Research exploring delusions among individuals with psychosis often focuses on form, rather than content, and on prevalence, rather than change in a cohort over time. While delusional forms are mostly consistent across cultures and historical periods, the content of delusions is shaped by sociopolitical factors. We explored the form and content of delusions in a modern sample of individuals...
This article provides guidance on Front-Loaded Phenomenology (FLP) in qualitative research, an approach where researchers use phenomenological concepts and conceptual distinctions during initial research planning to shape how a study is designed and conducted. FLP studies have precise conceptual foci and enable the generation of nuanced findings that may be difficult to obtain using other...
Hallucination research is a fast‑growing, inherently interdisciplinary field bridging psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry, and philosophy. This article maps out key conceptual and methodological issues underlying the study of hallucinations. We begin by unpacking core theoretical issues - how hallucinations differ from other perceptual alterations, whether they form a single construct or...
ABSTRACT Cognitive science needs phenomenology, not despite, but because of the epistemic challenges posed by consciousness. This article argues that the pervasive presence of intuitive dualism, the empirical cognitive tendency to distinguish the mental from physical, is a widespread and entrenched feature of human experience. Drawing on work in developmental psychology and cognitive...
PsyArXivOctober 24, 2025Olivier Desmedt, Pierre Maurage, Mateo Leganes-Fonteneau et al.
preprint
Interoception, the processing of internal bodily states, contributes to human behaviour through multiple cognitive and affective processes, including emotional regulation and decision-making. It also constitutes a key variable in a range of psychopathological processes. Yet, its core phenomenological dimension, namely how bodily sensations are subjectively experienced, remains understudied....
This manuscript provides a naturalistic foundation for a Philosophy of Enactive Inference and, on this basis, argues for a multi-perspectival monism. Starting from the thesis that the spatiotemporal dynamics of brain activity function as a "common currency" for neuronal and mental processes, the paper develops a multi-layered synthesis of the theories of Northoff, Buonomano, Friston, and...
Abstract Jean-Paul Sartre develops a phenomenological account of dreaming in his early work on the imaginary. Providing a brief but rich analysis, he emphasizes the active and imaginative nature of consciousness during dreaming and distinguished it sharply from perception. This paper revisits Sartre’s dream theory in light of the neuroscientific and philosophical framework of Predictive...
What makes phenomena such as birth, death, creation or fate specifically “limit phenomena” within Husserl’s phenomenology is not simply their difficulty, but also that they seem to threaten phenomenology as a transcendentalist project. As a transcendentalist project, phenomenology tries to overcome contingency by seeking the apodictic and necessary, leading Husserl to focus on normal, optimal,...
Why should we be interested in the relationship between dreaming and memory?Dreaming and Memory: Philosophical Issues sets out to explore this issue, offering rigorous and thought-provoking investigations into how these two phenomena might illuminate one another.Bringing together a range of philosophical perspectives, the volume navigates the blurred boundaries of these two cognitive...
Purpose. This article discusses researching the nature and basic structure of acts of empathy. Such research first requires answering the question: are empathic acts intentional acts of our consciousness? If the answer to this question is affirmative, then there is a need to answer the following questions: what are the features of acts of empathy as intentional ones? And can such acts be...
An intellectual biography of one of the most celebrated and yet least understood figures of the late twentieth century, Terence McKenna. A stand-up philosopher who made a unique contribution to science, humanism, and the hidden arts, Terence McKenna (1946–2000) was the twentieth century’s psychedelic Renaissance man. Perfecting his rugged philosophy on the role of psychedelics in evolution,...
BACKGROUND: In recent years, the renewal of soul-centred shamanic soul retrieval theories has provided various theoretical interpretations of the shamanic soul retrieval phenomenon and has exacerbated the "explanatory gap" found in "mind-mater" dualism. However, these theories cannot explain the body-centred turn of modern Chinese shamans under the influence of the body revitalization movement...
In most countries of Latin America, there are philosophers working in the philosophy of mind. Interesting contributions has been made to all the important themes of recent Philosophy of mind in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, and Columbia. There are works on Externalism, Naturalism, Enactivism, Extended Mind, Physicalism, Mental Causation, Intentionality, Consciousness and the phenomenal...
Phenomenology remains a central yet often misunderstood approach in qualitative inquiry, valued for its ability to reveal the meanings of lived experience. Despite its influence, researchers continue to face uncertainty in applying phenomenological principles consistently. Two areas frequently present challenges: determining when to adopt descriptive or interpretive phenomenology, and...
Schizophrenia BulletinOctober 1, 2025Julia Cassaniti, Chaiyun Sakulsriprasert, T M Luhrmann
Background and hypothesis: Research has found that the content and valence of voices heard by persons with schizophrenia appear to be shaped by local culture. We interviewed twenty participants about their voices in Suan Prung Hospital in Chiang Mai, Thailand to see if, and how, there appeared to be such local influences. Study design: In an ethnographically driven and phenomenological study,...
This paper critically evaluates Matthew Burch's interpretations and critiques of the phenomenological account of health and illness, which are predominantly situated within the realm of static phenomenology within Husserl's framework, thereby neglecting the potential insights offered by genetic phenomenology. The primary focus of this paper is to explore genetic phenomenology in order to...
In a series of papers, Miri Albahari (2019; 2020; 2022; 2024) has articulated and defended perennial idealism (PI), a view she associates with Śakara’s Advaita Vedānta. She argues that PI offers a solution to the hard problem of consciousness (HPC). In this work, I distinguish the HPC, which occupies contemporary analytic philosophy of mind, from the hard problem of the self (HPS), which...
Meditation and psychedelics have separately been studied as powerful tools for probing consciousness through their capacity to deconstruct the sense of self. Yet, direct empirical comparisons remain scarce, particularly in expert meditators. Here, we report for the first time a case study in which an advanced meditator and Lama from the Mahāmudrā meditation tradition engaged in a traditional...
BMC PsychologySeptember 29, 2025Hajar Behzadi, Mohammad Farzollah Abbasi, Sally Pezaro et al.
Background: Death is an experience that every human being faces. As such, the near-death experience (NDE) has been a topic of interest to humanity for millennia. The NDE is often understood as a subjective event of altered consciousness that can occur during life-threatening events and/or near the time of biological death. This study investigated the near-death lived experiences of coma...
While voice-hearing in psychosis has received much attention, perceptual experiences in other sensory modalities and psychiatric conditions have remained relatively overlooked. The present review aimed to address this gap by providing an overview of voices/altered perceptual experiences (APE) across psychotic, mood and anxiety disorders in terms of phenomenological characteristics,...