Unlike Heidegger who reflects on the relationship between being and time, we are interested in studying the relationship between doing and time. We begin by discovering that the basis of people's doing is the starting point for any reflection on society and culture, and therefore we believe that our conclusions can be important especially for sociologists, ethnologists, political scientists, economists and psychologists. A fundamental difference between "doing" and "acting" could be that only people, not things, "do". We say "Antonio made (...) his house out of bricks to prevent the wind from blowing it down". We never refer to the "action of the wind" as a "doing". Acting, especially in "action," is erroneously associated with causation; we think, "the action of the wind on the house, is the cause of the collapse of the house." But in reality, causation is only a variant of doing. For example, in "Susanna writes a letter to Paul", Susanna is the cause of the text of the letter, but not of the reading of the letter. This is a paradigmatic example, the one that gave rise to our study. We say that the text "attracts its reader", as the poles of a magnet attract each other. From which we concluded that it is impossible to keep secrets. The importance of the study of doing in general becomes very relevant when we understand that "producing" and "consuming" are variants of doing. In Marx's work, the doing that generates social value is productive doing. But our research shows that all variants of doing generate order and all "order" generates organizational value. Note that the order of an act can be measured in "bits", which frees us from subjective measurements of the value of what we do in "money". We anticipate here that, in the following pages, we arrive at the conclusion that doing can be divided into 6 types of acts and their subgroups: the vectorial independent and hodern acts and the pendular complementary, parallel, curative and causa-dor acts. In addition, we discovered the existence of inter-acts, i.e. the "organizational resonance of the poles of a pendular act" and which includes the self-referent, bipolar, tripolar and multipole variants. This book could not have been written, without the background of the works already published and elaborated jointly, with Professor Luis de Marcos Ortega between 2018 and 2021. We refer to The Informational Foundation of the Human Act and Whispers and Shouts. The Informational Measurement of the Human Act both published by the University of Alcalá (Madrid). The texts of this book were published in weekly installments between May 2020 and December 2021, in the GaZeta portal of Guatemala. We have respected the chronological order of publication, as well as the contents of the articles. (shrink)

Fitness apps on mobile devices are gaining popularity, as more people are engaging in self-tracking activities to record their status of fitness and exercise routines. These technologies also evolved from simply recording steps and offering exercise suggestions to an integrated lifestyle guide for physical wellbeing, thus exemplify a new era of "quantified self" in the context of health as individual responsibility. There is a considerable amount of literature in science, technology and society (STS) studies looking at this phenomenon from different (...) perspectives, linking it with the sociology of self-surveillance and neoliberal regimes of health. However, the human-technology interface, through which the micro- (behavioral) and macro- (social) aspects converge, still calls for extensive examination. This paper approaches this topic from the postphenomenological perspective, in combination with empirical studies of design analysis and interviews of fitness apps, to reveal the human-technology link between the design elements and people's perception through the direct experiences and interpretations of technology. It argues that the intentionality of self-tracking fitness app designs mediates the human-technology relations by "guiding" people into a quantified knowledge regime. It shapes the perceptions of fitness and health with representations of meanings about a "good life" of individual success and management. This paper also gives a critique of current individual, performance-oriented fitness app designs and offers the possibility of seeking alternatives through the multistable nature of human-technology relations—how altering interpretation and meaning of the design with a cultural or social context could change the form of technological embodiment. (shrink)

As AI algorithms advance and produce surprising outputs, the question of imagination arises. Can we classify their output as imaginative? And what is their effect on human imagination? Apparently, algorithms follow Kant’s explanations on human imagination, thereby pushing us to update our understanding of imagination by taking into account the co-shaping between humans and their technologies. Such a new understating is offered in this article based on the theories of Don Ihde and Bernard Stiegler. With Ihde, imagination is conceived as (...) tightly linked to perception. Imagination evolves from the modernist task of seeking new points-of-view to a new mode in which technologies present imaginative layers of information on top of reality. With Stiegler, imagination is regarded as tightly linked to memory. He demonstrates how imagination complements memory, serves as a condition to memory/technology and at the same time how imagination itself is conditioned by memory/technology. In this article I develop a new synthesis: imagination as composed of perception and memory. This is the foundation of my layered model of digital imagination. In this model, the task of AI algorithms is the filling in of the layers with data. By producing endless possibilities, these technologies “automate” the Kantian “free play” of imagination, allowing us to examine more options and focus on the best of them. The model reserves the production of meaning to humans. Our role as humans is to generate meaning to the link between layers and establish new layers. (shrink)

Phenomenology is explored as a way of helping students and educators open up to music as a creative and transformative experience. I begin by introducing a simple exercise in experimental phenomenology involving multi-stable visual phenomena that can be explored without the use of complex terminology. Here, I discuss how the “phenomenological attitude” may foster a deeper appreciation of the structure of consciousness, as well as the central role the body plays in how we experience and form understandings of the worlds (...) we inhabit. I then explore how the phenomenological attitude may serve as a starting point for students and teachers as they begin to reflect on their involvement with music as co-investigators. Here I draw on my teaching practice as a percussion and drum kit instructor, with a special focus on multi-stable musical phenomena. To conclude, I briefly consider how the phenomenological approach might be developed beyond the practice room to examine music’s relationship to the experience of culture, imagination and “self.”. (shrink)

The phenomenological technique of imaginative variation was identified by Husserl as conducive to elucidating the manner in which phenomena appear to consciousness. In brief, by engaging in the phenomenological reduction and using imaginative variation, phenomenologists are able to describe the experience of consciousness, having stepped outside of the natural attitude through the epoché. Imaginative variation is a stage aimed at explicating the structures of experience more distinctively, and is best described as a mental experiment. Features of the experience are imaginatively (...) altered in order to view the phenomenon under investigation from varying perspectives. Husserl envisaged this process as ultimately definitive of the essential elements of an experience, as only those aspects that are invariant to the experience of the phenomenon will not be able to change through the variation.Often in qualitative research interviews, participants struggle to articulate or verbalise their experiences. The purpose of this paper is to present a radically novel way of using imaginative variation as an interview technique by engaging the participants in imaginative variation in order to elicit a richly detailed and insightful experiential account of a phenomenon. We will discuss how the first author successfully used imaginative variation in this way in her study of the erotic experience of bondage, discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism, before considering the usefulness of this technique when applied to areas of study beyond human sexuality. (shrink)

Existential psychotherapy places pivotal significance upon the inter-relational aspects of human experience. By so doing, the therapeutic relationship itself becomes the principal means through which the client’s presenting symptoms and disorders are disclosed as direct expressions and outcomes of the client’s overall “way of being” rather than as isolated and disruptive impediments. At the same time, existential therapy emphasises the actual relationship that emerges between psychotherapist and client and argues that it is via the contrast and comparison of this lived (...) experience with that of their ‘wider world’ experience that clients can find the means to reconsider and reconstruct their “ways of being”. This paper seeks to demonstrate that, as well as their shared aims and methods of enquiry, it is the mutual emphasis upon inter-relatedness as a foundational value for human enquiry that reveals substantive and intriguing points of connection between existential psychotherapy and phenomenological enquiry. The paper furthermore argues that existential psychotherapy might best be viewed as a clearly formulated expression of phenomenological enquiry. (shrink)

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge advances a theory of how designers can improve decision-making in various situations where people have to make choices. We claim that the moral acceptability of nudges hinges in part on whether they can provide an account of the competence required to offer nudges, an account that would serve to warrant our general trust in choice architects. What needs to be considered, on a methodological level, is whether they have clarified the competence required for choice (...) architects to prompt subtly our behaviour toward making choices that are in our best interest from our own perspectives. We argue that, among other features, an account of the competence required to offer nudges would have to clarify why it is reasonable to expect that choice architects can understand the constraints imposed by semantic variance. Semantic variance refers to the diverse perceptions of meaning, tied to differences in identity and context, that influence how users interpret nudges. We conclude by suggesting that choice architects can grasp semantic variance if Thaler and Sunstein’s approach to design is compatible with insights about meaning expressed in science and technology studies and the philosophy of technology. (shrink)

Harry Collins interprets Hubert Dreyfus’s philosophy of embodiment as a criticism of all possible forms of artificial intelligence. I argue that this characterization is inaccurate and predicated upon a misunderstanding of the relevance of phenomenology for empirical scientific research.

Like previous educational technologies, artificial intelligence in education threatens to disrupt the status quo, with proponents highlighting the potential for efficiency and democratization, and skeptics warning of industrialization and alienation. However, unlike frequently discussed applications of AI in autonomous vehicles, military and cybersecurity concerns, and healthcare, AI’s impacts on education policy and practice have not yet captured the public’s attention. This paper, therefore, evaluates the status of AIEd, with special attention to intelligent tutoring systems and anthropomorphized artificial educational agents. I (...) discuss AIEd’s purported capacities, including the abilities to simulate teachers, provide robust student differentiation, and even foster socio-emotional engagement. Next, to situate developmental pathways for AIEd going forward, I contrast sociotechnical possibilities and risks through two idealized futures. Finally, I consider a recent proposal to use peer review as a gatekeeping strategy to prevent harmful research. This proposal serves as a jumping off point for recommendations to AIEd stakeholders towards improving their engagement with socially responsible research and implementation of AI in educational systems. (shrink)

An emerging philosophical perspective called “postphenomenology,” which offers reflection upon human relations to technology, has the potential to increase our understanding of the functions performed by imaging technologies in scientific practice. In what follows, I review some relevant insights and expand them for use in the concrete analysis of practices of image interpretation in science. As a guiding example, I explore how these insights bear upon a contemporary debate in space science over images of the fossilized remains of a river (...) delta on the surface of Mars. These considerations include an analysis of the ways that the objects of study are transformed by the mediating imaging technologies, such as the Mars Orbiter Camera. (shrink)

The philosophical tradition of phenomenology, with its focus on human bodily perception, can be used to explore the ways scientific instrumentation shapes a user’s experience. Building on Don Ihde’s account of technological embodiment, I develop a framework of concepts for articulating the experience of image interpretation in science. These concepts can be of practical value to the analysis of scientific debates over image interpretation for the ways they draw out the relationships between the image-making processes and the rival scientific explanations (...) of image content. As a guiding example, I explore a contemporary debate over images of the surface of Mars which reveal a landmass that resembles river delta formations on Earth, and which thus has important implications for the history of Martian climate and water flow. The phenomenological framework I develop can be used to help evaluate the different interpretations on offer for these images, and to analyze the roles in this discussion played by spacecraft equipped with cameras and laser and thermal imaging devices. (shrink)

Phenomenology has been with us for many years, and yet grasping phenomenology remains a difficult task. Heidegger, too, experienced this difficulty and devoted much of his teaching to the challenge of working phenomenologically. This article draws on aspects of Heidegger’s commentary in progressing the teaching and learning of phenomenology, especially as this pertains to research in fields such as education. Central to this task is elucidation of what I believe to be the most important feature of phenomenology—what Heidegger referred to (...) as the ‘starting point’ of phenomenology. I have written this article in the manner of a phenomenological workshop with the intention of inviting the reader to engage experientially with this starting point. (shrink)

This commentary to Vanhoutte and Wynants’s paper “Performing phenomenology: negotiating presence in intermedial theatre” tries to ascertain whether the dialectics between the real and the virtual in CREW’s artistic and technological experiments, which the authors call a ‘strategy,’ implies an a-priori relation that is hard to reconcile to the ethos of discovering through doing proposed by postphenomenological research, and to an ‘empirical turn’ based in case studies and descriptive concreteness suggested by a ‘pragmatic phenomenology.’ I propose that the shift from (...) live to mediated perception in CREW’s experimental productions, producing a multistable ontology, is less occasion for strategic dialectics and Benjaminian ‘illumination’ of our mediatized culture, than for an analytic perspective on what actually happens when the shift occurs and what this tells us about our relationship to digital technologies of reproduction. (shrink)

It is argued that the increasing interest in the use of phenomenological methods in sport psychology could help rescue research in this area from its current obsession with measurement and prediction. Phenomenology proceeds from a very different set of philosophical assumptions from the natural science approach that underlies most research and practice in sport psychology. Phenomenology insists that psychology should focus on meaning and investigate the essence of human experience. The concept of anxiety occupies a central position within phenomenological perspectives (...) in psychology. This paper examines the experience of anxiety in sport by drawing on applied sport psychology work undertaken with professional footballers in the English Premier League (EPL). The phenomenology of anxiety is considered by distinguishing between May's psychological account and Heidegger's philosophical perspective. Anxiety is viewed positively by both philosophical and psychological phenomenology due to its links to the idea of authenticity. This is discussed in depth in the paper and consideration will be given to how this connects to important sources of meaning and identity in sport, such as spirituality and religious belief. (shrink)

In recent years, increasingly advanced artificial intelligence (AI), and in particular machine learning, has shown great promise as a tool in various healthcare contexts. Yet as machine learning in medicine has become more useful and more widely adopted, concerns have arisen about the “black-box” nature of some of these AI models, or the inability to understand—and explain—the inner workings of the technology. Some critics argue that AI algorithms must be explainable to be responsibly used in the clinical encounter, while supporters (...) of AI dismiss the importance of explainability and instead highlight the many benefits the application of this technology could have for medicine. However, this dichotomy fails to consider the particular ways in which machine learning technologies mediate relations in the clinical encounter, and in doing so, makes explainability more of a problem than it actually is. We argue that postphenomenology is a highly useful theoretical lens through which to examine black-box AI, because it helps us better understand the particular mediating effects this type of technology brings to clinical encounters and moves beyond the explainability stalemate. Using a postphenomenological approach, we argue that explainability is more of a concern for physicians than it is for patients, and that a lack of explainability does not introduce a novel concern to the physician–patient encounter. Explainability is just one feature of technological mediation and need not be the central concern on which the use of black-box AI hinges. (shrink)

During history humans have developed a large variety of contemplative practices, in many different areas of life, and as part of many different traditions and contexts. Although some contemplative practices are very old, the research field of Contemplation Studies is young, and there are no agreed-upon definitions of central concepts such as contemplative practices and contemplative experiences. The present paper focuses on contemplative practices, defined as practices that are engaged in for the sake of the contemplative experiences they afford. The (...) purpose of the present paper is to discuss the potential of experimental phenomenology to contribute to the development of the research field of Contemplation Studies. Experimental phenomenology is defined as the investigation of phenomenological practices and their effects on experience. Phenomenological practices involve intentional variations of experiencing by means of changes in the direction of attention and the choice of attitude, typically as guided by verbal instructions or self-instructions. It is suggested that contemplative practices represent a subcategory of phenomenological practices. Two different varieties of experimental phenomenology are described and illustrated in the present paper: an informal variety which involves the development of new phenomenological practices by creative variation of procedures and observation of effects; and a more rigorously scientific variety, which involves the systematic variation of phenomenological practices in accordance with experimental designs to study their experiential effects. It is suggested that the development of contemplative practices during the ages is the result of an informal experimenting of the first kind; this variety of experimental phenomenology can also be used to develop personalized health interventions in a clinical setting. As to the more rigorously scientific experimental phenomenology, it is possible that it may lead not only to an improved understanding of general principles underlying contemplative practices, but also to a more systematic development of new contemplative practices. The experimental-phenomenological approach to contemplative practices is illustrated by various examples involving mindfulness, gratitude, receiving and giving. (shrink)

The effort to “appreciate” phenomenology and feminism in the study of quiltmaking discourse self-reflexively joins a philosophy of experience with a politics of women's experiences. At the same time it reveals method to be an embodied practice which involves knowledge as power, and it discovers power relations between researchers and the researched within particular contexts and relationships. For phenomenology, these reflections may encourage closer attention to the en-gendering and situating of the subject within social and cultural conditions. Also they may (...) challenge us to ask: who benefits from phenomenological understanding? For feminism, this effort may encourage greater self-critique in regard to the phenomena of women's experiences. Simultaneously, these reflections may temper an uncritical embracing of phenomenological methods. Perhaps these reflections can best be seen as a working out of a pattern that joins phenomenology, feminism, and their compatible and contradictory relations like the three layers of a quilt. In this embodied and ongoing labor of piecing and quilting I have attempted to expose the seams and the gaps rather than smooth over their differences. Research, like quiltmaking, functions as both a noun and a verb, a product and a practice, engaged bodily and mindfully as a project in the world. (shrink)

Argumentation is a form of communication, rather than an application of(formal) logic, and is used in communicative activity as a means forinquiry, although it is more typically thought of as bringing inquiry toclosure. Thus interpretation is an intrinsic and crucial aspect ofconversational (interactive) argumentation. In order to further thisunderstanding of argumentative activity, I propose a procedure forinterpretation that draws upon hermeneutic phenomenology. In response tocriticisms by argumentation theorists (and others) who understand thistradition as oriented to psychological, perceptual, or textual objects, (...) Iargue that hermeneutic phenomenology supports methods for analysis ofpublic communicative activity. The resulting conception of ’thick argumentation‘ responds to contemporary (postmodern) claims that argumentation valorizes univocity, stasis, and certainty at the expense ofthe pluralism, fluctuation, and range of epistemic results thatcharacterize discourse in the public sphere. (shrink)

This introduction to the special issue of Human Studies on postphenomenology outlines specific developments which have led to this style of phenomenology. Postphenomenology adapts aspects of pragmatism, including its anti-Cartesian program against early modern subject/object epistemology. Postphenomenology retains and emphasizes the use of phenomenological variations as an analytic tool, and in practice postphenomenology takes what is commonly now called “an empirical turn,” which deeply analyzes case studies or concrete issues under its purview.

Could a person ever transcend what it is like to be in the world as a human being? Could we ever know what it is like to be other creatures? Questions about the overcoming of a human perspective are not uncommon in the history of philosophy. In the last century, those very interrogatives were notably raised by American philosopher Thomas Nagel in the context of philosophy of mind. In his 1974 essay What is it Like to Be a Bat?, Nagel (...) offered reflections on human subjectivity and its constraints. Nagel’s insights were elaborated before the social diffusion of computers and could not anticipate the cultural impact of technological artefacts capable of materializing interactive simulated worlds as well as disclosing virtual alternatives to the “self.” In this sense, this article proposes an understanding of computers as epistemological and ontological instruments. The embracing of a phenomenological standpoint entails that philosophical issues are engaged and understood from a fundamentally practical perspective. In terms of philosophical praxis, or “applied philosophy,” I explored the relationship between human phenomenologies and digital mediation through the design and the development of experimental video games. For instance, I have conceptualized the first-person action-adventure video game Haerfest (Technically Finished 2009) as a digital re-formulation of the questions posed in Nagel’s famous essay. Experiencing a bat’s perceptual equipment in Haerfest practically corroborates Nagel’s conclusions: there is no way for humans to map, reproduce, or even experience the consciousness of an actual bat. Although unverifiable in its correspondence to that of bats, Haerfest still grants access to experiences and perceptions that, albeit still inescapably within the boundaries of human kinds of phenomenologies, were inaccessible to humans prior to the advent of computers. Phenomenological alterations and virtual experiences disclosed by interactive digital media cannot take place without a shift in human kinds of ontologies, a shift which this study recognizes as the fundamental ground for the development of a new humanism (I deem it necessary to specify that I am not utilizing the term “humanism” in its common connotation, that is to say the one that emerged from the encounter between the Roman civilization and the late Hellenistic culture. According to this conventional acceptation, humanism indicates the realization of the human essence through “scholarship and training in good conduct” (Heidegger 1998, p. 244). However, Heidegger observed that this understanding of humanism does not truly cater to the original essence of human beings, but rather “is determined with regard to an already established interpretation of nature, history, world, and […] beings as a whole.” (Heidegger 1998, p. 245) The German thinker found this way of embracing humanism reductive: a by-product of Western metaphysics. As Heidegger himself specified in his 1949 essay Letter on Humanism, his opposition to the traditional acceptation of the term humanism does not advocate for the “inhuman” or a return to the “barbaric” but stems instead from the belief that the humanism can only be properly understood and restored in culture as more original way of meditating and caring for humanity and understanding its relationship with Being.). Additionally, this study explicitly proposes and exemplifies the use of interactive digital technology as a medium for testing, developing and disseminating philosophical notions, problems and hypotheses in ways which are alternative to the traditional textual one. Presented as virtual experiences, philosophical concepts can be accessed without the filter of subjective imagination. In a persistent, interactive, simulated environment, I claim that the crafting and the mediation of thought takes a novel, projective (In Martin Heidegger’s 1927 Being and Time, the term “projectivity” indicates the way a Being opens to the world in terms of its possibilities of being (Heidegger 1962, pp. 184–185, BT 145). Inspired by Heidegger’s and Vilem Flusser’s work in the field of philosophy of technology as well as Helmuth Plessner’s anthropological position presented in his 1928 book Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie, this study understands the concept of projectivity as the innate openness of human beings to construct themselves and their world by means of technical artefacts. In this sense, this study proposes a fundamental understanding of technology as the materialization of mankind’s tendency to overcome its physical, perceptual and communicative limitations.) dimension which I propose to call “augmented ontology.”. (shrink)

This article asks, what is worth knowing? The concept of objectivity in contemporary philosophy of science is argued to de-value indigenous knowledge-systems and gendered approaches. Community bias is argued to confound rogue research with gendered and indigenous situatedness. This problem is resolved using the innovation of ‘ecosystem services.’ Technoscience is explained as the appropriation of science by capital interests and strong critique from Vandana Shiva in the global South is provided. Finally, because philosophers of science resist discussion of sociopolitical issues, (...) the “very notion of philosophy of science” is argued to be in crisis caused by limited understanding of ‘knowledge’ that has been reduced to post-Enlightenment science, and by neglect of the broader human context within which the sciences work. (shrink)

Currently, we find ourselves in a paradigm in which we believe that accepting climate change data will lead to a kind of automatic action toward the preservation of our environment. I have argued elsewhere (Fried 2020) that this lack of civic action on climate data is significant when placed in the historical, military context of the technologies that collect this data––Earth remote sensing technologies. However, I have not yet discussed the phenomenological or moral implications of this context, which are deeply (...) interconnected. In this paper, I assert that Earth remote sensing technologies can, if we are not careful, lead us to a kind of environmental deskilling. This assertion comes in four parts. First, the military context of Earth remote sensing technologies––which collect important data on climate change––acts as a kind of stability, as defined by Don Ihde and others. Second, I invoke Sir Patrick Heelan to argue that the theoretical underpinnings of Earth systems science do not translate from military to environmental praxes as we imagine they do. Third, Hannah Arendt makes the case that a state’s trust in simplifying narratives like that of climate data, meant to create “islands” of certainty in an uncertain world, can be self-defeating. That is to say, they can silence public action. I extend these arguments through Vallor’s analysis of moral deskilling, in which she points out that an overemphasis on autonomous data collection––and trust in a kind of automated decision-making on that data––can deskill us from important questions relevant to our collective flourishing. In all of these examples, the lines between environmental and military research are blurry. (shrink)

Selective permeability holds that people’s distinct capacities allow them to do different things in a space, making it unequally accessible. Though mainly applied to urban geography so far, we propose selective permeability as an affordance-based approach for understanding diversity in education. This has advantages. First, it avoids dismissing lower achievements as necessarily coming from “within” students, instead locating challenges in the environment. This implies that settings (not just people) need remedial attention, also raising questions about normative judgments in disability nomenclature. (...) Second, affordances can be negotiated in numerous ways to reach a goal, analogously to how people with missing arms have learned to drive with their feet, so restrictive problem-solving methods are often counterproductive. Third, our approach illuminates how cultural factors ranging from gait styles to language and hence group coordination modulate action possibilities, so that cultural groups may encounter objectively different affordances in the same classroom. But fourth, while fit with environment allows for skill refinement, non-fit can contribute to growth situations, which suggests a degree of selective closure can be desirable. Throughout, we argue social constructs—including educational ones—are literally built or enacted barriers or openings that have reality in environments in the same way that affordances do. (shrink)

This paper uses Schrag's framework to analyze an episode of pain and to discuss the phenomenological perspective of pain. The experience of pain is explicated through the metaphor of co-present, interwoven fields of consciousness, embodiment, attitudinal posture and custom, time, and space. Interventions based on the metaphor are discussed.

Phenomenology and experimental psychology have been largely interested in the same thing when it comes to attention. By building on the work of Aron Gurwitsch, especially his ideas of attention and restructuration, this paper attempts to articulate common ground in psychology and phenomenology of attention through discussion of a new way to think about multistability in some phenomena. What psychology views as an attentionality-intentionality phenomenon, phenomenology views as an intentionality-attentionality phenomenon. The proposal is that an awareness of this restructuring of (...) attentionality and intentionality can benefit both approaches to attention. After reviewing Husserl’s position on attentionality and intentionality, this paper examines multistable phenomena, redefines the attentional transformation called restructuring, discusses disciplinary perspectives on attention and gives an example using common ground. (shrink)

Pragmatism’s naturalism is inconsistent with the phenomenological tradition’s anti-naturalism. This poses a problem for the methodological consistency of phenomenological work in the pragmatist tradition. Solutions such as phenomenologizing naturalism or naturalizing phenomenology have been proposed, but they fail. As a consequence, pragmatists and other naturalists must answer the phenomenological tradition’s criticisms of naturalism.

This paper responds to the issues raised by D. Chalmers by offering a research direction which is quite radical because of the way in which methodological principles are linked to scientific studies of consciousness. Neuro-phenomenology is the name I use here to designate a quest to marry modern cognitive science and a disciplined approach to human experience, thereby placing myself in the lineage of the continental tradition of Phenomenology. My claim is that the so-called hard problem that animates these Special (...) Issues can only be addressed productively by gathering a research community armed with new pragmatic tools for the development of a science of consciousness. I will claim that no piecemeal empirical correlates, nor purely theoretical principles, will really help us at this stage. We need to turn to a systematic exploration of the only link between mind and consciousness that seems both obvious and natural: the structure of human experience itself. In what follows I motivate my choice by briefly examining the current debate about consciousness at the light of Chalmer’s hard problem. Next, I outline the phenomenological strategy. Finally I conclude by discussing some of the main difficulties and consequences of this strategy. (shrink)

During the last decades, two major and interrelated themes have dominated the study of religion: (a) the theme claiming that the long taken-for-granted so-called secularization thesis was all wrong, and (b) the theme of the so-called “return” or “resurgence of religion”. This global revival of religion — on micro, meso and macro levels — has been chronicled in a number of important books lately. As even a quick glance in some of the many textbooks about religious studies reveal that there (...) are many various ways of studying religion — theologically, sociologically, psychologically, anthropologically, philosophically, etc. — and they can be tackled from many different ideological or theoretical “slants” or perspectives – gender, postcolonial, orientalism, postmodernism, inside/outside, hermeneutical, etc. And it seems to be a general rule within science that the more important, complex and controversial a subject area is perceived to be, the more heated the debate about theory, method and definitions of concepts seems to be within it. Comparative religion can, very broadly, be carried out from two types of data: texts or actual living human beings. During the last thirty or so years, and in tandem with the initially mentioned two themes, the latter – what many scholars now call “lived religion” (Hall, 1997; Orsi, 2005; Ammerman, 2007; Mcguire, 2008) – have more and more come to the fore in departments of religious studies. This can be seen as a “rejuvenation” of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s opinions that the only way to study religion adequately was in and through the religious beliefs and practices of actually living human beings and that the heart of religion was to be found, not in rules and regulations, hierarchies and hymnbooks, but in the individual’s experience of dependence upon a power infinitely greater than his own. The student of religion must, in other words, concentrate, not on what people might do, ought to do, or what the textbooks say they are supposed to do, but on what they actually do, and the ways in which they actually behave, and why they do what they do — their motives, reasons or inducements for doing what they do. (shrink)

A Study of Perennial Philosophy and Psychedelic Experience, with a Proposal to Revise W. T. Stace’s Core Characteristics of Mystical Experience ©Ed D’Angelo 2018 -/- Abstract -/- According to the prevailing paradigm in psychedelic research today, when used within an appropriate set and setting, psychedelics can reliably produce an authentic mystical experience. According to the prevailing paradigm, an authentic mystical experience is one that possesses the common or universal characteristics of mystical experience as identified by the philosopher W. T. Stace (...) in his 1960 work Mysticism and Philosophy. Stace’s common characteristics of mystical experience are the basis for the Hood Mysticism Questionnaire, which is the most widely used quantitative measure of mystical experience in experimental studies of psychedelic experience. In this paper, I trace the historical roots of Stace’s common characteristics of mystical experience back to Christian Neoplatonism and apophatic theology, and I trace those, in turn, back to Plato’s concept of the Good and to Aristotle’s concept of God as active intellect. I argue that Stace’s common characteristics of mystical experience are not universal or culturally invariant but are the product of a specifically Christian religious and moral tradition that has its roots in ancient Greek metaphysics. My paper concludes with a revised list of common characteristics of psychedelic experience that is a better candidate for a list of invariant structures of psychedelic experience than Stace’s common characteristics of Christian mystical experience. (shrink)

The question asked in this paper is: How can we investigate our phenomenal experience in ways that are accurate, in principle repeatable, and produce experiences that help clarify what we understand about the processes of sensing, perceiving, moving, and being in the world? This sounds like an impossible task, given that introspection has so often in scientific circles been considered to be unreliable, and that first-person accounts are often coloured by mistaken ideas about what and how we are experiencing. The (...) first-person experiments I suggest are different from experiments done in the psychology laboratory in that there is no narrowing down of the experiments to looking at a singular aspect of a question, and that they are to be carried out in most instances in a natural or specially structured environment without strict task controls or statistical experimental design. There is no intent to replace formal second- and third-person investigation, but to use a phenomenological approach to conjoin with hard research, and to suggest ways of awareness training that can enhance the skills of researchers. I take as a model an informal phenomenological approach for experimentation. I also suggest that it is possible through directing and broadening the attention process to turn consciousness towards what is non-conscious or unattended to in order to develop an improved sensory awareness and an ability to be open to experiencing without prejudging and without expectations. The idea is to go back to experience without first creating a theoretical stance from which to interpret what happens. I conclude with some other examples of this approach. (shrink)