Meditation in Context

This is a study of the role that social and cultural context play in Buddhist meditation techniques, especially those that fall under the category of vipassana and related practices. It argues that such contexts inform not only practitioners’ explicit understandings of their practice of these techniques, but also their pretheoretical, tacit, implicit orientations, and even …

Philosophical and historical accounts for the neuroscientific investigation of human spirituality

Although human spirituality has long been considered impenetrable to empirical investigation, recent cognitive and affective neuroscience studies have started the neuroscientific exploration of the mental processes and the neural underpinnings underlying spiritual and religious experiences. The scientific investigation of such complex phenomena, however, cannot proceed in the absence of a deep philosophical conceptualization of human …