Personal Meaning through Self Integration: Revising Obstacles and Ethical Challenges of Current Philosophical Models
Abstract
Contemplative meditation reveals a latent capacity for personal integration that enhances mental well being through relational and transcendent ordering. Identification of the physical features that assist the personal capacity for integration, however, is neglected in current philosophical models of the brain, where such features are postulated to reside. These models, moreover, also introduce serious challenges to ethical practice that diminish the personal meaning of the human being. Personalist approaches to ethics and empirical neuroscience, however, are together now beginning to offer a synergistic view of integration that may assist the revision of these models and reinstate a more positive anthropological meaning for the individual.
Keywords
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Bramer P. Introduction to the special focus: spiritual formation and Christian education. Christian Education Journal, 2010, 7(2):334-340.
AbdAleati NS, Zaharim NM, and Mydin YO. Religiousness and mental: systematic review study. J Rel Health, 2016, 55(6):1929-1937.
Luhrmann TM, Nusbaum H, and Thisted R. The absorption hypothesis: learning to hear God in Evangelical Christianity. American Anthropologist, 2010, 112(1):66-78.
Van Kaam A Formative Spirituality (7 vol). New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1983.
Muto S. Living contemplatively and serving God in the world: two sides of the coin of Christian ministry. J Spiritual Formation Soul Care, 2013, 6(1):82-92
Hadot P. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995.
Antonaccio M. Contemporary forms of askesis and the return of spiritual exercises. Ann Society Christian Ethics, 1998, 18:69-92.
Nino AG. Spiritual exercises in Augustine's Confessions. J Rel Health, 2008, 47:88-102.
Luders E, Phillips O, Clark K, Kurth F, Toga A, Narr KL. Bridging the hemispheres in meditation: thicker callosal regions and enhanced fractional aniostropy (FA) in long-term practitionrs. Neuroimage, 2012, 61(1): 181-187.
Moss SA et al. Effecgts of an 8 week meditation program on mood and anxiety in patients with memory loss. J Alternative Complementary Medicine, 2012, 18(1):48-53.
Larrivee D and Echarte L. Contemplative Meditation and Neuroscience: Prospects for Mental Health. J Rel Health, 2017 DOI 10.1007/s10943-017-0475-0
Larrivee D. Reconfiguring the neural paradigm: embodied cognition, brain failure, and the somatic integrity thesis. In (Eds G Holub and P Duchlinski) Man on the Edge of Existence. Krakow: Akademia Ignatianum W Krakowie, 2017.
Swedish Committee on Defining Death. The Concept of Death, Summary. Stockholm: Swedish Ministry o Health and Social Affairs, 1984.
Condic ML. Determination of death: a scientific perspective on biological integration. J. Med Phil, 2016, 41:257-278.
President's Council on Bioethics. Controversies in the determination of death: A white paper by the president's council on bioethics. Available: http://bioethics 2008
Bernat JL. The definition and criterion of death. In (Eds JL Bernat and R Beresford). Handbook of Clinical Neurology: Ethical and Legal Issues in Neurology. New York: Elsevier Press, 2013.
Bernat JL and Larriviere D. Areas of persisting controversy in brain death. Neurology, 2014, 83:1394-1395.
Bernat 2002
Verjeide HK, Rady MY, and McGregor JL. Brain death, states of impaired consciousness, and physician-assisted death for end-of-life organ donation and transplantation. Med Health Care Phil, 2009, 12:409-421.
Shewmon DA. The brain and somatic integration: insights into the standard biological rationale for equating "brain death" with death. J Medicine Phil, 2001, 26(5):457-478.
Evers JC and PA Byrne. Brain death - still a controversy. Pharos of Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society, 1990, 53:10-12.
Jones DA. Loss of faith in brain death: Catholic controversy over the determination of death by neurological criteria. clinical ethics, 2012, 7:133-141
Shea JB. Organ donation: The inconvenient truth. Catholic Insight Magazine September, 2007.
Gillet C. Reduction and Emergence in Science and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Craver C Physical law and explanation in the Hodgkin and Huxley model of the action potential. Phil Science, 2008, 75(5):1022-1033.
Winning J and Bechtel W. Review of Biological Autonomy. Phil Science, 2016, (3):446-452.
Lee P and Grisez G. Total brain death: a reply to Alan Shewmon. Bioethics, 2012, (5):275-284.
Wojtyla K Man in the Field of Responsibility. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1991.
Holub G. The human subject and its interiority: Karol Wojtyla and the crisis in philosophical anthropology, Quien, 2016, 4:47-66.
John Paul II, Pope. The Splendor of Truth Veritatis Splendor: Encyclical Letter. Boston, Mass.: St. Paul Books & Media, 1993.
Onishi B. Information, bodies, and Heidegge: tracing visions of the posthuman. Sophia, 2011, 50:101-112.
Bostrom N. In defense of human dignity. Bioethics, 2005, 19(3):202-214.
Levy N. Neuroethics and the extended mind. In (Eds J Illes and B. Sahakian) Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Douglas T and Suvalescu J. Synthetic biology and the ethics of knowledge. J Med Ethics, 2010, 36(11):687-693.
Latour B We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Reiner, P. The rise of neuroessentialism. In (Eds J Illes and B. Sahakian) Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Roskies http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2016/08/mental-alchemy_23. html2016.
Smith L Dynamic systems, sensorimotor processes, and the origins of stability and flexibility. In (Eds J Spencer, M Thomas, JL McClelland) Toward a Unified Theory of Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Wiesel T and Hubel DH. Single cell responses in striate cortex of kittens deprived of vision in one eye. J Neurophysiol, 1963, 26:1003-1017.
Damasio A. Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. New York: Pantheon Books, 2012.
Hooker C. Interaction and bio-cognitive order. Synthese, 2008, 166:513-546.
Frith C. Explaining delusions of control: the compartor model 20 years on. Consciousness and Cognition, 2012, 21(1):52-54.
Thelen E and Smith L. Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18686/mmf.v1i2.977
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
