Modern neuroscience has come to accept the challenge of understanding consciousness (Crick and Koch, 2003; Dehaene and Changeux, 2011). A major finding has been the discovery that there are conscious and unconscious systems in the brain (top and bottom of Figure 1, Lisman and Sternberg, 2013) and the development of methods for manipulating whether a sensory input will be consciously or...
In Heidegger's last seminar, which was in Zähringen in 1973, he introduces what he called a "phenomenology of the inconspicuous" (Phänomenologie des Unscheinbaren). Despite scholars' occasional references to this "approach" over the last 40 years, this approach of Heidegger's has gone largely under investigated in secondary literature. This article introduces three different, although not...
In its study of the structure of the human imagination, the Bachlarian research is concerned with looking at “dream, poetic, or artistic images in general.” It is based on a detailed analysis of the activity of perception, the imagined power, and what comes out of them between what belongs to the past, which is produced by sensory memory and stirred by imagination, and is often represented in...
Poletti, Gebhardt, Krueger, and Raballo (2017) raise the important issue of a careful phenomenological approach in understanding the experience of psychosis in their helpful commentary on our recent article (Bell, Mills, Modinos, & Wilkinson, 2017). To summarize their main concern, they argue that the breadth of subjective and intersubjective experience in psychosis cannot be reduced to...
Chapter 5 displays narrative unity in the “Reason chapter” of Hegel’s Phenomenology by showing how consciousness as reason becomes, and takes successive forms as, purposive activity: first, as organism, then, as end-directed human action, and finally, as human action that is its own end. The successive forms of purposive activity in the chapter are generated as attempts to resolve the...
This chapter examines Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl's concept of God from a phenomenological point of view. Husserl is not content merely to recognize as the “principle of principles” the originary presence of the thing to consciousness; he also excludes the concept of a God who would escape the laws of intentionality. God is not only a limiting-concept for philosophy, but is also what is...
This chapter examines the philosophical reflections of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger regarding the phenomenology of the event. It proposes a kind of philosophy that should be able to take account of the very passage of time and its eventality, or structural “eventuality,” and shows that this “true” philosophy is phenomenology. What unites Husserl and Heidegger is the idea that...
This chapter examines the philosophical reflections of Jan Patočka and Martin Heidegger regarding phenomenology and the question of human phenomena. According to Patočka, Heidegger is the thinker who realized Wilhelm Dilthey's idea of “understanding the human on the basis of the human” by starting from what separates the human from all other beings, without recourse to anything foreign to...
There is converging evidence that high doses of hallucinogenic drugs can produce significant alterations of self-experience, described as the dissolution of the sense of self and the loss of boundaries between self and world. This article discusses the relevance of this phenomenon, known as "drug-induced ego dissolution (DIED)", for cognitive neuroscience, psychology and philosophy of mind....
The conclusion speculates about what it would mean to continue where Merleau-Ponty left off. If throughout his writings, he criticized all ideologies of transparency (the self’s transparency to itself, the transparency of knowledge to the self, or the transparency to the self of others), this also entails to accept that to return to the things themselves doesn’t mean that there could be an...