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Item Open Access Thought insertion and commitment(Oxford University Press, 2023) Fernandez, J.; López-Silva, P.; McClelland, T.Making thought insertion its central topic, this compilation gathers a series of essays that, taken as a whole, offer a broad and thoughtful approach to the clinical, phenomenological, conceptual, and experimental aspects of the systematic ...Item Metadata only The influence of classical Stoicism on Walt Whitman’s thought and work(Taylor and Francis, 2024) Chitrarasu, M.; Hill, L.Although scholars have long recognized that classical Stoicism affected Walt Whitman’s work, a full account of the extent of this debt has yet to be produced. Although he drew inspiration from many sources, we argue that Whitman’s “spinal ideas”—the ontological, moral, metaphysical and political threads of order in his thinking—are most consistently Stoic in origin. We do so by examining Whitman’s poetry, prose, correspondence, manuscripts, notebooks, and autobiography in the context of the primary and secondary Stoic material with which he was familiar. We demonstrate that a number of ideas at the heart of Whitman’s literary vision—his pantheism, materialism, cosmopolitanism, reconciliation of evil and death, and conceptions of both providence and virtue—were strongly indebted to Stoic thought. As background to this argument, we first explore the transmission of Stoicism to America and its reception among American readers. We also show how and why Whitman came under the influence of Stoic teachings.Item Open Access The Contents of Imagination(Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2023) Fernandez, J.Our imaginings seem to be similar to our perceiving and remembering episodes in that they all represent something. They all seem to have content. But what exactly is the structure and the source of the content of our imaginings? In this paper, I put forward an account of imaginative content. The main tenet of this account is that, when a subject tries to imagine a state of affairs by having some experience, their imagining has a counterfactual content. What the subject imagines is that perceiving the state of affairs would be, for them, like having that experience. I discuss three alternative views of imaginative content, and argue that none of them can account for two types of error in imagination. The proposed view, I suggest, can account for both types of error while, at the same time, preserving some intuitions which seem to motivate the alternative views.Item Open Access Naturalistic Entheogenics: Précis of Philosophy of Psychedelics(Universitatsbibliothek der Ruhr-Universitat Bochum, 2022) Letheby, C.In this précis I summarise the main ideas of my book Philosophy of Psychedelics . The book discusses philosophical issues arising from the therapeutic use of classic psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin and LSD. The book is organised around what I call the Comforting Delusion Objection to psychedelic therapy: the concern that this novel and promising treatment relies essentially on the induction of non-naturalistic metaphysical beliefs, rendering it epistemically (and perhaps, therefore, ethically) objectionable. In the book I develop a new response to this Objection which involves showing that a popular conception of psychedelics as agents of insight and spirituality is both consistent with a naturalistic worldview and plausible in light of current scientific knowledge. Exotic metaphysical ideas do sometimes come up, but they are not, on closer inspection, the central driver of change in psychedelic therapy. Psychedelics cause therapeutic benefits by altering the sense of self, and changing how people relate to their own minds and lives--not by changing their beliefs about the ultimate nature of reality. Thus, an "Entheogenic Conception" of psychedelics as agents of insight and spirituality can be reconciled with naturalism (the philosophical position that the natural world is all there is). Controlled psychedelic use can lead to genuine forms of knowledge gain and spiritual growth--even if no Cosmic Consciousness or divine Reality exists.Item Metadata only The ownership of memories(Oxford University Press, 2023) Fernandez, J.; Garcia-Carpintero, M.; Guillot, M.Is there such a thing as experiencing a memory as one’s own? I argue that the phenomenon of disowned memory gives us a reason to believe that memories carry a sense of mineness. I challenge the view that the sense of mineness for a memory is the feeling of being identical with the witness of the remembered scene, and I put forward an alternative proposal. According to it, the sense of mineness for a memory is the experience of the memory as matching the past. I argue that the alternative proposal makes better sense of the available reports of disowned memory. I conclude by offering some considerations on how the proposed account could accommodate other cases of disowned conscious states.Item Metadata only Schiller and His Philosophical Context: Pleasure, Form, and Freedom(Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) McMahon, J.; Falduto, A.; Mehigan, T.Schiller’s interests in theology, poetry, and literature influenced the way he responded to the ethics and aesthetics of the British philosopher the Third Earl of Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley-Cooper), and the German philosophers Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant. Often Schiller’s most significant philosophical contributions are those which represent alternatives to more influential views, such as his rejection of Kant’s understanding of the relation between the sensuous and rationality in the moral person. In what follows, Schiller’s key concepts within their 18th century context are presented and their significance within this context is discussed by showing how he relates the sensuous to the rational through the following: “pleasure and morality” (section 3), “form and beauty” (section 4) and “freedom or nature” (section 5).Item Open Access A vessel without a pilot: Bodily and affective experience in the Cotard delusion of inexistence(Wiley, 2023) Gerrans, P.The initial cause of Cotard delusion is pervasive dyshomeostasis (dysregulation of basic bodily function). This explanation draws on interoceptive active inference account of self-representation. In this framework, the self is an hierarchical predictive model made by the brain to facilitate homeostatic regulation. The account I provide is an alternative to two factor accounts of the Cotard delusion that treat depersonalisation experience as the first factor in genesis of the Cotard delusion. I argue that depersonalisation experience and the Cotard delusion are produced by different breakdowns in the process of self-modelling.Item Metadata only Item Metadata only Persistence and Spacetime(University of Notre Dame, Department of Philosophy, 2011) Eagle, A.Item Metadata only Psychedelics, atheism, and naturalism: myth and reality(Imprint Academic, 2022) Letheby, C.An emerging body of research suggests that psychedelic experiences can change users’ religious or metaphysical beliefs. Here I explore issues concerning psychedelic-induced belief change via a critique of some recent arguments by Wayne Glausser. Two scientific studies seem to show that psychedelic experiences can convert atheists to belief in God, but Glausser holds that academic and popular discussions of these studies are misleading. I offer a different analysis of the relevant findings, attempting to preserve the insights of Glausser’s critique while setting the record straight on some important points. For one thing, the studies provide stronger evidence for atheist ‘deconversion’ than Glausser allows. For another, Glausser’s arguments against the ‘Metaphysical Belief Theory’ of psychedelic therapy involve scientifically dubious claims and inferences. Finally, in evaluating this theory, we ought to focus on its strongest version, which posits belief shifts from metaphysical naturalism to nonnaturalism, rather than from atheism to classical monotheism.Item Open Access Imagining oneself being someone else(Wiley, 2023) Fernández, J.Sometimes, one can imagine, in virtue of having some experience, that one is someone else having some property.This is puzzling if imagination is a guide to possibility, since it seems impossible for one to be someone else. In this paper, I offer a way of dissolving the puzzle. When one claims that, by having some experience, one imagines that one is someone else having some property, what one imagines, I suggest, is that if the other person had the property in question, then having it would be, for them, like having the relevant experience is for one. I discuss two alternative views about the content of these episodes of imagination,and argue that both of them are too weak and too strong.The proposed view avoids the two difficulties while preserving some intuitions about the phenomenology and the epistemology of imagination which are captured by the alternative views.Item Open Access Towards a Unified Theory of Beauty(University of Sydney, 1999) McMahon, J.A.; Benitez, E.; Runcie, C.The Pythagorean tradition dominates the understanding of beauty up until the end of the eighteenth century. According to this tradition, the experience of beauty is stimulated by certain relations perceived to obtain between an object/construct's elements. As a result, the object of the experience of beauty is indeterminate: it has neither a determinate perceptual analogue (one cannot simply identify beauty as one can a straight line or a particular shape) nor a determinate concept (there are no necessary and sufficient conditions for beauty at the semantic level). By the thirteenth century in the West, the pleasure experienced in beauty is characterised as disinterested. Yet, on the basis that all cultural manifestations of the Pythagorean theory of beauty recognise that judgments of beauty are genuine judgments, we would want to say that judgments of beauty are 'lawful'. In addition, from ancient times, up until after Kant, philosophers of beauty within this tradition recognise two kinds of beauty: a universal, unchanging beauty coexisting with a relative, dynamic beauty. These two kinds of beauty and the tensions discussed above, are reconciled and dissolved respectively, according to the metaphysical/religious commitments of the particular author. As yet, however, these features of beauty have not been reconciled within a physicalist worldview. This is what I set out to do. The aim of this paper, then, is to outline a way of thinking about beauty which resolves these apparent contradictions. An explanatory hypothesis for beauty is developed, which draws upon recent developments in cognitive science. A theory of perception needs to satisfy certain conditions in order to explain the features of beauty in such a way that they are complementary rather than dichotomous. This paper begins by uncovering the nature of these conditions, and considering whether contemporary theories of perception satisfy them. Finally, an outline of a new way of thinking about beauty emerges, whose relevance for understanding contemporary art is then examined. But first, a brief history of beauty is in order.Item Metadata only Naturalizando la epistemología psicodélica(National Autonomous University of Mexico, Ciudad Universitaria, 2022) Letheby, C.El objetivo de este ensayo consiste en mostrar que tipo de conocimiento de puede adquirir en las experiencias psicodélicas, pero tomando como marco de referencia una posición naturalista. En este texto se analizan tres formas en las que esto es posible: 1) la introspección psicodinámica o el saber qué, 2) el saber cómo, que se vincula con el aprendizaje de alguna habilidad concreta y 3) el conocimiento por familiaridad. No son todas las que son posibles, pero si son suficientes para mostrar algunos de los temas que ha de abordar la epistemología psicodélica. = The objective of this essay is to show what kind of knowledge can be acquired in psychedelic experiences, but taking a naturalistic position as a frame of reference. In this text, three ways in which this is possible are analyzed: 1) psychodynamic introspection or knowing what, 2) knowing how, which is linked to the learning of some specific skill and 3) knowledge by familiarity. They are not all that are possible, but they are enough to show some of the issues that psychedelic epistemology has to address.Item Open Access Relativity and the a-theory(Routledge, 2021) Eagle, A.; Knox, E.; Wilson, A.The special theory of relativity (STR) is widely supposed to be in tension with theories of time which gives a special significance to the present moment. This chapter considers A-theoretic responses which accept STR, so far as it goes, but take it to be incomplete with respect to tensed facts. STR is a theory of the geometrical structure of space and time together: Minkowski spacetime. The theory postulates an underlying manifold of spacetime points. A model of STR yields a tenseless mosaic or manifold of all that happens and the spatiotemporal relations between these happenings. The A-theoretic picture of a wave of simultaneous happenings that sweeps through time, grounding tense in the four-dimensional manifold, is not straightforwardly compatible with STR, a tension dramatized by attempts to locate or impose a relation of absolute simultaneity on Minkowski spacetime. Conciliatory approaches trace the problems for the A-theory to the fact that each point of spacetime is part of many moments of timeItem Metadata only Liberal Naturalism, Aesthetic Reflection, and the Sublime(Routledge, 2022) McMahon, J.; De Caro, M.; Macarthur, D.According to the scientific image, aesthetic experience is constituted by private reverie or mindless gratification of some kind. This image fails to fully acknowledge the theoretical and hence cultural aspect of perception, which includes aesthetic experience. This chapter reframes aesthetic reflective judgment in terms of perceptual processes (section 2); intentional pleasure (section 3); non-perceptually represented perceptual properties (section 4); and intersubjectivity (section 5). By clarifying the relevant terms, the liberal naturalist account of the sublime provides the link between the sublime and moral motivation (section 6).Item Metadata only Philosophy of Psychedelics(Oxford University Press, 2021) Letheby, C.This book is the first scholarly monograph in English devoted to the philosophical analysis of psychedelic drugs.Item Metadata only Psychedelics and meditation: a neurophilosophical perspective(Routledge, 2022) Letheby, C.; Repetti, R.Psychedelic ingestion and meditative practice are both ancient methods for altering consciousness that became widely known in Western society in the second half of the 20th century. Do these methods share deeper commonalities? Taking a neurophilosophical approach, this chapter answers in the affirmative. Recent empirical studies indicate that psychedelics and meditation modulate overlapping brain networks involved in the sense of self, salience, and attention, and that psychedelics can occasion lasting increases in mindfulness-related capacities for taking a non-reactive stance on inner experience. The self-binding theory of psychedelic ego-dissolution offers a plausible explanation of these findings: By disrupting self-related beliefs implemented in high-level cortical networks, both psychedelics and meditation can “unbind” mental contents from one’s self-model, moving these contents along the continuum from phenomenal transparency to opacity - in other words, both can expose and weaken our foundational beliefs about our identity, allowing us to disidentify with these beliefs and see them as “just thoughts”. There are connections between these ideas and recent arguments suggesting that psychedelic use may have epistemic benefits consistent with philosophical naturalism. This chapter concludes with a proposal: These connections may help in thinking about the putative epistemic benefits of meditation practice from a naturalistic perspective.Item Open Access Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs(Nature Publishing Group, 2021) Timmermann, C.; Kettner, H.; Letheby, C.; Roseman, L.; Rosas, F.E.; Carhart-Harris, R.L.Can the use of psychedelic drugs induce lasting changes in metaphysical beliefs? While it is popularly believed that they can, this question has never been formally tested. Here we exploited a large sample derived from prospective online surveying to determine whether and how beliefs concerning the nature of reality, consciousness, and free-will, change after psychedelic use. Results revealed signifcant shifts away from ‘physicalist’ or ‘materialist’ views, and towards panpsychism and fatalism, post use. With the exception of fatalism, these changes endured for at least 6 months, and were positively correlated with the extent of past psychedelic-use and improved mental-health outcomes. Path modelling suggested that the belief-shifts were moderated by impressionability at baseline and mediated by perceived emotional synchrony with others during the psychedelic experience. The observed belief-shifts post-psychedelic-use were consolidated by data from an independent controlled clinical trial. Together, these fndings imply that psychedelic-use may causally infuence metaphysical beliefs—shifting them away from ‘hard materialism’. We discuss whether these apparent efects are contextually independent.Item Metadata only Psychedelic experience and the narrative self an exploratory qualitative study(Imprint Academic, 2020) Amada, N.; Lea, T.; Letheby, C.; Shane, J.It has been hypothesized that psychedelic experiences elicit lasting psychological benefits by altering narrative selfhood, which has yet to be explicitly studied. The present study investigates retrospective reports (n = 418) of changes to narrative self that participants believe resulted from, or were catalysed by, their psychedelic experience(s). Responses to open-ended questions were analysed using inductive and deductive thematic coding and interpreted within agent-centred approaches to development and well-being. Themes include decentred introspection, greater access to self-knowledge, positive shifts in self-evaluation processes, greater psychological and behavioural autonomy, and enhanced connectedness with others and the world. While this explorative qualitative study offers some initial support for the explanation that changes to narrative self are a cornerstone of psychedelics' therapeutic and transformative potential, methodological and recruiting limitations preclude the ability to make objective claims and generalizations. Future scientific research is necessary to further elucidate this hypothesized mechanism.Item Metadata only “Aesthetic Ideas”: mystery and meaning in the early work of Barrie Kosky(Springer, 2021) McMahon, J.; Severn, J.R.; Phillips, J.In this chapter I invite the reader to consider the philosophical assumptions which underpin the early career aims and objectives of Barrie Kosky. A focus will be his “language” of opera, and the processes by which the audience is prompted to interpret it. The result will be to see how Kosky creates mystery and meaning while avoiding fantasy and escapism; and can express psychological truth while stimulating subjective interpretations. The point will be to show that Kosky’s oeuvre demonstrates a central concept in the Kantian tradition of aesthetic theory regarding the key process in creative expression, and that is the evocation/communication of “aesthetic ideas”.