In this section
Concepts
- Dualism and the mind-body problem The idea that mind and matter are two different kinds of thing — and the objection raised within two years of Descartes publishing it, by a correspondent usually left out of the story.
- Emergence How wholes come to have properties their parts lack — and the cautionary tale of the last movement that bet everything on it.
- Faith, belief and knowledge Three words used at cross purposes in almost every argument about religion — including by people who agree with each other.
- Free will and determinism Whether you could have done otherwise — and why the famous brain experiment proves much less than it is usually said to.
- Idealism The view that mind is fundamental and matter derivative — a serious philosophical tradition that modern spirituality invokes constantly and usually misquotes.
- Materialism and physicalism The view that there is nothing but the physical — the default assumption of the modern sciences, and the position most of this site is implicitly arguing with.
- Meaning and absurdity The question that actually starts most spiritual searching — and the distinction that stops it being unanswerable.
- Non-duality The report that the boundary between self and world is not ultimately real — and the reason Advaita and Buddhism mean incompatible things by it.
- Panpsychism The idea that experience goes all the way down — the least fringe of the strange options, and the one with a problem nobody has solved.
- Perennialism and constructivism Do all mystics meet the same reality and describe it differently, or does the tradition build the experience before it happens? The argument that decides how the rest of this site can be written.
- Personal identity and survival What makes you the same person you were at six — and why every answer breaks, with consequences for anything that claims to survive death.
- The argument from religious experience Millions of people report encountering something. Whether that is evidence of anything — and what the brain scans actually showed.
- The hard problem of consciousness Why there is something it is like to be you — the one gap physicalism has not closed, and the one most often borrowed to prove things it does not prove.
- The natural and the supernatural A line that most of the world's traditions never drew, that hardened surprisingly late, and that dissolves the moment you press on it.
- The study of mysticism How scholars examine mystical experience without endorsing or debunking it — and the awkward possibility that "mysticism" is a category the West invented.
- What "metaphysics" means One word, two almost unrelated meanings — and a title that was probably just a librarian's filing note.
- What counts as evidence There is no algorithm for deciding what should change your mind — but there are some rules that are better than the slogans usually offered in their place.
Figures
- Carl Jung More of modern spirituality runs through him than through anyone else in this section — which is exactly why his weakest claims and his worst conduct both need stating plainly.
- Evelyn Underhill Wrote the standard book on Western mysticism at thirty-six, then spent thirty years arguing that mysticism is for ordinary people and produces work rather than withdrawal.
- William James The philosopher who made religious experience a respectable object of study, and who decided to believe in free will as a treatment for his own despair.