Qualitative research methodologies focus on meaning and although use similar methods have differing epistemological and ontological underpinnings, with each approach offering a different lens to explore, interpret or explain phenomena in real-world contexts and settings. In this article, we provide a brief overview of phenomenology and outline the main phenomenological approaches relevant for...
The hard problem of consciousness is the question how subjective experience arises from brain matter. I suggest exploring the possibility that quantum physics could be part of the answer. The simultaneous unity and complexity of subjective experience is difficult to understand from a classical physics perspective. In contrast, quantum entanglement is naturally both complex and unified. Moreover...
Religious experience and the experiential dimension of religious practice have come to constitute a fruitful area of enquiry for anthropology. This entry discusses the phenomenological school of philosophy as a source for the anthropology of religion. Concepts from this school that have been taken up within the anthropology of religion, such as bracketing, intentionality, embodiment, and...
ABSTRACT This article analyzes the moral-psychological stakes of Jay Garfield's reading of Buddhist ethics as moral phenomenology and applies that thesis to the pedagogical mechanisms of the Tibetan Buddhist lojong (“Mind Training”) tradition. I argue that moral phenomenology requires that the practitioner work on a part of her subjectivity not ordinarily accessible to agential action: the...
How do we explain the seemingly rich nature of visual phenomenology while accounting for impoverished perception in the periphery? This apparent mismatch has led some to posit that rich phenomenological content overflows cognitive access, whereas others hold that phenomenology is in fact sparse and constrained by cognitive access. Here, we review the Rich vs. Sparse debate as it relates to a...
Karl Jaspers published the first edition of 'General Psychopathology' in 1913. Now, coinciding with its 100th anniversary whose importance was consecrated through multiple congresses, we see a parallelism and a return to the dilemma of the 'Methodenstreit', which led Karl Jaspers to introduce the phenomenological method for psychopathology to understand the subjective manifestations of the...
Transpersonal psychology has at times critiqued the broader psychology field for perpetrating a somewhat arbitrary Cartesian subject-object divide. Some phenomenologists claim that reframing this purported divide as an experienced phenomenon can defuse its philosophical impact. If subjective experiences are viewed as continuous with the lifeworld out of which objective phenomena are abstracted,...
Dream–reality confusion (DRC) is a difficulty or an impossibility to determine whether an event or an experience took place during wakefulness or if it was the content of a dream. The main goal of the present study was to explore characteristics of participants from the general population who often/very often experience DRC in comparison with those who never/almost never experience it....
Researchers suggest links between mind-wandering and impaired processing of external task stimuli: mind-wandering results in perceptual decoupling. The primary methodology employed to investigate the effects of mind-wandering requires people to report their conscious state and then predicts prior behavior or neurophysiological responses using the person's self-report. Unfortunately, this method...
Using an analysis of a voluntary action caused by a visual perception, I suggest that the three fundamental characteristics of this perception (being conscious, self-conscious, and provided with a content) are neurologically implemented by three distinct higher order properties of brain dynamics. This hypothesis allows me to sketch out a physicalist naturalist solution to the mind-body problem....