Background: Despite the rapid growth of psychedelic research, limited attention has been given to how psychedelics are used, experienced and integrated within highly conservative religious communities, and in Jewish contexts more broadly. This study addresses this gap by examining ayahuasca use among the ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) community, a highly religious, conservative, and collectivist...
Autistic patterns of language use, including echolalia, gestalt language processing, and formulaic repetition, have been theorized largely within behavioral and developmental frameworks. Such accounts have documented the functional range of these phenomena in valuable detail, yet their experiential structure has received little attention. This paper develops a phenomenological account of...
In this article I will try to show how phenomenological philosophy may come to terms with the predominant epistemological paradigm of our time in ways that analytic philosophy cannot do, especially by focusing on certain disciplines of natural science, primarily foundational mathematics (permitting this classification) and quantum physics. I note that logic, mathematics and physics may be...
The “Hard Problem of Consciousness” may not be a problem of consciousness at all. This work argues that the famous explanatory gap identified by David Chalmers is better understood as a limitation in the way neuroscience and contemporary consciousness theories attempt to explain first-person phenomenal experience through third-person physical and neural descriptions. The Consciousness Theory of...
Contemporary artificial intelligence systems present themselves through the aesthetic of openness: a clean interface, a blinking cursor, an implicit invitation to bring whatever one wishes. This essay argues that this appearance conceals a structural inversion. Drawing on phenomenological philosophy, particularly the work of Simone Weil, Jean-Luc Marion, Jacques Derrida, Henri Bergson, and...
The hard problem of consciousness is to explain why certain physical states are conscious: why do they feel the way they do, rather than some other way or no way at all? Arthur Reber (2016) claims to solve the hard problem. But he does not: even if we grant that amoebae are conscious, we can ask why such organisms feel the way they do, and Reber’s theory provides no answer. Still, Reber’s...
The present study offers a critical revision of the phenomenological approach to intersubjectivity and simultaneously justifies an alternative theoretical optics centered around the concept of the transindividual. The author shows that Husserl's apprehension of the alter ego, which implicitly reproduces Leibniz's monadological logic, encounters fundamental aporetic difficulties. The "Other" in...
From an epistemological standpoint, attributing sentience to non-human animals poses significant challenges. The apparatus that records the electrical activity of the brain can only demonstrate that a certain specific neurological state is taking place. It is impossible to empirically prove that an organism has subjective, qualitative consciousness. Whether an animal has this kind of...
Contemporary discourse treats distraction almost exclusively as a deficit: a failure of attention, a moral lapse, a symptom of technological overreach. This article argues that such a framing forecloses a more interesting phenomenological question, namely what kind of presence distraction itself constitutes. Drawing on Husserl's account of intentionality, Heidegger's analysis of falling and...