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Articles and News

MindScience Academy curates a series of articles with the intention to gloss and approach the ongoing exchange between scientific research and contemplative traditions. Through such endeavor, we shall try to expand the tools at the disposal of the critical reader and researcher, without the pretense of exhausting debate, on the contrary, multiplying and hybridizing its languages. This way, our column resembles the laboratory itself; critical, enzymatic, open to surprise and transformative experience.
focus on may 2024
Changing our perspective on life to one of kindness really helps us feel gratitude. Gratitude is a wonderful feeling to have because then you see how rich your life is and how much you’ve received. You see how much people have benefited you and how good you have it.
focus on may 2024
Happiness cannot come from setting it as a goal; it arises from the ability to appreciate the journey or, more precisely, the experience that life offers in the present moment. (...) When we are unhappy, instead of trying to become happy, we should take whatever is happening as an opportunity to encounter and overcome obstacles on the path.
focus on april 2024
It all starts with establishing what is an existing entity and how it is subdivided. For instance, all Buddhist philosophical schools accept that an existing entity is that which is ascertained by a valid knower.
focus on april 2024
In language, the data of experience are organized. Languages, in fact, are cognitive tools that convey not a given reality, but an interpreted reality; they are systems functional to the cognitive organization of experience. It's like saying that everyone speaks, first and foremost, to themselves.
focus on april 2024
Geshe Gelek has addressed four in-depth questions regarding the topic of valid cognition, illustrating in great technical detail the differences existing among the various schools. A contribution certainly appreciated by readers with advanced knowledge in Buddhist studies.
focus on april 2024
From the thought of Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, enactive epistemology flourishes, bringing to light first-person knowledge where embodied experience plays a constitutive role. A fundamental text.
Despite apparent divergences between the models we are going over — one referring to the basic emotions currents, to other being constructivist perspectives —, the common grounds also appear to be quite interesting. Both Barrett and Asma & Gabriel agree upon the existence of core affects, proposing different views on their extension (how many and what they are) and on their role in shaping human behavior.
focus on February 2024
Human beings have the characteristic of perceiving reality as existing out there, as if it had intrinsic existence. This is simply how it appears to our consciousness. To realize that it is not so requires meticulous philosophical analysis.
Consciousness and Inner Reality
Speaking of consciousness, existing models can be classified into two main categories: those that recognize to the Consciousness an intrinsic existence independent, at least in part, from its physical substratum and those who instead consider the Consciousness entirely reducible to the electro-chemical-physical processes that take place in the brain.
Relationships and Society
At times, the paths of individuals cross unbeknownst to the protagonists themselves, and their ideas converge across time and space. Such is the case of the remarkable, unfulfilled, and even unexplored 18th-century connection between Ippolito Desideri, an Italian Jesuit missionary, and David Hume, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher.
focus on February 2024
Do appearances conceal reality from our eyes? Or does our preconceived idea of what is real prevent us from seeing the reality of appearance? I would like to draw attention to two aspects. The first is to emphasize the importance of phenomenology, which aims to study the appearing, highlighting how our belief in the reality of external objects is generated from it. The second reason is because it seems to me that the way Western metaphysics and science have seen the difference between reality and appearance is exactly opposite to that of Buddhism.
focus on February 2024
Consciousness is the greatest and unresolved problem since the origins of philosophy: everything we see, do, encode, decide, and even science itself, are products of the mind and inhabit the world of consciousness. The entire worldview, culture, and science depend on consciousness and the mind-reality interface.