In 1817 the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge described “the willing suspension of disbelief” as an act of “poetic faith” through which a reader accepts fanciful aspects of a fictional work. Without this willingness the …
Staying on the Inside – Unifying the Self with Reality
We live in fractured times. Our experience of reality and ourselves often seems to be dominated by a sense of isolation and separation. In the cannon of philosophy this sense of division is often spoken …
Why Does the World Exist?
We are here. That much seems clear. We can’t deny our own existence. Well actually great philosophers have denied our existence. What we can’t deny I suppose is that something exists. There is an experience …
The Ego Tunnel and the Nature of Reality
Thomas Metzinger’s new book The Ego Tunnel weaves research in out-of-body experiences, lucid dreaming, phantom limbs and other extraordinary human occurrences with leading edge neuroscience to create a convincing picture of how neural activity constantly …
The Assumption of Reality
When we think about reality or talk about reality the big assumption we almost always make is that there is a reality to think and talk about. When Rene Descartes drew an astonishingly original distinction …
The Integral Assumption of American Philosophy
Mind cannot exist without matter; matter cannot exist without mind. This is what I have come to see as perhaps the most essential theme that runs through American philosophy. In the modern western world it …