scholarly journals Naturalistic Entheogenics: Précis of Philosophy of Psychedelics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Letheby
Keyword(s):  
Spiritual Growth ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Knowledge Gain ◽  
Therapeutic Benefits ◽  
Psychedelic Drugs ◽  
Promising Treatment ◽  
Main Ideas ◽  
Ultimate Nature ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge

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.

scholarly journals Philosophy of Psychedelics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Letheby
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Scientific Evidence ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Knowledge Gain ◽  
Psychological Benefits ◽  
Psychedelic Drugs ◽  
Anxiety Depression ◽  
Apparent Conflict

Philosophy of Psychedelics is the first scholarly monograph in English devoted to the philosophical analysis of psychedelic drugs. Its central focus is the apparent conflict between the growing use of psychedelics in psychiatry and the philosophical worldview of naturalism, which holds that the natural world is all that exists. The book reviews scientific evidence that psychedelics such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and psilocybin can be given safely in controlled conditions, and can cause lasting psychological benefits with one or two administrations. Supervised psychedelic sessions can reduce symptoms of anxiety, depression, and addiction, and improve well-being in healthy volunteers for months or even years. But these benefits seem to be mediated by ‘mystical’ experiences of cosmic consciousness, which prompts a philosophical concern: Do psychedelics cause psychological benefits by inducing false or implausible beliefs about the metaphysical nature of reality? The author integrates empirical evidence and philosophical considerations in the service of a simple conclusion: This ‘Comforting Delusion Objection’ to psychedelic therapy fails. Exotic metaphysical ideas do sometimes come up, but they are not the central driver of change in psychedelic therapy. Psychedelics cause lasting psychological benefits by altering the sense of self and changing how people relate to their minds—not by changing their beliefs about the ultimate nature of reality. The upshot is that a traditional conception of psychedelics as agents of insight and spirituality can be reconciled with naturalism. Controlled psychedelic administration can lead to genuine knowledge gain and spiritual growth, even if no cosmic consciousness or divine Reality exists.

scholarly journals Psychedelic Epistemology: William James and the “Noetic Quality” of Mystical Experience

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 1058
Author(s):  
Ron Cole-Turner
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
William James ◽  
Mystical Experience ◽  
Therapeutic Benefits ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Psychedelic Drugs ◽  
Subjective States

William James proposed in 1902 that states of mystical experience, central to his idea of religious experience, can be identified based on their ineffability and their noetic quality. The epistemological category of the noetic quality, modified by W. T. Stace in 1960, plays a central but somewhat confounding role in today’s biomedical research involving psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin and LSD. Using scales based on James, it can be shown that psychedelics “reliably occasion” intense subjective states of experience or mystical states. It is debated whether these states are necessary for the wide range of possible mental health therapeutic benefits that appear to follow. This paper reviews what James said about the noetic quality and its relationship to religious experience, epistemology, and states of mystical experience. It explores how the noetic quality is measured in today’s research, addressing a growing list of concerns that psychedelic science can be epistemologically biased, that it is hostile to atheistic or physicalist views, that it injects religion unduly into science, or that it needs to find ways to eliminate the mystical element, if not the entire intense subjective experience altogether.

Nāgārjuna (c. AD 150–200)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Siderits
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
South India ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Ultimate Truth ◽  
Profound Influence ◽  
Inherent Nature ◽  
Further Development ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Ultimate Nature ◽  
Insight Into

Nāgārjuna was the first Buddhist philosopher to articulate and seek to defend the claim that all things are empty, that is, devoid of their own essential nature. A native of South India, as the founder of the Madhyamaka school of Mahāyāna Buddhism he exerted a profound influence on the further development of Buddhist thought in South and East Asia. When he claimed that all things are empty, he denied that anything exists solely in virtue of its own inherent nature. If, as all Buddhists hold, existents only arise in dependence on other existents, then nothing may be said to have a determinate nature apart from its relations to other things. Yet prior developments in Buddhist philosophy had presumably shown that anything lacking an independent nature is a conceptual fiction and not ultimately real. Thus if all things are empty, nothing is ultimately real. Still Nāgārjuna claimed not to be a nihilist. Emptiness is rather the defeat of all metaphysical theories, all attempts at grasping the ultimate nature of reality – including nihilism. Insight into emptiness is said to free us from our tendency conceptually to construct an ultimate truth, a tendency that bolsters our sense of self. Thus realization of emptiness is, Nāgārjuna held, required in order to attain full liberation from the suffering caused by clinging.

Cultural Botany: Toward a Model of Transdisciplinary, Embodied, and Poetic Research into Plants

2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
John C. Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Economic Botany ◽  
Environmental Studies ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Cultural Ecology ◽  
Transdisciplinary Research ◽  
Research Approach ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge

Since the eighteenth century, the study of plants has reflected an increasingly mechanized and technological view of the natural world that divides the humanities and the natual sciences. In broad terms, this article proposes a context for research into flora through an interrogation of existing literature addressing a rapprochement between ways to knowledge. The natureculture dichotomy, and more specifically the plant-to-human sensory disjunction, follows a parallel course of resolution to the schism between objective (technical, scientific, reductionistic, visual) and subjective (emotive, artistic, relational, multi-sensory) forms of knowledge. The foundations of taxonomic botany, as well as the allied fields of environmental studies, ethnobotany and economic botany, are undergirded by universalizing, sensorylimited visual structuring of the natural world. As the study of everyday embodied interactions of humans with flora, expanding upon the lens of cultural ecology, "cultural botany" provides a transdisciplinary research approach. Alternate embodied cultural engagements with flora emerge through a syncretic fusion of diverse methodologies.

8. Affectual Insight

2020 ◽  
pp. 101-108
Author(s):  
David L. Haberman
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Religion And Ecology ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge

Focusing on religion and ecology in Hinduism, this chapter elucidates the value of love and devotion as ways of connecting to the natural world. In contrast to the detachment that characterizes abstractly intellectual forms of knowledge, these ways of connecting to nature yield emotional or affective knowledge, which promotes care for the beauty and vulnerability of the natural world.

A Problem for Theology: The Concept of Nature

1972 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon D. Kaufman
Keyword(s):  
Natural Theology ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Human Learning ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Ecological Balance

The growing general awareness that the order of nature within which man lives is a delicate ecological balance — a balance which cannot be indiscriminately exploited by men much longer without destroying the continuing possibility of human life — has not been without repercussions among theologians. There is an increasing attentiveness to nature as a theological problem and an interest in developing theologies of ecology and conservation. In addition there appears to be a growing belief that the theological focus on “history” in recent years has been extravagant or even entirely misplaced: it has turned attention in theology away from the natural world, which is “our real home”; it has led to a theological ignoring of the natural sciences and has thus helped to isolate theology from some of the most important and influential streams of human learning in modern culture; and it has contributed to and mightily re-enforced man's sense of self-importance and insularity, for history is preeminently the human story, and the “God of history” seems principally involved in transactions with men (although of course he is said to be the creator and father of all). What we need, we are told, is a “theology of nature” that will enable us to understand the orders of life and being within which we live and of which we are part, and even a “natural theology” that will illuminate for us, and teach us properly to worship, the God implicit in nature.

Jean Delville's La Mission de l'Art: Hegelian Echoes in fin-de-siècle Idealism

2007 ◽  
Vol 11 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 330-372
Author(s):  
Brendan Cole
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Arthur Schopenhauer ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Prolific Author ◽  
Physical Form ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Main Ideas ◽  
The Ideal

AbstractJean Delville was not only a gifted painter, but also a prolific author, poet and polemicist. He is unique amongst his artistic contemporaries for having written extensively on the subject of Idealism in art. Idealist philosophy, as an intellectual influence, was fairly pervasive amongst contemporary non-realist authors, poets and painters; the core nineteenth-century influence in this regard was the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer. Delville, however, took a different path, particularly in his seminal book, La Mission de l'Art, and his various polemical essays on the subject, which reflect, rather, key ideas derived from the writings of the German Idealist, G.W.F. Hegel. Hegel's influence on late-nineteenth century non-realist art is understated in the literature. This paper analyses the main ideas of Delville's La Mission de l'Art in the context of Hegelian Idealism. It focuses on key areas of this tradition, specifically with regard to the nature of the Idea and the Ideal, the relation of the Ideal to the natural world, the relation between the Idea and the notion of Beauty and the special role of the artist in revealing the Idea in physical form.

scholarly journals ‘Placing’ Pedagogy and Curriculum Within an Ecological Worldview

2009 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jodi MacQuarrie ◽  
Gillian Diane Smith
Keyword(s):  
World View ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Human World ◽  
Pedagogy And Curriculum ◽  
Ecological Worldview ◽  
Ways Of Being

Surveying the last two centuries, one might easily deduce the purpose of education has been to induct, or rather indoctrinate, students into a culture’s dominant ontology and epistemology. In modern Western culture’s prevailing education systems, this usually means atomistic, dualistic, and competitive ways of being and disembodied, decontextualized and dispassionate ways of knowing that focus on passively acquiring abstracted and fragmented knowledge. Given our current predicament of human alienation and ecological crisis, we suggest a new worldview is needed to reconceptualize human ways of living and being in, indeed valuing, our place within the ecosphere. In contrast to the modernist, mechanistic world view, which deems the natural world detached, valueless, and available for human exploitation, an ecological worldview advocates a human sense of self as interconnected and unified with the natural world. Moved by the work of philosophers, eco-theorists and eco-educators, this paper explores the role of the more-than-human world in pedagogical and curricular processes and practices that align more closely with an ecological worldview. Our proposed praxis of ecological education was introduced and put into action with a group of educators at the Education With/Out Borders (EWOB) symposium at Sasamat, British Columbia, in October, 2008. An overview of the exercise and highlights from the group’s concluding discussion of the experience are also presented.

scholarly journals Disconnected: Non-Users of Information Communication Technologies

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 553-571 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariann Hardey ◽  
Rowland Atkinson
Keyword(s):  
Information Exchange ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Information Communication Technologies ◽  
Information Communication ◽  
Opting Out ◽  
Therapeutic Benefits ◽  
Social Anxieties ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Ways Of Being

Growing concern about the impact of constant, mediated connection has often focused on the ways in which technologies contribute to a ubiquitous sense of presence and interaction, and the kind of invasion that this may represent to a sense of self and privacy. Discussion about information communication technologies is increasingly converging around the need for a deepened understanding of their effect on pace of life, methods of work, consumption, and wellbeing. Counter-narratives to overwhelming hyper-connectivity have emerged as a result of these changes. Using qualitative interview data from respondents recruited from across the globe, we focus on the strategies and worldviews of those who explicitly reject the use of any information communication technologies. Our participants relate how, to varying degrees, they have elected to avoid forms of immediate connection and what they identify as the deep advantages and therapeutic benefits of such ways of being. The article responds to rising social anxieties about being locked into information communication technology ecologies and the difficulty of opting out of corporate information-exchange systems. These concerns, we argue, are generating increasing interest in how to manage information communication technologies more effectively or to switch off altogether.

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