong (“Mind Training”) tradition. I argue that moral phenomenology requires that the practitioner work on a part of her subjectivity not ordinarily accessible to agential action: the...
How do we explain the seemingly rich nature of visual phenomenology while accounting for impoverished perception in the periphery? This apparent mismatch has led some to posit that rich phenomenological content overflows cognitive access, whereas others hold that phenomenology is in fact sparse and constrained by cognitive access. Here, we review the Rich vs. Sparse debate as it relates to a...
Karl Jaspers published the first edition of 'General Psychopathology' in 1913. Now, coinciding with its 100th anniversary whose importance was consecrated through multiple congresses, we see a parallelism and a return to the dilemma of the 'Methodenstreit', which led Karl Jaspers to introduce the phenomenological method for psychopathology to understand the subjective manifestations of the...
Transpersonal psychology has at times critiqued the broader psychology field for perpetrating a somewhat arbitrary Cartesian subject-object divide. Some phenomenologists claim that reframing this purported divide as an experienced phenomenon can defuse its philosophical impact. If subjective experiences are viewed as continuous with the lifeworld out of which objective phenomena are abstracted,...
DreamingSeptember 1, 2018Dagna Skrzypińska, M. Hołda, Barbara Szmigielska et al.
Dream–reality confusion (DRC) is a difficulty or an impossibility to determine whether an event or an experience took place during wakefulness or if it was the content of a dream. The main goal of the present study was to explore characteristics of participants from the general population who often/very often experience DRC in comparison with those who never/almost never experience it....
Researchers suggest links between mind-wandering and impaired processing of external task stimuli: mind-wandering results in perceptual decoupling. The primary methodology employed to investigate the effects of mind-wandering requires people to report their conscious state and then predicts prior behavior or neurophysiological responses using the person's self-report. Unfortunately, this method...
Using an analysis of a voluntary action caused by a visual perception, I suggest that the three fundamental characteristics of this perception (being conscious, self-conscious, and provided with a content) are neurologically implemented by three distinct higher order properties of brain dynamics. This hypothesis allows me to sketch out a physicalist naturalist solution to the mind-body problem....
This paper aims to show that Paul Ricœur's hermeneutical phenomenology has significance for philosophy of mind, in particular for recent theories of enactivism, one of the most significant latest developments in cognitive theory.While philosophy of mind often finds its inspiration in hermeneutics and phenomenology, especially in Husserl's and Merleau-Ponty's, the later development of...
Abstract Buddhist philosophy of mind is fascinating because it denies that there is a self in one of the ways that has traditionally seemed best able to make sense of that idea: the idea that the self is the agent of actions including the thinking of thoughts. In the Buddhist philosophy of mind of the fifth century thinker Buddhaghosa what does the explanatory work is instead attention....