Philosophy Commons^™

Mikhail Bakhtin’S Heritage In Literature, Arts, And Psychology. Introduction, Slav N. Gratchev, Howard Mancing

Modern Languages Faculty Research

This volume celebrates hundred years of Bakhtin’s heritage: in September 13 of 1919 in the literary journal Den Iskusstva (The Day of the Art) was published the first work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, the work that became his literary manifesto.

This book aims to examine the heritage of Mikhail Bakhtin in a variety of disciplines. To achieve this end, we drew upon colleagues from eight different countries across the world--United States, Canada, Spain, Great Britain, France, Russia, Chile, and Japan--in order to bring the widest variety of points of view on the subject. But we also wanted …

Bridging The Gap Between Similarity And Causality: An Integrated Approach To Concepts, Corinne L. Bloch-Mullins

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

A growing consensus in the philosophy and psychology of concepts is that while theories such as the prototype, exemplar, and theory theories successfully account for some instances of concept formation and application, none of them successfully accounts for all such instances. I argue against this ‘new consensus’ and show that the problem is, in fact, more severe: the explanatory force of each of these theories is limited even with respect to the phenomena often cited to support it, as each fails to satisfy an important explanatory desideratum with respect to these phenomena. I argue that these explanatory shortcomings arise from …

Long-Term Spiritual Growth And Its Influence On Professional Endeavor, Larry Seidlitz

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

This paper presents a qualitative study of how long-term practitioners of Integral Yoga working in four fields of professional endeavour—business management, education, health care, and the arts—have applied Integral Yoga in their work and how they perceived its influences. The paper gives a brief overview of the nature of Integral Yoga, especially its aspect of karmayoga, and an explanation of the study’s method which involved semi-structured interviews with 12 residents or regular visitors to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram or Auroville. Ten common themes were identified which emerged in at least three of the interviews and in at least two fields …

A Neurotheological Approach To Spiritual Awakening, Andrew B. Newberg, Mark R. Waldman

Marcus Institute of Integrative Health Faculty Papers

A neurotheological approach suggests an analysis of spiritual awakening experiences by combining phenomenological data with neuroscience. This paper presents a synthesis combining information on the thoughts, feelings, and experiences associated with spiritual awakening experiences and neurophysiological data, primarily from neuroimaging studies, to help assess which brain structures might be associated with these experiences. Brain structures involved with emotions correlate with emotional responses while areas of the brain associated with the sense of self appear to correlate with the key feature of these experiences in which an individual loses the sense of self and feels intimately connected with God, universal consciousness, …

Re-Imagining Embodiment And The Self In People With Traumatic Spinal Cord Injuries: A Narrative Approach, Namitha Kumar, Sangeetha Menon

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

Traumatic spinal cord injuries from accidents cause physical and social suffering, pain and loss. After an initial period of physical and psychological trauma, the individual begins to cope and successfully crosses over. Crossing over as a term used in the spinal cord injury register refers to positive adaptation—physical, psychological and social. This paper is based on a qualitative narrative study of the lived experiences of individuals negotiating spinal cord injuries in the Indian context wherein the disability is no longer the location of inability, tragedy, pain, and loss, but one of creative possibilities. As individuals re-imagine embodiment and self, a …

The Self And The Structure Of The Personality: An Overview Of Sri Aurobindo’S Topography Of Consciousness, Matthijs Cornelissen

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga aimed not only at what he called the realization of the Divine, but also at an integral transformation of human nature under Divine influence. For this exceptionally wide aim, he developed an exceptionally deep and comprehensive frame for understanding human nature. His concepts, as discussed in this paper, must be understood on their own terms, which are often different from meanings attributed in the conventional language of Western psychology. This paper provides a detailed account of Sri Aurobindo’s conceptualization of the various centers of identity and of the vertical and concentric dimensions he used to describe …

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International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

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A Matter Of Heart And Soul: The Value Of Positing A Personal Ontological Center For Developmental Psychology, Elizabeth M. Teklinski

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

A whole person understanding of postconventional development needs to offer a facilitative agent, what is here called a psychocentric dimension, with a unique and necessary role in the transformation of individual consciousness, that complements and completes the egocentric and cosmocentric domains. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s writings and praxis concerning what they called the psychic being may elucidate an alternative frame to current theoretical speculations, in a way that may offer a new synthesis and a more theoretically satisfying interpretation. More specifically, it is hoped that an integral yoga psychology framework for postconventional development can meaningfully account for the transformation …

The Unconscious In Sri Aurobindo: A Study In Integral Psychology, Indra Sen

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

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Integral Psychology, Paul Herman

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

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After Awakening, The Laundry: Is Nonduality A Spiritual Experience?, Jenny Wade

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

Historically the exclusive purview of contemplative religious paths, awakening into nonduality was considered the pinnacle of human attainment, even if, in some traditions, it proved to be the threshold to even more sublime states. Awakening was traditionally available only to dedicated elite seekers, usually renunciates who practiced for years in monastic communities, their progress directed by the authorities of their lineage. Today technologies for creating the electroencephalographic signatures of advanced meditators are available for purchase, and esoteric religious practices like Zen meditation and asana yoga have been secularized as stress-reduction techniques and physical exercise, respectively. Increased numbers of teachers of …

Intimations Of A Spiritual New Age: Ii. Wilhelm Reich As Transpersonal Psychologist. Part 2: The Futural Promise Of Reich’S Naturalistic Bio-Energetic Spirituality, Harry T. Hunt

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

This is the second part of a consideration of the later Wilhelm Reich as anticipating a future planetary-wide “New Age” form of this-worldly spirituality in ways overlapping with figures from the same era of Western crisis from the 1930s through the 1950s, including Jung, Toynbee, Bergson, Heidegger, Teilhard de Chardin, and Simone Weil. Where the first part of this treatment of Reich as transpersonal psychologist traced his evolution from his bio-energetic psychotherapy to a Weberian this-worldly mysticism of a universal life energy, his cosmic orgone, with its attendant features of conflicted “spiritual emergency,” this second paper seeks to further develop …

Re-Veiling The Revealed: Insights Into The Psychology Of “Enlightenment” From The Kabbalah, B. Les Lancaster

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

I explore psychological aspects of a mystically-awakened state as depicted in the Kabbalah. This awakened state is portrayed using imagery of light and is associated with wisdom. The path towards the state entails intense hermeneutic work, and the core characteristic of the awakened person is the ability to see into that which is concealed—be it in scriptural texts, fellow humans, or the outer world. The primary distinction between this kabbalistic state and awakened states as portrayed in recent psychological and perennialist conceptions is the importance of cognitive and intellectual components in the former. I argue that cultural constructions of spiritual …

A Neurotheological Approach To Spiritual Awakening, Andrew B. Newberg, Mark R. Waldman

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

A neurotheological approach suggests an analysis of spiritual awakening experiences by combining phenomenological data with neuroscience. This paper presents a synthesis combining information on the thoughts, feelings, and experiences associated with spiritual awakening experiences and neurophysiological data, primarily from neuroimaging studies, to help assess which brain structures might be associated with these experiences. Brain structures involved with emotions correlate with emotional responses while areas of the brain associated with the sense of self appear to correlate with the key feature of these experiences in which an individual loses the sense of self and feels intimately connected with God, universal consciousness, …

Subjectivity Is No Object: Can Subject-Object Dualism Be Reconciled Through Phenomenology?, Brent Dean Robbins, Harris L. Friedman, Chad V. Johnson, Zeno Franco

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

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, the divide between these is revealed as a somewhat arbitrary, if useful, construction. This, in turn, challenges psychology to engage with subjective phenomena in a more substantive way. In this paper based on excerpts from a protracted email conversation held on the American Psychological Association’s Humanistic Psychology (Division …

Review: 'Improvising Improvisation: From Out Of Philosophy, Music, Dance, And Literature', Aili W. Bresnahan

Philosophy Faculty Publications

This book review attempts to interpret the meaning and value of Gary Peters’ book in a way that is true to the kind of book, an experimental improvisation, that it purports to be. As such, it grapples with the difficulties of evaluating the merits of a philosophical discussion within a book that claims not to be philosophy and case studies in performance that beg the question of whether they accurately exemplify the (non-)philosophy they are meant to support. Despite these difficulties, this review ends with the conclusion that this book does, in fact, convey something essential about the nature of …

Metaphysics Or Metaphors For The Anthropocene? Scientific Naturalism And The Agency Of Things, Patrick Gamez

Arts, Languages and Philosophy Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper, I provide the outlines of an alternative meta philosophical orientation for Continental philosophy, namely, a form of scientific naturalism that has proximate roots in the work of Bachelard and Althusser. I describe this orientation as an "alternative" insofar as it provides a framework for doing justice to some of the motivations behind the recent revival of metaphysics in Continental philosophy, in particular its ecological-ethical motivations. In the second section of the paper, I demonstrate how ecological-ethical issues motivate new metaphysicians like Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, Timothy Morton, Ian Bogost, and Graham Harman to impute to objects real …

Trust: A Recipe, Shane Ryan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

An essay on trust.

Laozi In Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy, Alan Kam Leung Chan

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Confucianism, Daoism (Taoism), and Buddhism generally name the three main currents of Chinese thought, although it should be obvious that like any “ism,” they are abstractions—what they name are not monolithic but multifaceted traditions with fuzzy boundaries. In the case of “Daoism,” it designates both a philosophical tradition and an organized religion, which in modern Chinese are identified separately as daojia and daojiao, respectively. With their own rich histories and internal differences, the two are deeply intertwined. Laozi (or Lao-tzu, in the “Wade-Giles” system of transliteration favored by earlier generations of Western scholars) figures centrally in both.

Essence, Explanation, And Modal Knowledge, Antonella Mallozzi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The primary aim of this project is to put forward a novel account of knowledge of metaphysical modality. I call this the “Essentialist Superexplanatory” account of modal knowledge, because it relies on the following two main theses: (a) knowledge of metaphysical necessity is grounded in knowledge of essence; and (b) essences are properties, sets of properties, or mechanisms, having distinctive explanatory powers for how things are. While thesis (a) is quite popular in the current debates, mostly thanks to Kit Fine’s recent work in modal metaphysics, thesis (b) introduces an original brand of essentialism. As I show by means of …

Morality As Social Software, Jongjin Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The dissertation research is a project to understand morality better through the concept of ‘Social Software.’ The dissertation is, consequently, to argue that the morality in a human society functions as a form of social software in the society. The three aspects of morality as social software are discussed in detail: the evolutionary, anti-entropic, and epistemic game-theoretic aspect.

We humans ‘usually’ think that, for example, (a) killing other humans without any necessary reason is morally wrong, and (b) helping other humans in need is morally right. We want to know, in this dissertation research project, why we think in such …

The Philosophical Foundations Of Plen: A Protocol-Theoretic Logic Of Epistemic Norms, Ralph E. Jenkins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I defend the protocol-theoretic account of epistemic norms. The protocol-theoretic account amounts to three theses: (i) There are norms of epistemic rationality that are procedural; epistemic rationality is at least partially defined by rules that restrict the possible ways in which epistemic actions and processes can be sequenced, combined, or chosen among under varying conditions. (ii) Epistemic rationality is ineliminably defined by procedural norms; procedural restrictions provide an irreducible unifying structure for even apparently non-procedural prescriptions and normative expressions, and they are practically indispensable in our cognitive lives. (iii) These procedural epistemic norms are best analyzed in …

Vectorial Realities: Foucault And The Politics Of The Literary Address, Jiyoung Ryu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation articulates the politics of contemporary literature via addressing the theoretical problem at the heart of Foucault studies. The Kantian problem of articulating the “origin” of knowledge was also at the core of Foucault’s oeuvre. The dissertation derives a concept, here-elsewhere, from its analysis of The Order of Things to argue that here-elsewhere addresses the problem at hand via articulating the difference and the sameness that spans the Kantian continuum of I-Other. It denotes the continuum as a relative spatio-temporality with a vector, which reflects Foucault’s interest in the modern physics. As a realist and critical concept, …

Infodynamics: A Naturalistic Psychosemantics, Daniel E. Weissglass

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When we think, we typically think ‘about’ something, a peculiar property of mental states often called ‘intentionality’. My dissertation is a collection of papers addressing key questions about the nature of intentionality. These questions demand answers because intentionality is poorly understood, yet fundamental to the way we talk and think about the mind in both folk and scientific contexts. The role of intentionality in the theory of mind is, in fact, so pronounced that it is regularly proposed as a candidate positive criterion of mentality, a so-called ‘mark of the mental’. While it is unclear whether intentionality does in fact …

Feeling As Knowing: Trans Phenomenology And Epistemic Justice, B. Lee Aultman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a critical intervention into the literatures on epistemic and phenomenological claims about trans experiences, and embodied knowledge more generally. It also addresses the conception of ordinary affects, or feelings of self-adjustment in everyday life, and their political implications for trans people. Traditional literatures on the political tend to avoid questions of embodiment and the experiences of everyday life in favor of institutional interpretations of courts, elections, and protest movements. This has become particularly true of scholarship on trans politics and theories of ordinary life. These literatures often reduce political movements to their presumed universal intentions for constitutional …

The Psychology Of Plato's Republic: Taking Book 10 Into Account, Daniel Mailick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Three puzzles motivate this dissertation. First, how much does Republic Book 10 contribute to the dialogue’s main argument? For centuries, commentators have found Book 10 to be a puzzling and disappointing conclusion to the dialogue. The second puzzle is the important and still much debated question of whether Plato considered the parts of the soul to be independent and agent-like (as ‘realists’ interpret the dialogue) or not (as ‘deflationists’ argue). The third puzzle regards an issue that is much less discussed in the literature, namely the Republic’s notion of character. On the one hand, Socrates never launches an explicit inquiry …

The Fragmented Mind: Working Memory Cannot Implement Consciousness, Javier Gomez-Lavin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In both philosophy and the sciences of the mind there is a shared commitment to the idea that there is a center—the seat of consciousness, the source of deliberation and reflection, and the core of personal identity—in the mind. My dissertation challenges this deeply entrenched view. I review the empirical literature on working memory, psychology’s best candidate for the workspace of the mind, and argue that it is not a natural kind and cannot inform these central cognitive processes. This deflationary view directly imperils many naturalistic theories of consciousness that rely on working memory, which are reviewed in this project. …

Theories Of Perception And Recent Empirical Work, Philip Zigman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I answer the following question: Does recent empirical work give us reason to think that naive realism is false or that indirect realism is correct? There is a small amount of literature arguing that recent empirical findings pose problems for naive realism and suggest that perception involves mental representation. I review this literature and the arguments therein, examine the relevant empirical work, and argue that recent empirical work on perception does give us reason to reject naive realism and to favour an indirect realist view that countenances mental representations.

Demystifying The Placebo Effect, Phoebe Friesen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation offers a philosophical analysis of the placebo effect. After offering an overview of recent evidence concerning the phenomenon, I consider several prominent accounts of the placebo effect that have been put forward and argue that none of them are able to adequately account for the diverse instantiations of the phenomenon. I then offer a novel account, which suggests that we ought to think of the placebo effect as encompassing three distinct responses: conditioned placebo responses, cognitive placebo responses, and network placebo responses. Next, I consider implications of the placebo effect’s role in complementary and alternative medicine for discussions …

Experimental Philosophy And Feminist Epistemology: Conflicts And Complements, Amanda Huminski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The recent turn toward experimental philosophy, particularly in ethics and epistemology, might appear to be supported by feminist epistemology, insofar as experimental philosophy signifies a break from the tradition of primarily white, middle-class men attempting to draw universal claims from within the limits of their own experience and research. However, the relationship between the two is not so straightforward, and an analysis of their connection bears on broader questions concerning intuitions, philosophical methodology, and epistemic standards more generally. This dissertation project aims to 1) examine the conception of intuitions that appears to underpin many projects in experimental philosophy, 2) levy …