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...
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 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...
The article shows that young Foucault's interest in phenomenology should not be understood as a more or less orthodox adherence to a singular philosophical program. Emphasis is given to the variety of contexts, meanings, and uses (or appropriations) of German phenomenology in France at the time when Foucault was interested in it at the beginning of his intellectual career. In particular, the...
This essay argues for a mixed‐resource approach to scientific modeling and applies it to questions in philosophy of mind. A mixed‐resource approach makes use of whatever resources—at whatever scale, from whatever academic discipline—seem useful, freely combining such varied resources in individual models. The success of mixed‐resource modeling challenges the widely shared commitment to a...
The academic study of Western esotericism has developed a sophisticated set of research approaches over the past three decades: historical-philological, discursive, sociological, anthropological, depth-psychological, and cognitive-scientific. Each approach illuminates important dimensions of esoteric traditions. What remains underdeveloped is a seventh approach: the...
This article offers a critical and interdisciplinary review of Saumya Liyanage’s Lamp in a Windless Place: Phenomenology and Performance (2025), situating the work within global performance studies, phenomenology, and anthropological discourse. The book proposes a body–mind paradigm grounded in continental philosophy and Asian somatic traditions, particularly Sri Lankan martial arts and...
This essay addresses a tension at the heart of the phenomenological method, namely the idea that phenomenology is both a method and an experience – it is both something we do and something we undergo. This dual understanding of the method generates questions as to how to best understand it. The above epigraphs are testament to the fact that the phenomenological reduction is not only something...