Fall 2017 CSC Speaker Series: Georges Dreyfus - Meditation and Phenomenology

The Contemplative Sciences Center is honored to host Georges Dreyfus for his talk, “Meditation and Phenomenology,” examining how meditation can contribute to the phenomenological project of describing consciousness from a first person perspective.

 

Registration recommended here.

 

Georges argues that meditation is particularly helpful in helping subjects to dis-identify with their thoughts and emotions and hence supports the bracketing of the ordinary attitude recommended by Husserl. He further argues that once understood in this way, meditation and phenomenology can work hand in hand to provide better descriptions of consciousness in general and of its liminal state in particular. Georges will also examine the qualms of skeptics, such as Dennett, who reject the idea of describing consciousness from a first person perspective. Georges suggests that although the introspective insights provided by meditation may not provide the basis for a spectacular new science of the mind, they can help in the phenomenological project of describing consciousness by finding putative invariant of mental states.