The article develops a fundamental conception of atmospheres which is incorporated into a phenomenology of the felt body [Leib]. It builds on a critique of a splitting of the world into a private inner world as the location of experience and of emotions, and an external world that is separated off from that – a split already made in antiquity. Set against this notion is the conception of the...
Studying subjective experience is hard. We believe that pain is not identical to nociception, nor pleasure a computational reward signal, nor fear the activation of "threat circuitry". Unfortunately, introspective self-reports offer our best bet for accessing subjective experience, but many still believe that introspection is "unreliable" and "unverifiable". But which of introspection's faults...
The world we live in now is almost exclusively populated by things designed by minds to be understood by other minds. I argue here that: (1) Human environments now consist mainly of reified concepts, such as "chairs." (2) These externalized concepts look like simple cartoons of the concepts they reify, with flat, homogenous surfaces in geometric shapes, with one or a small number of colors,...
Representationalism is the theory that our conscious perception of the world is mediated by mental representations, rather than being a direct encounter with reality. In this article, we define representations in terms of a unified theory of long-term memory that incorporates both its explicit and implicit divisions. Apart from these integrative features, the theory offers the possibility for...
Exposure to rapid and bright stroboscopic light has long been reported to induce vivid visual hallucinations of colour and geometric formations. This phenomenon was first documented by Purkinje over 200 years ago. Since then, significant progress has been made in understanding the effects of stroboscopic light and the experiences it induces through multiple waves of interest from the...
Over several decades, Liangkang Ni has developed a distinctive perspective on the parallels and divergences between Edmund Husserl's phenomenology and Buddhism, particularly Yogācāra Buddhism. Despite the significance of his contributions, Ni's writings remain largely unavailable in English and have thus had limited exposure in Western phenomenological discourse. This article addresses that gap...
Iris Murdoch’s Wild Imagination returns to the land to focus more intently on Murdoch’s depictions of key moments of human interaction in landscape. With reference to The Good Apprentice, chapter 5 begins by charting Murdoch’s fascination, as a young philosopher, with the role of the body and sensory awareness as essential precursors to thought. It considers Murdoch’s early interest in the work...
The paper argues for an embodied and enactive view of linguistic concepts as a solution to the "scaling up" problem, namely the transition from embodied experience to symbolic and abstract thought. Drawing on phenomenology, neurobiology, conceptual metaphor theory and enactivism, it aims to demonstrate the constitutive role of the body and intersubjectivity in concept formation. Concrete...
Mixed-method studies require adaptation to the era of big data in quantitative research, seeking scalable approaches that can analyze extensive qualitative datasets while preserving the depth and nuance inherent in the study of consciousness on a broader scale. This study aimed to leverage ChatGPT, renowned for its descriptive generation proficiency, to perform a phenomenological analysis. Our...
This study examines the phenomenon of anomalous experiences. The term 'anomalous experience' refers to experiences often described as hallucinations and, more broadly, to the experiential dimensions of what is commonly referred to as psychosis. I present a critical analysis of the dominant clinical conceptualization of anomalous experience, which frames it as a 'pathology of the mind', by...