DESCRIPTION / ABSTRACT: Abstract: Vedanta 2.1 develops the central problem left open by Vedanta 2.0: what is meant by the Witness (draṣṭā/sākṣin), and can witnessing awareness be reduced to another mental representation? The inquiry begins neither from a metaphysical conclusion nor from a neuroscientific claim. It begins from an ordinary phenomenological possibility: thoughts, memories,...
This paper critically examines the view that Husserl's 1891 essay The Logic of Signs (LoS) anticipates the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM). According to this interpretation, Husserl's account of symbolic inference endorses an automatic, syntactic, causally driven model of thought. However, this study argues that such a reading neglects Husserl's broader philosophical context and his explicit...
Abstract This essay concerns two distinct topics in Husserlian phenomenology. The first is “image consciousness” [ Bildbewusstsein ], which concerns the experiential nature of our encounters with pictures and other depictive objects. The second is “historicity” [ Geschichtlichkeit ], which refers to how human subjects, prior to any detailed knowledge of history, are in some sense always already...
Abstract Hermann Schmitz offers one of the most extensive descriptions available of embodied space, characterizing it as pre-sensorial, indivisible, and surfaceless yet capable of disclosing absolute locations. Schmitz nevertheless anchors the felt body’s absolute location in temporal irruption rather than in the ability for lived space to ground itself in rest. This article argues that...
The brainstem theory of consciousness asserts that raw, subjective experience, the "me inside," derives from computations implemented in the brainstem, not the cortex. The argument rests on philosophy's prototypical example of sentience, pain. Feeling pain does not require cortical processing. Nowhere in the cortex does electrical stimulation reliably evoke pain. Subcortical stimulation does....
Beliefs surrounding black magic, spirit influence, and ritual harm have long been interwoven into India's cultural and spiritual fabric, significantly shaping personal behavior, social relationships, and health-seeking pathways. Despite their prevalence, discourse in this domain remains sharply divided between traditional acceptance and empirical dismissal, leaving the subjective, lived reality...
Cognitive Phenomenology’s central question asks is there something it is like to think, i.e. is there a phenomenological sense to the act of thinking. The inclusivist position holds there is something it is like to think while the exclusivists believe that there is not and so thinking should not be considered to have a phenomenology. A cognitive phenomenological sense, to be considered as such,...
The ultra-high-risk (UHR) and at-risk mental state (ARMS) constructs were originally developed to identify individuals at imminent risk of transition to psychosis. However, declining transition rates, limited predictive value, and the persistence of significant non-psychotic morbidity increasingly challenge the view of ARMS as a brief, transitional stage along a linear continuum from health to...
This chapter functions as a comparative review designed to orient readers—both within and outside philosophy—to the conceptual vocabulary necessary for the model developed in this book. It introduces and clarifies terms such as perception, identity, individuality, Emotion, Logic, Reason, and intentionality by situating them within the established discourse of the philosophy of mind. The chapter...
Felt presence (FP) involves sensing another social entity nearby without clear, corresponding evidence. Characteristics of FP depend on context. Previous work suggests FP is meaningful and welcomed in spiritual practice, but in psychotic-like states, FPs are intrusive, distressing, and intense. However, real-world contexts are rarely so discrete. A total of 337 participants completed an...
Recent discussions of QBism have turned increasingly toward the question of its ontology. I argue that key insights into QBism's ontology of agency can be identified by reconstructing its response to Wigner's friend paradox. I clarify the relation between two formulations of that response: one grounded in the claim that quantum states are agents'personal probability assignments, and another...
The question of consciousness remains one of the most challenging issues in contemporary philosophy. David Chalmers has transformed the issue through his formulation of the "Hard Problem of Consciousness," which distinguishes subjective experience from cognitive and behavioral functions. Chalmers's philosophy of consciousness, focusing on the explanatory gap between physical processes and...
Dreams, Myth, and the Phenomenology of EntanglementWe are pleased to introduce the second of the two consecutive issues of Eidos.A Journal for Philosophy of Culture entitled Phenomenology and Narrative (respectively Part 1 and Part 2).This issue continues the investigations into the intersections signaled in its title, being on the one hand slightly more closely focused on classical...
This article presents a theoretical and conceptual analysis of self-deconstruction in contemporary contemplative and clinical practices. It argues that psychological suffering is not primarily related to the existence of the self as such, but to its ontological and linguistic reification as a fixed identity, corresponding to idem-identity and to what Heidegger described as an ontology of...
Recent interdisciplinary scholarship has demonstrated how systemic racism, racialized mental health disparities, and histories of colonial and biomedical violence shape psychedelic experiences, therapeutic outcomes, and processes of integration. Emerging literature has foregrounded concerns including racial underrepresentation in research, the violent legacy of the War on Drugs, systemic racism...
Background: Despite the rapid growth of psychedelic research, limited attention has been given to how psychedelics are used, experienced and integrated within highly conservative religious communities, and in Jewish contexts more broadly. This study addresses this gap by examining ayahuasca use among the ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) community, a highly religious, conservative, and collectivist...
Autistic patterns of language use, including echolalia, gestalt language processing, and formulaic repetition, have been theorized largely within behavioral and developmental frameworks. Such accounts have documented the functional range of these phenomena in valuable detail, yet their experiential structure has received little attention. This paper develops a phenomenological account of...
This paper addresses the contemporary crisis of existential vacuum by examining how death anxiety may be reinterpreted through meaning-centered contemplation. Drawing on Ken Wilber’s Three Eyes of Knowing, the study brings Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy, transpersonal psychology, Buddhist Nianfo practice, and selected insights from cognitive neuroscience into philosophical dialogue. Nianfo is...
In this article I will try to show how phenomenological philosophy may come to terms with the predominant epistemological paradigm of our time in ways that analytic philosophy cannot do, especially by focusing on certain disciplines of natural science, primarily foundational mathematics (permitting this classification) and quantum physics. I note that logic, mathematics and physics may be...
The “Hard Problem of Consciousness” may not be a problem of consciousness at all. This work argues that the famous explanatory gap identified by David Chalmers is better understood as a limitation in the way neuroscience and contemporary consciousness theories attempt to explain first-person phenomenal experience through third-person physical and neural descriptions. The Consciousness Theory of...