Abstract It is well-established that phenomenology is about both existent and imaginary entities. The latter category encompasses necessary beings, hypothetical objects, possible objects, and modal properties. Given the vast range of potential intentional objects for intentional states, the total number of such mental states would vastly exceed the number of possible physical states. This...
In the past decade, interest in studying psychedelic compounds as potential therapeutic agents has resurged. These studies carefully exclude individuals at risk for developing psychotic symptoms in response to psychedelic use. Given the potential for psychedelics to be established as treatments in psychiatry, it is important to more robustly understand their link with psychosis and...
The study reconstructs the categorical core of Jacques Waardenburg’s neo‑phenomenology of religion through an analysis of the relation between objective religious facts and subjective meanings. The article examines the concepts of religious fact, subjective meaning, intentionality, the supposed/posited object, faith, context, understanding, and the verification of interpretation, as well as...
This paper presents a systematic critical review of consciousness science from the formulation of the hard problem (Chalmers, 1995) to the present (2025). Using a methodology of primary source verification and explicit epistemic stratification — distinguishing established findings from debated results and speculative proposals — we map four theoretical frameworks (Integrated Information Theory,...
Abstract: This chapter argues that allegory, as a structure that supports appearances, has a fundamental connection to phenomenology, the study of appearances. By analysing a foundational philosophical text, Plato’s Republic, and the appearance of the ideal world in the ‘allegory of the cave’, the essay shows that allegory phenomenalizes the power of language to bring worlds into appearance in...
This article examines the hard problem of consciousness, as defined by David Chalmers in his 1995 paper, against five distinct, philosophically rigorous positions developed within the Indian philosophical tradition over approximately 2,500 years, while giving full, undiminished weight to the current empirical state of consciousness science. It reviews the 2025 Cogitate Consortium adversarial...
Abstract In this paper, I attempt to uncover motivations for the main premise that supports essential representationalism about perceptual experience (ER), namely the Immediacy thesis . ER claims that for every phenomenal property in the class Φ, there is some representational property R such that, necessarily, having Φ entails having R. The Immediacy thesis is that, roughly, the very...
Abstract This article argues that the contemporary debate surrounding the hard problem of consciousness confirms Lev Shestov’s structural critique of rationalist philosophy. First, it shows that the hard problem should not be understood as a merely recent technical difficulty within analytic philosophy, but as a new configuration of a much older conflict between rational explanation and lived...
David Chalmers’ 'hard problem' of consciousness—how subjective experience arises from physical processes—has dominated philosophy of mind for decades. This paper argues that the hard problem is not a problem at all, but a category error—a confusion between classical and second-order cybernetic questions. By treating consciousness as an object to be explained from a third-person perspective,...
Affective robots, agentic AI, and post-mortem avatars have given rise to a growing interest in defining an internal domain limited to consciousness, one that has, in some respects, obscured the effects these entities exert on the world. As systems begin to generate synthetic phenomenology, does the problem of consciousness give way to an ontological question about the attribution of being, or...
Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) during sleep involve a transient disruption of bodily self-consciousness, in which the self or center of awareness is experienced as displaced from the physical body. Although OBEs have been reported in neurological, psychiatric, and dissociative contexts, they also occur in non-clinical populations, raising the question of whether their altered-self phenomenology...
Abstract It is surprisingly difficult to provide an account of hallucination that captures all the cases that clinicians typically class as hallucinations, without at the same time admitting cases that would not typically be classed as such. Most attempts to specify exactly what a hallucination is supposed to be fails to meet at least one of these conditions, as we show in the first part of the...
Review of Decolonizing Existentialism and Phenomenology: The Liberation of Philosophies of Freedom and Identity, by Jina Fast. Reviewed by Ikeoluwapo B. Baruwa.
Abstract Both phenomenology and anthropology study lived experience, but they have traditionally done so in different ways. Phenomenology aims to identify universal structures of experience via the epoché, reduction and eidetic variation. Anthropology, by contrast, foregrounds cultural diversity as documented through ethnography. Ethnographic accounts provide thousands of cases of lived...
This article presents Biotransenergetics (BTE) as an integral transpersonal psychotherapy grounded in an embodied, participatory, and non-dual epistemology of consciousness. Developed by Pier Luigi Lattuada, BTE proposes a radical redefinition of the therapeutic process through the centrality of the Self, the concept of Transe, and the experiential realization of Essential Transe. The article...
This commentary examines Chan and Chen’s ( 2025 ) argument for the compatibility between phenomenology and naturalism, focusing on their response to the Argument from Sparse Bundles. It argues that the target article involves a shift in the meaning of experience, but that this shift can be understood as an interpretation of a specifically phenomenalist version of ASB. Drawing on Husserl’s own...
This study investigated the prevalence, phenomenology, and potential transformative significance of nonordinary experiences in a representative German sample. Across cultures and historical periods, such experiences have been widely reported and often culturally valued. To assess these phenomena, the study employed the Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences (INOE; Taves et al., 2023), a...
Abstract Despite our proclivity to make either tacit or overt passage of time judgments in daily life, insufficient work has been done to uncover the neurocognitive mechanisms underpinning such determinations. A prima facie promising account of passage of time judgments derives from the predictive processing framework. More precisely, Hohwy et al. (2016) propose that the reported speed of the...
Abstract The language of the “pathology paradigm” is not merely a vocabulary for describing autism—it participates in shaping the “affective atmospheres” that autistic people inhabit and move through. Drawing on some recent contributions to the phenomenology of affective atmospheres from Joel Krueger, Tonino Griffero, and Enara García, this paper develops the concept of “neuronormative...
This paper identifies a structural explanatory gap in cognitive-scientific and functionalist accounts of mind: the problem of first-personal individuation. Even a complete functional description of a conscious system leaves open the question of what makes a given perspective belong to one subject rather than another — a difficulty I term the individuation gap, which is distinct from, and not...