To date, George Henry Lewes’ contributions to the intellectual culture of Victorian Britain have been overshadowed by the literary success of his partner, Marian Evans (better known by her pen name, George Eliot). In this chapter I draw attention to both the sophistication and continued relevance of Lewes’ writings on the mind-body problem, and particularly his five volume Problems of Life and...
Fundamental aspects of trauma--among them dissociation during trauma, which is considered one of the strongest predictors of posttraumatic stress disorder-are not fully understood. This article argues that the application of the phenomenological structure of time and the phenomenological description of the self (minimal self, sense of ownership, sense of agency, sense of self) to dissociation...
Psychoanalysis proffers a wealth of phenomenological tools to advance the study of consciousness. Techniques for elucidating the structures of subjective life are sorely lacking in the cognitive sciences; as such, experiential reporting techniques must rise to meet both complex theories of brain function and increasingly sophisticated neuroimaging technologies. Analysis may offer valuable...
The science of consciousness is a nascent and thriving field of research that is founded on identifying the minimally sufficient neural correlates of consciousness. However, I have argued that it is the neural constitution of consciousness that science seeks to understand and that there are no evident strategies for distinguishing the correlates and constitution of (phenomenal) consciousness....
Are dreams subjective experiences during sleep? Is it like something to dream, or is it only like something to remember dreams after awakening? Specifically, can dream reports be trusted to reveal what it is like to dream, and should they count as evidence for saying that dreams are conscious experiences at all? The goal of this article is to investigate the relationship between dreaming, dream...
In this article, we aim to contribute to the understanding of how people with mental illness experience hearing voices and sounds that others do not hear in daily life. We conducted in-depth interviews with 14 people and analyzed the interviews using a hermeneutic phenomenological approach. The themes we arrived at included the following: hearing someone else or myself, am I losing my mind?,...
Ambiente & SociedadeSeptember 4, 2013Isabel Cristina Moura Carvalho, Carlos Alberto Steil
O presente artigo discute as práticas de aperfeiçoamento de si e do cuidado com o ambiente, voltadas para a saúde e o bem estar físico, mental e espiritual. O foco desta discussão está dirigida para os pontos de interseção entre práticas ecológicas e religiosas, que dão origem a processos de sacralização da natureza e de "naturalização" do sagrado. O campo de interesse empírico são as práticas...
John Searle repeatedly claims to have offered a solution to the mind-brain problem, especially as regards the mystery of consciousness. The aim of this paper is to present and analyse Searle’s theory of biological naturalism, from its earliest expression in the 1980s to his most recent works. Our analysis shows that Searle’s biological naturalism suffers from many theoretical difficulties and...
Poor insight into illness is considered the primary cause of treatment noncompliance in schizophrenia. In this article, we critically discuss the predominant conceptual accounts of poor insight, which consider it as an ineffective self-reflection, caused either by psychological defenses or impaired metacognition. We argue that these accounts are at odds with the phenomenology of schizophrenia,...
It is argued that the problem of interpreting quantum mechanics, and the philosophical problem of consciousness, both have their roots in the same set of misguided Cartesian assumptions. The confusions underlying those assumptions are analyzed in detail. It is sometimes suggested that quantum mechanics might explain consciousness. That is not the suggestion here. Rather it is suggested that an...