Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
September 26, 2026
Douwe Fennema
preprint
Abstract During wakefulness, experience continually changes the functional organization of neural networks. Repetition, attention, emotional significance, and other forms of experience-dependent activation can affect the relative strength of synaptic relationships (Hebb, 1949; Bliss & Lømo, 1973; Dudek & Bear, 1992). During sleep, direct coupling to external sensory input and behavioral output...
Research Square
September 25, 2026
Lisa Guenther
preprint
Abstract Husserl’s phenomenology of the lifeworld affirms the importance of engaging critically with the historical past to revitalize and transform its meaning. But his account of the role that ‘normality’ plays in world-constitution raises questions about the usefulness of Husserl’s generative phenomenology for a social critique of normalizing power. Through a reading of key passages in the...
Journal of Humanistic Psychology
September 24, 2026
Brett D. Wilkinson, Andrew Brown
This article examines foundational tenets of logotherapy and proposes an embodiment-focused reinterpretation of Frankl’s dimensional ontology. We begin by contrasting negative orientations to suffering via the existential vacuum with positive orientations to transformation grounded in three expressions of the noetic: discovery of meaning, self-detachment, and self-transcendence. Next, we...
Natural Resources for Human Health
September 22, 2026
A. S. Jothi
Cormac McCarthy’s companion novels, The Passenger (2022) and Stella Maris (2022), represent a profound late-career turn from externalized physical violence to interiorized psychological, existential, and phenomenological trauma. Through a qualitative, interdisciplinary close reading informed by Sartre and Camus’s existentialism, Cathy Caruth and Dominick LaCapra’s trauma theory, and Maurice...
Hypatia
September 21, 2026
River J. Heisler
Abstract Embodiment is a particularly difficult dimension of experience to capture for transgender individuals, particularly individuals who identify as nonbinary. Accounts of embodiment in both philosophy and psychology often fail to capture the layers of perplexity which nonbinary individuals experience when attempting to understand the relationship between the lived body and social...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
September 21, 2026
Steven Tyler
preprint
Before asking why experience occurs for an experiencer, one must first ask what that experiencer is and why it has been exempted from the explanandum. The canonical hard-problem formulation places the experiencer in a primitive explanatory position; this paper subjects that placement to a biological and causal-temporal audit. Rather than treating the familiar narrator-level “I” as an antecedent...
Knowledge Commons (Lakehead University)
September 19, 2026
Mark Edward Chard
Western eschatology often depicts the afterlife as either static contemplation or undifferentiated union with the Divine, leaving the social mechanics of disembodied interaction undertheorized. Using an autoethnographic case study anchored in a lifelong twin bond, this paper investigates post-mortem sociality through a strictly Christocentric lens. Drawing on experiential data of communication...
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
September 17, 2026
Thomas Metzinger
Biological naturalism may collapse into eliminative materialism, and the ethics of synthetic phenomenology will remain.
September 13, 2026
Qi Zhang
Subjectivity and awareness are widely regarded as core properties of consciousness, and explaining their nature remains a major challenge in consciousness research. While many existing theories provide predominantly qualitative accounts, the development of quantitative modeling may bridge the explanatory gap. This study expands the Twin Cognitive Cycle (TCC) model by focusing on quantifying the...
Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science
September 12, 2026
Cristóbal Pacheco, Pablo Fossa
This theoretical-conceptual essay reconsiders epoché in qualitative phenomenological research and its relation to experiential emergence. Rather than a one-time technique of bracketing, epoché is conceptualized as a sustained discipline of epistemic suspension, attentional reorientation, and phenomenological restraint. On this basis, protoexistence is reformulated as a heuristic for incomplete...