On Becoming Aware: A pragmatics of experiencing - Advances in Consciousness Research 43 (Paperback)

Nathalie Depraz (author), Francisco J. Varela (author), Pierre Vermersch (author)

£60.00

Paperback 289 Pages
Published: 20/03/2003

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Synopsis

This book searches for the sources and means for a disciplined practical approach to exploring human experience. The spirit of this book is pragmatic and relies on a Husserlian phenomenology primarily understood as a method of exploring our experience. The authors do not aim at a neo-Kantian a priori ‘new theory’ of experience but instead they describe a concrete activity: how we examine what we live through, how we become aware of our own mental life. The range of experiences of which we can become aware is vast: all the normal dimensions of human life (perception, motion, memory, imagination, speech, everyday social interactions), cognitive events that can be precisely defined as tasks in laboratory experiments (e.g., a protocol for visual attention), but also manifestations of mental life more fraught with meaning (dreaming, intense emotions, social tensions, altered states of consciousness). The central assertion in this work is that this immanent ability is habitually ignored or at best practiced unsystematically, that is to say, blindly. Exploring human experience amounts to developing and cultivating this basic ability through specific training. Only a hands-on, non-dogmatic approach can lead to progress, and that is what animates this book. (Series B)

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Co
ISBN: 9789027251633
Number of pages: 289
Weight: 515 g
Dimensions: 240 x 160 mm

MEDIA REVIEWS

Becoming Aware is a major achievement in the interdisciplinary understanding of mind in its many dimensions. Drawing on experience and knowledge in philosophy, psychotherapy, and Eastern thought, the authors have written a text as practically insightful as it is wise in thought and outlook. This is a book not to be missed – it is a signal accomplishment by three of the brightest contemporary thinkers in the world today. - Edward S. Casey, Leading Professor, SUNY at Stony Brook

This precise application of Husserl’s philosophy to meditative practices of attention is a new opening for phenomenology. - Eugene Gendlin

On Becoming Aware is a project that reaches across and into a surprisingly wide spectrum of practices, from teaching to meditation, from psychoanalysis to empirical research, from writing to interviewing. It presents a strategy that should appeal to professionals, researchers, and practitioners in all fields that involve inquiry into subjective experience. The authors offer detailed descriptions that go step by step through the procedures of methodological first-person access to experience. This phenomenology is carefully worked out in a way that provides reasonable answers, on the one side, to scientific skepticism about the validity of introspection, and on the other side, to the post-structuralist critique of the philosophy of consciousness. - Shaun Gallagher