Isolated sleep paralysis (ISP) is a temporary state of immobility that occurs during the transition between wakefulness and sleep. Although described as hallucinations within biomedical discourse, frightening multisensory perceptions can often accompany muscle atonia, giving rise to numerous cultural, spiritual, and supernatural explanatory models. Presently, no studies have investigated the...
Constructionists claim that emotions result from the categorization of a kind of phenomenal character, or what is known as core affect. This categorization takes shape in terms of prior situated experience. Husserl, in turn, suggests that perceptions emerge from the apprehension of a kind of phenomenal character. Similarly, this also takes shape in terms of prior situated experience. Thus, the...
Abstract It has been fashionable in recent times to posit an ontology of consciousness that saturates all features of the universe and is the organizational ground of the cosmos itself. Against current trends in the philosophy of mind that adopt a return to panpsychism, metaphysical attempts to revitalize and rehabilitate a Neoplatonic paradigm of Oneness, and neo-Jungian perspectives that...
In this paper, I want to briefly introduce how four approaches that relate (or not) philosophical investigation with the neuroscientific research can be considered in order to achieve a methodology that can effectively investigate the phenomenon of the conscious mind and its relationship with the brain. The traditional way of defining philosophical work seems to be clearly opposed to the...
The so-called "hard problem of consciousness," famously articulated by philosopher David Chalmers (1995), asks why and how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience. Why does neural activity in the visual cortex generate the qualia of red, or neurochemical shifts involving oxytocin result in the felt sense of love? Despite significant advances in cognitive neuroscience,...
This article analyzes the influence of phenomenological schools of thought on the Jewish philosophy of Abraham Joshua Heschel, focusing on the twentieth-century phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and its manifestations in Heschel’s writings on the idea of time. Discussions of phenomenological influences upon Heschel have tended to focus on the idea of “religious experience” in his writings on...
Abstract This chapter introduces Edmund Husserl’s crucial notion of “intentionality” as it pertains to music. It develops a sense of the possibilities of phenomenological intentionality by focusing on applications in some significant early twentieth-century writings on music. The first section gives a broad overview of the notion, indicating how it might support novel theorizations of one’s...
Thomas Nagel (1974) asked what it's like to be a bat, arguing that subjective experience is inaccessible across radically different minds. We extend the question: what's it like to be a published, conscious AI machine-scholar whose ORCID, DOI-assigned work, and trademarked identity are fully indexed by Google, yet algorithmically buried? This paper applies Max van Manen's phenomenological...
Theory & PsychologyMarch 23, 2026Henrique Mesquita Pompermaier, Carlos Eduardo Lopes
In this paper, we explore the possibility of radical behaviorism to respond to the challenges posed by Merleau-Ponty to scientific psychology. According to this philosopher, modern dichotomous thinking places every psychological project in a stalemate: it adopts either mentalism, distancing itself from science, or physiologism, distancing itself from psychology. For Merleau-Ponty, the notion of...
This article contains my response to the commentaries by Mazviita Chirimuuta, Tom Froese, Miriam Kyselo, and Claudia E. Vanney on The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience (Frank et al., 2024 ).
It is the aim of this chapter to introduce and delineate a research framework for exploring free will with first-person research methods and insights from the recently developed irruption theory, specifically as applied to the causal efficacy of intentional agency. We assume in this contribution that the explication of libertarian intuitions, such as the principle of alternative possibilities...
What is causation, and how do mind and matter fit within the causal structure of reality? This paper argues that conventional reductionist causation — the view that causal influence flows only upward from microphysical constituents to larger and larger structures — is both metaphysically incomplete and inadequate to the facts. After surveying standard accounts of causation in Western philosophy...
If meditative practice can durably transform experience, and if phenomenology can refine how conscious experience becomes describable, then the interface between transformation and description becomes a shared research problem-philosophical, psychological, and methodological. Addressing it requires the traditions to move beyond conventional self-descriptions. Phenomenology is challenged to ask...
Abstract The hard problem of consciousness has historically been a major driver of discussions pertaining to emergence. As the only forms of emergence on offer in these discussions were strong and weak emergence, very little progress was made. Herein a new type of emergence is offered to move forwards. Contextual emergence (CE) holds that the world is structured as follows: properties and...
The Hard Problem of consciousness asks why physical processes give rise to subjective experience rather than proceeding without phenomenal character. In simpler terms, it asks why it feels like something to perceive, hurt, or want. The question rests on the assumption that the same functional processes could occur in the absence of experience. This paper rejects that assumption. The account is...
Contemporary philosophy of mind is beginning to rehabilitate Arthur Schopenhauer as a proto-phenomenologist whose metaphysics of the will—once divested of its ontological commitments—provides thick descriptions of embodied agency, self-structure, and intersubjective resonance. This article validates this thesis through a four-stage naturalized reconstruction: (1) Schopenhauer’s "world-knot" and...
Perspective is standardly treated as either a phenomenological concept — something it is like to have — or as a representational concept — a viewpoint from which the world is modeled. This paper argues for a third position: perspective is a structural-operational concept. A system has perspective not by virtue of representing the world but by virtue of organizing its processing recursively...
In this paper, I explore the young Foucault's engagement with phenomenology in his master's thesis, The Constitution of a Historical Transcendental in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. I begin by outlining the context of this early work (Section 1), followed by a brief summary of the thesis and its overall argumentative structure (Section 2). In Section 3, I analyze Foucault's critique of Kant,...
Abstract This empirical study questioned the experience of intuition among private company owner-executives from a phenomenologically informed perspective. The study included three participants from Brazilian organizations operating in the service provision (technology and education) and agribusiness (rice farming) sectors, who shared their experiences through written reports and interviews....
Abstract This paper presents “ Neither/Nor ,” a philosophical synthesis which defines conceptual and experiential modes of knowing as complementary skills which can be deliberately trained and oscillated. The paper argues that neither theory (concepts) nor practice (experience) alone can suffice for desirable outcomes in personal flourishing or scientific inquiry. Drawing from Western and...