All Is Burning: Buddhist Mindfulness as Radical Reflection

This paper consists of two parts. In the first part (Section 1, part of Section 2), I put forward a critique of what I refer to as the ‘received’ or ‘standard’ view of mindfulness in the Western cultural milieu. According to the received view, mindfulness is the acontextual ‘core’ of Buddhism whose determining characteristic is bare (present-oriented, non-judgmental) attention to the flow and content of experience. As noted by many researchers, this conception is in stark contrast to the traditional Buddhist understanding, where mindfulness is not only embedded in a broader context that provides it with a specific philosophico-existential orientation (normative aspect) but is also construed as a reflective activity (noetic aspect). In the second part (part of Sections 2–4), I argue that one of the main issues with the standard view is that it frames experience in terms of what Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls ‘objective thought’ (using objectivity, or ‘thinghood’, as an onto-epistemological standard of reality), which makes the two aspects of the traditional conception (normative and noetic) unintelligible. I then provide an alternative view based on the phenomenological work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty that attempts to integrate the two aspects into a broader conception of experience. By drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s notions of ‘phenomenal field’ and ‘radical reflection’, I argue that mindfulness needs to be understood as a reflective attitude that allows one to discern not only the content but also, and primarily, the context of each experience, and that this also includes seeing itself—the act of reflection—as an act that stems from, and returns back into, the pre-reflective current of existence.

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF "EXPERIENCE" CONCEPT AT SOCIAL CULTURAL PRACTICE TRANSFORMATIONS: THE ANALYSIS OF STRUCTURAL CONCEPT OF M. FOUCAULT

The article is devoted to the analysis of structural concept of M. Foucault, at borders of which the influence of social cultural practice transformations on the establishment of "experience" concept content is researched. M. Foucault rejects the absolutization of subject-object opposition, under which the content of "experience" concept is gnoseologically analyzed, and reveals the necessity of understanding of subject decentralization experience

Dissecting the experience of space as peripersonal

Are we aware of peripersonal space as peripersonal? Is there a distinctive way that peripersonal space is perceptually experienced that differs from the perceptual experience of other parts of space? I explore two ways of thinking about peripersonal experience. A substantial view takes the content of experience of peripersonal space to effectively represent that space as peripersonal while a deflationary view understands peripersonal experience to be constituted by specific sensory-motor links and implicates a distinctive role for attention. In both, there is a distinctive type of peripersonal experience, but only on the substantial view does the perceptual system speak in terms of the peripersonal. By examining the role of attention in peripersonal experience, I argue that we should not endorse a substantive conception of peripersonal experience over a deflationary conception. I explore what a deflationary account of peripersonal experience might be.

Sameness of place and the senses

When we watch a film at the cinema, we typically experience the speech we hear as coming from the mouths of the actors depicted on the screen, rather than from the loudspeakers. This is an everyday example of the spatial ventriloquism effect. In this chapter, we are interested in what it is for things that we are aware of through different senses to appear to be in a single space, or even—as in spatial ventriloquism—at the same place. The answer may seem trivial: all that is required is that we pick out places in the different senses in the same way. However, as Millikan (1991, 2000) has argued, representing a single location in the same way is not the same as representing sameness of location. What we need, either instead of, or as well as, sameness of reference frame, is for sameness of place to be a part of the content of experience. Empirical evidence suggests that there exist peripersonal representations that encode multisensory information about the region of space that immediately surrounds the body. Their existence generates a puzzle for accounts of perception—namely, what is the relation between peripersonal representations that figure in empirical discussions and our everyday perceptual experience of ourselves and the world? Here we examine whether peripersonal space representations might play a role in our conscious awareness of the spatial relations between entities experienced in vision, audition, and touch.

Marharita Rouba: Translator’s Comments of T. Rosefeldt: ‘Being Realistic about Kant’s Idealism’

The preface to the translation of Tobias Rosefeldt’s article into Russian provides a discussion context, in which the author settles an issue of interpreting the a posteriori aspects of the content of experience in Kant’s transcendental idealism. Key points of the article are briefly formulated and the translator’s choices of certain terms are justified.

Explaining Temporal Phenomenology: Hume’s Extensionalism and Kant’s Apriorism

The empiricist needs to explain the origin, in perception, of the idea of time. Kant believed the only answer was a kind of idealism about time. This essay examines Hume’s extensionalism as a possible answer to Kant. Extensionalism allegedly accounts for the experience of time via the manner of presentation of experiences, rather than the content of experience.

From Non-Self-Representationalism to the Social Structure of Pre-Reflective Self-Consciousness

Why should we think that there is such a thing as pre-reflective self-awareness? And how is this kind of self-awareness to be characterized? This paper traces a theoretical and a phenomenological line of argument in favor of the notion of pre-reflective self-consciousness and explores how this notion can be further illuminated by appealing to recent work in the analytical philosophy of language and mind. In particular, it argues that the self is not represented in the (nonconceptual) content of experience, but is rather implicit in the mode. Further, it argues that pre-reflective self-consciousness is best understood as a form of knowledge-how. Finally, it will be argued that our sense of self is thoroughly social, even at the basic, pre-reflective level.

Intentionalism, Cognition, and Representation

This chapter continues consideration of reductive intentionalism without embracing the doctrine, framing it in the context of cognitive science. Cognition, including perception, is representation. An agent’s cognitive, perhaps perceptual, state is a relation binding the agent to a proposition by means of her mental representation. Intentionalism would explicate the phenomenal character of a perceiver's experience in terms of the content of her prevailing perceptual representation. While minimal intentionalism maintains that the phenomenal character of the perceiver's experience merely supervenes on her representation's content, maximal intentionalism would reduce character to content. For maximal intentionalism maintains that phenomenal character is simply what introspection finds. Yet, according to maximal intentionalism, introspection, when tuned to conscious perception, detects only the content of experience. Hence, the maximalist identifies phenomenal character with the content carried by perceptual representation.