Ontology of Consciousness

Percipient Action

edited by Helmut Wautischer

A Bradford Book

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

( 2008 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or me-

chanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without

permission in writing from the publisher.

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use. For information, please e-mail special_sales@mitpress.mit.edu or write to Special Sales Depart-

ment, The MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142.

This book was set in Stone Serif and Stone Sans on 3B2 by Asco Typesetters, Hong Kong, and was

printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ontology of consciousness : percipient action / edited by Helmut Wautischer.

p. cm.

‘‘A Bradford book.’’

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-262-23259-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-262-73184-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Consciousness. 2. Philosophical anthropology. 3. Culture—Philosophy. 4. Neuropsychology—

Philosophy. 5. Mind and body. I. Wautischer, Helmut.

B105.C477O58 2008

126—dc22 2006033823

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contributors

Karim Akerma has lectured on philosophy at the universities of Leipzig and Hamburg.

Recent articles are Hegel’s Silence on Extraterrestrial Intelligence, The End and the Perma-

nence of Mankind in Karl Jaspers’s Philosophy, Wann beginnt ein menschliches Leben?

(When does a Human Life Begin), and Das embryonale Potenzial. Ein ontologischer Fehls-

chluss (The Embryonic Potential: An Ontological Fallacy). His monographs include Der

Gewinn des Symbolischen. Zur Ableitung von Naturtheorie aus dem gesellschaftlichen Sein

in der Tradition kritischer Theorie seit Marx (1992, The Premium of Symbols. Deriving

Natural Theory from Social Existence, in the Tradition of Critical Theory Since Marx),

Soll eine Menschheit sein? Eine fundamentalethische Frage (1995, Ought There Be a Hu-

manity? A Normative Query), Verebben der Menschheit? Neganthropie und Anthropodizee

(2000, Ebbtide for Humanity. Neganthropy and Anthropodicy), Außerirdische Einleitung

in die Philosophie. Extraterrestrier im Denken von Epikur bis Jonas (2002, Alien Introduc-

tion into Philosophy: Extraterrestrials in Philosophical Thought from Epikur to Jonas),

and Lebensende und Lebensbeginn. Philosophische Implikationen und mentalistische Begrun-

dung des Hirn-Todeskriteriums (2006, The End of a Life and the Beginning of a Life: Phi-

losophical Implications and Mentalistic Foundation of the Brain-Death Criterion).

Apart from philosophy, Karim Akerma works as a translator and offers translation ser-

vice (http://www.akerma.de).

Matthijs Cornelissen teaches Integral Psychology at the Sri Aurobindo International

Centre of Education in Pondicherry. A qualified physician, he came to India in 1976

to study the confluence of Yoga and psychotherapy. Together with Neeltje Huppes he

founded in 1981 Mirambika, a research center for integral education in New Delhi.

More recently, together with Huppes he organized three major conferences on Indian

psychology in Pondicherry. Publications include several papers on Indian psychology

and two edited volumes, Consciousness and Its Transformation (2001), and together with

Kireet Joshi, Consciousness, Indian Psychology, and Yoga (2004).

Antoine Courban is a physician and a transdisciplinary humanist. Born in Lebanon, he

received his doctorate in Medicine, Surgery, and Midwifery from Liege’s University

Belgium (1977). He completed his postgraduate specialization in General Surgery in

1983, where he worked with Ernest Schoffeniels on transmembranic ionic exchange

in brain tissue. He participated, as medical coordinator, in humanitarian missions of

‘‘Medecins du Monde.’’ In 1990, he was appointed at University Saint Joseph (USJ) in

Beirut as a lecturer and, in 1994, Associate Professor of Human Anatomy. From 1990 to

2003, he was project chair, on behalf of the Belgian Cooperation Agency, of a national

integrated community-based development program in Lebanon. He is a expert consul-

tant, in health sustainable development, affiliated with many international agencies.

For his achievements in this domain, he was awarded the Honor Medal of the Sover-

eign Order of Malta. In the academic field, he has been a pioneer: in 1991 he imple-

mented a transdisciplinary unit at the Faculty of Medicine of Beirut’s USJ that became

the academic chair of the ‘‘History and Philosophy of Medical Sciences’’ in 2003,

which he currently holds. In 2005, he was nominated Chairman of the Department

of Cultural Sciences. Since 1996, he has also been a permanent member of the Reading

Committee of Travaux et Jours (Beirut–USJ Press). In the history and philosophy of

sciences, he has numerous publications and lectures, mainly in French and some in Ar-

abic, reflecting a transdisciplinary approach. Examples include Ilya Prigogine and the

End of Certitudes (1997), The Aquarian Culture (1998), Bioethics: A New Science or Everlast-

ing Ethics? (1998), Hygiene and Decency in Old Days (1999), From Pain to Ethics (2000),

Bioethics’ Ethics (2002), Urbi et Orbi: The Metaphysical War (2003), Brainless Robot or

Thinking Machine? (2002), From Eden to Hedonism (2003), The Veil and the Mask (2005),

Curing and Healing (2004), The Universal Ground of Medicine (2005), Biology of Passions

(2005), Arabic Medicine and Byzantine Hospitals, and so on. Courban’s main research do-

main covers the development of sciences in the eastern Mediterranean world from late

antiquity until the emergence of modern Western thought. In 1999, he participated,

under the direction of Dominique Lecourt, in writing the Dictionnaire d’Histoire et Phi-

losophie des Sciences (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France) that was awarded the spe-

cial price of the Institut de France in 2000 and has been reprinted five times. In 2004

he collaborated, with Dominique Lecourt, in writing of the Dictionnaire de la Pensee

Medicale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France). He is a full member of the Scientific

Board of the ‘‘Centre Georges Canguilhem de Philosophie et Histoire des Sciences’’

(Universite Paris VII–Denis Diderot) as well as the ‘‘Ferdinand Gonseth Institute’’ (Lau-

sanne, Switzerland), which is also devoted to the transdisciplinary tradition in the phi-

losophy of sciences.

Mario Crocco is a neurobiologist with degrees in several fields. Since 1982 he has been

Director of the Neurobiology Research Centre, Ministry of Health of the Argentine Re-

public. He served the Argentine Federal Government from 1984 to 1986 as chair of the

database of the Economic Felonies Investigative Commission in the Senate House.

Since 1988, he also directs the Laboratory of Electroneurobiological Research at the

Hospital J. T. Borda, funded by the City of Buenos Aires. He has been measuring intri-

594 Contributors

cate inner brain surfaces since the late 1950s, including the finest blood vessels and

brain interstitium or slender passageway amidst the surfaces of brain cells. Having

strobe-filmed the motion of cilia (microbes’ ‘‘hair’’) since childhood, on these results

and with a comparative study between 1964 and 1972 he revindicated the ciliary-

system ancestry of an object-structuring biophysical mechanism involving whole

regions of brain tissue, relating it with the natural selection of intellectual perfor-

mances and conceiving of sensations ( Jakob’s intonations) as the Newtonian force that

deflects the biospheric evolutionary process through animal appetition and violence.

He reconstituted a text by Plato, which had been corrupted by the interpolation of

a nineteenth-century philologist, discovering therein a cogito, which he communicated

in 1979 and which clarified Aristotle’s complex role. With his wife, Alicia Avila, he has

deepened the studies of the cultural struggle against time’s irrevocable elapse and of

the role of existential violence in biological evolution, elaborating in natural sciences

a notion of persons as respectable.

Christian de Quincey is Professor of Philosophy and Consciousness Studies at John F.

Kennedy University, Director of the Center for Interspecies Research, and Academic

Director for Conscious Evolution at The Graduate Institute. He is also cofounder of

The Visionary Edge, committed to transforming global consciousness by transforming

mass media. De Quincey is author of the award-winning book Radical Nature: Rediscov-

ering the Soul of Matter (2003) and Radical Knowing: Understanding Consciousness through

Relationship (2005). Samples of his writings on consciousness and cosmology are avail-

able at http://www.deepspirit.com.

Thomas B. Fowler is presently serving in three capacities: he is President of the Xavier

Zubiri Foundation of North America, founded in 1997; he is Adjunct Professor at

George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia; and he is Principal Scientist at Mitretek

Systems, a nonprofit consulting firm in McLean, Virginia. He received his BA degree

from the University of Maryland in 1969, and his BS degree from the same institution

in 1972. He received an MS degree from Columbia University in 1973, and the ScD de-

gree from the George Washington University in 1986. He has translated two of Xavier

Zubiri’s books, Nature, History, God (1981), and Sentient Intelligence (1999). He has pub-

lished over 100 articles, and is especially interested in Zubiri and modern science and

mathematics. He is doing research in the areas of productivity measurement, and in

systems aspects of genetics and evolution. He is also working on a book on the subject

of causality and Zubiri’s philosophy, and another on the evolution controversies.

He serves as coeditor of The Telecommunications Review and The Xavier Zubiri Review.

He has presented papers and lectures on Zubiri in Europe, the United States, and South

America. He organized and chaired a Zubiri session at the XX World Congress of

Philosophy in Boston in 1998 and has presented papers on Zubiri’s thought at nu-

merous conferences.

Contributors 595

Erlendur Haraldsson is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Iceland in

Reykjavik. He obtained his PhD in psychology at the University of Freiburg in Ger-

many and completed an internship in clinical psychology in the Department of Psy-

chiatry at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Haraldsson has been an active

researcher, has written five books and published numerous articles in psychological

journals, and has been visiting professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the Uni-

versity of Virginia in 1983–1984 as well as at the Institut fur Grenzgebiete der Psycho-

logie und Psychohygiene in Freiburg in 1993–1995. Further details at http://www

.hi.is/~erlendur.hygiene.

David J. Hufford is University Professor and Chair of Medical Humanities at Penn State

College of Medicine, the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, in Hershey, Pennsylvania,

with joint appointments in Neural and Behavioral Sciences and Family & Community

Medicine. He also is Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania with appoint-

ments in Religious Studies and the Bioethics Master’s Degree Program. He is on the

Governing Board of Metanexus Institute for Religion and Science. Hufford’s work has

focused on the roles of personal experience and reason in spiritual belief. He has lec-

tured and published widely on spiritual belief, and on the conflicted relationships

between such beliefs and the fields of medicine and psychology that have been fre-

quently used to pathologize and ‘‘explain away’’ common spiritual experiences and

beliefs. The basics of Hufford’s ‘‘experience-centered approach’’ are established in his

1982 book, The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernat-

ural Assault Traditions, University of Pennsylvania Press (1998, Japanese translation and

edition), which shared the 1983 Chicago Folklore Prize. Hufford is a founding member

of the Editorial Board of the journal Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, of Ex-

plore: The Journal of Science and Healing, and of the Cancer Advisory Panel of the newly

reorganized National Center for Complementary & Alternative Medicine at NIH. In

1992, he received the Manuel de la Cruz Award from the Mexican Academy of Tradi-

tional Medicine for his research in folk and alternative medicine.

Pavel B. Ivanov is a former Senior Scientist at Troitsk Institute for Innovation and Fu-

sion Research (TRINITI) in Troitsk, Moscow region, Russia, and Information Systems

Manager at the International Science and Technology Center (ISTC), Moscow head-

quarters. He studied gravity theories, including quantum gravity, at Moscow State Uni-

versity, and obtained his PhD in atomic physics at the Institute of Spectroscopy of RAS,

exploring collective effects in quantum scattering processes. His recent publications in

physics study the effects of temporal coupling and hierarchical time in quantum pro-

cesses. At the ISTC, he was coordinating efforts to design intelligent computer systems

for corporate knowledge management and project development, using advanced tech-

nologies (hierarchical object models, neural networks, and so on). His research on the

foundations of mathematics and hierarchical logic, originating in physics and com-

596 Contributors

puter science, was also applied to psychology, contributing to a number of formal

models for psychological phenomena, including a mathematical theory of scale forma-

tion in aesthetic perception. Ivanov is IT manager and consultant for several commer-

cial companies, while collaborating with the ISTC in his research. He is participating in

the activities of the International Academy of Informatics related to developing formal

models of artistic creativity, using methods of information theory and quantum

mechanics.

Heinz Kimmerle is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam.

In 1957, he obtained his PhD with Professor Hans-Georg Gadamer in Heidelberg on

the topic of D. E. F. Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics. From 1970 to 1976 he taught

philosophy at the Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany) as a lecturer and professor of

philosophy. In 1976 he was appointed professor of philosophy at Erasmus University

Rotterdam (Netherlands). His special teaching and research topics were the philosophy

of Hegel, the history of dialectical philosophy, and philosophies of difference. From

1979 to 1982 he was Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy. In 1989 he worked as a visit-

ing professor in philosophy at the University of Nairobi in Kenya and the University of

Ghana at Legon/Accra. During the last five years of his teaching career he held a special

chair for Foundations of Intercultural Philosophy. In 1995 he retired from teaching at

Erasmus University and in 1996 he established the Foundation for Intercultural Philos-

ophy and Art at Zoetermeer in the Netherlands. In 1997 he was a visiting professor in

philosophy at the University of Venda in South Africa. And in 2003, the University of

South Africa at Pretoria conferred on him an honorary doctorate. A great number of his

publications are on the main subjects of his research and teaching. He has published

twenty monographs and edited numerous publications, including the critical edition

of D. E. F. Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutik (1959, 1974); Die Zukunftsbedeutung der Hoff-

nung (1966, 1974), on the philosophy of Ernst Bloch; Das Problem der Abgeschlossenheit

des Denkens (1970, 1982), on Hegel’s philosophy during the first half of his Jena period

(1801–1804); Derrida zur Einfuhrung (1988, 2004), on Derrida as a thinker of difference;

Philosophie in Afrika—Afrikanische Philosophie (1991), one of the first books on African

philosophy in the German language; Die Dimension des Interkulturellen (1994), on the

more general aspects of engaging in dialogue with the philosophies of other cultures;

and Philosophien der Differenz (2000), on the philosophies of Heidegger, Adorno,

Deleuze, Lyotard, Derrida, Irigaray, and Kristeva; and four volumes in the series Inter-

kulturelle Bibliothek: Afrikanische Philosophie im Kontext der Weltphilosophie (2005), Georg

Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel interkulturell gelesen (2005), Jacques Derrida interkulturell gelesen

(2005), and Ruckkehr ins Eigene: Die interkulturelle Dimension in der Philosophie (2006).

Stanley Krippner is the Alan Watts Professor of Psychology at the Saybrook Graduate

School and Research Center in California. He is a Fellow of four APA divisions, and

former president of two divisions (30 and 32). Formerly, he was director of the Kent

Contributors 597

State University Child Study Center, Kent, OH, and the Maimonides Medical Center

Dream Research Laboratory, Brooklyn, NY. He is author, coauthor, or editor of over

thirty books, including Extraordinary Dreams (2002), Varieties of Anomalous Experience:

Examining the Scientific Evidence (2000), and The Psychological Impact of War on Civilians:

An International Perspective (2003). Krippner has conducted workshops and seminars on

dreams and/or hypnosis in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Cyprus, Ecua-

dor, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Mexico, the

Netherlands, Panama, the Philippines, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Russia, South Africa,

Spain, Sweden, Venezuela, and at the four congresses of the Interamerican Psycho-

logical Association. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Indian Psy-

chology and Revista Argentina de Psicologia Paranormal, and the advisory board of the

International School for Psychotherapy, Counseling, and Group Leadership (St. Peters-

burg) and the Czech Unitaria (Prague). He holds faculty appointments at the Universi-

dade Holistica Internacional (Brasilia) and the Instituto de Medicina y Tecnologia

Avanzada de la Conducta (Ciudad Juarez). He has given invited addresses at the Chi-

nese Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, and the

School for Diplomatic Studies, Montevideo, Uruguay. He is a Fellow of the Society for

the Scientific Study of Religion, and has published cross-cultural studies on spiritual

content in dreams. More information is available at http://www.stanleykrippner.com/.

Armand J. Labbe (1945–2005) worked as a museum anthropologist for over twenty

years as Director of Research and Collections and Chief Curator at the Bowers Museum

of Cultural Art in Orange County, California, and was a Research Associate and An-

thropology Instructor at CSU Fullerton. He published ten books and numerous schol-

arly papers and articles focusing on cultural symbolic systems, neotropical shamanism,

indigenous concepts of the soul, and archaic religious thought. Among his latest books

are Shamans, Gods, and Mythic Beasts, which investigates shamanic themes reflected in

the pre-Hispanic art of Colombia, and Guardians of the Life Stream: Shamans, Art, and

Power in Prehispanic Central Panama, an in-depth, comprehensive examination of neo-

tropical shamanism and its underlying paradigms. Labbe was a Fellow of the American

Anthropological Association, a member of the Society for the Anthropology of Con-

sciousness, and a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, among other profes-

sional organizations.

James Maffie is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Colorado State University. His

research interests include the anthropology of epistemology, pre-Columbian Meso-

american philosophy, contemporary Anglo-American epistemology and philosophy

of science, and comparative world philosophy. His writings are published in Ulti-

mate Reality & Meaning, Social Epistemology, The Nahua Newsletter, Philosophical Forum,

History of the Human Sciences, Behavioral & Brain Sciences, and Philosophy of the Social

Sciences.

598 Contributors

Hubert Markl is a zoologist and humanist with an extensive research record in sensory

physiology, social biology, communication in animals, and environmental protection.

He studied biology, chemistry, and geography at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in

Munich, where he was awarded the degree of Dr. rer. nat. of Zoology in 1962. Research

locations include Harvard University and Rockefeller University, and he received the

Habilitation in Zoology at the University of Frankfurt. From 1968 to 1973 he was Pro-

fessor and Director of the Zoological Institute of the Darmstadt Institute of Technology

(Zoologisches Institut der Technischen Hochschule Darmstadt). Since 1974 he has been

Professor of Biology at the University of Constance (Universitat Konstanz), and in the

same year he was elected to the Senate of the German Research Association (Deutsche

Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG). Markl served as vice president of the DFG from 1977

to 1983. He held the office of president of the DFG between 1986 and 1991. In 1993

he was elected the first president of the newly established Berlin-Brandenburg Acad-

emy of Sciences (Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften). In addition,

Markl chaired the board of the Society of German Scientists and Physicians (Gesell-

schaft Deutscher Naturforscher und Arzte). From 1996 to 2002 he was president of

the Max Planck Society. The University of Saarland, the University of Potsdam, and the

University of Dublin conferred honorary doctorates on him in 1992 and 1997, respec-

tively. He also received honorary doctorates from the Jewish Theological Seminary,

New York; from Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv; from Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and

from the Weizman Institute of Science, Rehovot (in 2000, 2001, and 2002). Besides nu-

merous research reports and articles in the sciences and humanities, he is editor of Bio-

physik (1977, 1982; Engl. Biophysics 1983, coed.); Evolution of Social Behavior (1980, ed.);

Natur und Geschichte (1983, coed.); Neuroethology and Behavioral Physiology (1983,

coed.); and author of Evolution, Genetik und menschliches Verhalten (1986); Natur als Kul-

turaufgabe (1986); Wissenschaft: Zur Rede gestellt (1989); Wissenschaft im Widerstreit

(1990); Die Fortschrittsdroge (1992); Wissenschaft gegen Zukunftsangst (1998); and Schoner

neuer Mensch? (2002).

Graham Parkes is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Among the books he has edited, translated, or authored are: Heidegger and Asian

Thought (1987), Nietzsche and Asian Thought (1991), Nishitani Keiji’s The Self-

Overcoming of Nihilism (1990), Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology

(1994), Reinhard May’s Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East-Asian Influences on his Work

(1996), and Francois Berthier’s Reading Zen in the Rocks: The Japanese Dry Landscape Gar-

den (2000), as well as a new translation of Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra (2005). He

is also beginning to present the results of his philosophical research in the medium of

digital video on DVD: Nietzsche’s Thinking Places: From the Alps to the Mediterranean

(2003), and Walter Benjamin’s Paris: Projecting the Arcades (2005).

Michael Polemis is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria, and

Guest Professor at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. He is an executive

Contributors 599

board member of the Osterreichische Gesellschaft fur Philosophie, the Osterreichische

Gesellschaft fur Religionsphilosophie, and the Philosophische Gesellschaft Klagenfurt.

He is a Fellow of the Osterreichische Forschungsgemeinschaft. His special interests are

the history of philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of history.

His recent books include Negativitat und Praxis (1972, Negativity and Praxis), Die Byzan-

tinische Philosophie unter Berucksichtigung des Johannes von Damaskos: Versuch einer

Rekonstruktion (1985, Byzantine Philosophy with Consideration about Johannes of

Damascus), and Zum Begriff der Trinitat (1993, On the Concept of Trinity).

E Richard Sorenson. In the course of his long-term Study of Child Behavior and Human

Development in Cultural Isolates, Sorenson obtained a PhD in anthropology from

Stanford University; was a guest lecturer for the postgraduate course in pediatrics of

Harvard Medical School; served as a consultant at the Langley-Porter Neuropsychiatric

Institute of the University of California Medical School, San Francisco; was an NIH

scholar and an advisor on film in the Social Sciences for the National Research Council,

Washington DC; was the founding director of the National Human Studies Film Cen-

ter at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; and was a research associate of

many scholarly organizations around the world such as the Micronesian Area Research

Center, University of Guam, Agana; the Museo do Indio, Brazil; and the Institute for

Papua New Guinea Studies, Port Moresby. Important among these were the Library of

Tibetan Works and Archives, Dharamsala, India, and Gyudmed Tantric University,

Gurupura, India. Supporting these diverse and widespread studies were grants from

the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, the

National Institutes of Health, the National Geographic Society, the Rachelwood Foun-

dation, the Institute for Intercultural Studies, a specific line-item appropriation from

the United States Congress, and a variety of smaller foundations and private donations.

Principal accomplishments include organizing and directing the production of approx-

imately one million feet of research motion-picture film on vanishing ways of life and

culture in isolated regions worldwide, discovery of a preconquest type of consciousness

common to societies previously unconquered by aliens, uncovering a transformation

in basic consciousness as traditional Tibetan monasteries were modernized, and devel-

oping a methodology for preserving data from nonrecurring events for scientific study.

The study of consciousness development in traditional Tibetan monasteries included

in-depth personal instruction in Buddhist Tantric philosophy and practices at

Gyudmed Tantric University from four of its successive Abbots for a month or two a

year over a period of twenty years. That instruction is the basis of the chapter pre-

sented here. The chapter has been reviewed word by word by the last of these Abbot-

teachers, the venerable Losang Nawang Khensur, and approved by him for publication.

The most important translators were Geshe (Lharampa) Tashi Gyaltsen, of Gaden Uni-

versity of Tibet, Tenzin Yangdak of Zongkar Choede monestary, and later, Sanskrit

600 Contributors

scholar Chosang Phunrab, from the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, Vara-

nasi, India.

Mircea Steriade (1924–2006) was Professor of Neuroscience at the Faculty of Medicine,

Laval University, Quebec, Canada, since 1969. After earning an MD and DSc in Neuro-

science (in 1952 and 1955), he carried out postdoctoral studies with Frederic Bremer in

Brussels. In 1968 he was a visiting professor at the University of Montreal. For 35 years,

his research was funded by the Medical Research Council (now the Canadian Institutes

for Health Research). He was supported by the National Science and Engineering Re-

search of Canada, the Human Frontier Science Program, and the U.S. National Institute

of Health. He was actively involved in the education of PhD students and postdoctoral

fellows; many of those collaborators now have positions as professors and researchers

in Canada, the United States, Europe, and Japan. Steriade published more than 340

articles, book chapters, edited books, and monographs. Since 1990, he was the coau-

thor or single author of five monographs, Thalamic Oscillations and Signaling (1990),

Brainstem Control of Wakefulness and Sleep (1990), The Visual Thalamocortical System

and Its Modulation by the Brain Stem Core (1990), Thalamus (1997), and The Intact and

Sliced Brain (2001). Steriade was a member of the Royal Society of Canada (Academy

of Sciences). He was editor-in-chief of the journal Thalamus & Related Systems, pub-

lished by Elsevier, and was a member of other editorial boards.

Thomas Szasz AB, MD, DSc (Hon.), LHD (Hon.), is Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at

the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse, New York. He is

the author of 31 books, among them the classic, The Myth of Mental Illness (1961), and

The Meaning of Mind: Language, Morality, and Neuroscience (1996). His most recent book

is Coercion as Cure: A Critical History of Psychiatry (2007). Szasz is widely recognized as

the world’s foremost critic of psychiatric coercions and excuses. He maintains that

just as we reject using theological assertions about people’s (deviant) religious states of

mind (heresy) as a justification for depriving individuals of liberty, so we should also

reject using medical assertions about people’s (deviant) psychiatric states of mind

(mental illness) as a justification for depriving individuals of liberty and/or excusing

them of crimes (and incarcerating them in ‘‘mental hospitals’’). Szasz has received

many awards for his defense of individual liberty and responsibility threatened by this

modern form of tyranny masquerading as therapy (which he has termed the ‘‘Thera-

peutic State’’). A frequent and popular lecturer, he has addressed professional and

lay groups, and has appeared on radio and television, in North, Central, and South

America as well as in Australia, Europe, Japan, and South Africa. His books have been

translated into every major language.

Mariela Szirko is a neuropharmacologist with degrees in pharmacy and biochemistry

who has also had a teaching career in neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. She

is head of the Neurophysiology Department at the Centre of Neurobiological Research,

Contributors 601

Ministry of Health of the Argentine Republic, Full Professor of Neurophysiology in the

Department of Neuroscience, and researcher in charge of projects in the Laboratory of

Electroneurobiological Research of the Neuropsychiatric Hospital J. T. Borda, Buenos

Aires City Government. She has also worked in several CONICET (Argentinian Council

of Scientific Investigations) research projects for the Laboratory of Sensory Research

and the Physiology Department of the Pharmacy and Biochemistry Faculty, University

of Buenos Aires, and is editor of the journal Electroneurobiology. The central focus of her

work is investigating brain biophysics and neurochemical microprocesses in relativistic

perspective.

Robert A. F. Thurman is the Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies

in the Department of Religion at Columbia University; President of the Tibet House

U.S., a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation and promotion of Tibetan

civilization; and President of the American Institute of Buddhist Studies, a nonprofit

affiliated with the Center for Buddhist Studies at Columbia University and dedicated

to the publication of translations of important texts from the Tibetan Tanjur. Thurman

also translates important Tibetan and Sanskrit philosophical writings and lectures and

writes on Buddhism (particularly Tibetan Buddhism), on Asian history (particularly

the history of the monastic institution in Asian civilization), and on critical philoso-

phy, with a focus on the dialogue between the material and inner sciences of the

world’s religious traditions. His translations and writings of both scholarly and popular

works include Tsong Khapa’s Speech of Gold: Reason and Enlightenment in the Central Phi-

losophy of Tibet (1990), The Central Philosophy of Tibet (1991), The Tibetan Book of the

Dead (1993), Anger, The Seven Deadly Sins (2004), and his most recent, The Jewel Tree of

Tibet: The Enlightenment Engine of Tibetan Buddhism (2005). He is credited with being at

the forefront of making Tibetan art accessible and understandable in the West and,

with distinguished art historians, he collaborated in curating several important travel-

ing exhibitions, including ‘‘Wisdom and Compassion,’’ ‘‘Mandala,’’ and ‘‘Worlds of

Transformation,’’ which set a standard in the art world. For more information, go to

http://www.bobthurman.com/.

Edith L. B. Turner is a member of the faculty of the Department of Anthropology at the

University of Virginia, specializing in symbolism, ritual, and aspects of consciousness

including shamanism. She has done fieldwork among such diverse peoples as the

Ndembu of Zambia, the Inupiat, the Yupiit Eskimos of Eastern Siberia, the Bagisu of

Uganda, and in Mexico, Europe, Brazil, Israel, and elsewhere. She has participated in

rituals in Africa in which she sighted a spirit form, and in northern Alaska she studied

Eskimo healing and its relationship to shamanism. She has also lectured on aspects of

her fieldwork and on the general principles derived from it. Among her publications

are From Shamans to Healers: The Survival of an Inupiat Eskimo Skill (1989), The Whale

Decides: Eskimos’ and Ethnographers’ Shared Consciousness on the Ice (1990), Psychology,

602 Contributors

Metaphor, or Actuality? A Probe into Inupiat Healing (1992), The Reality of Spirits: A

Tabooed or Permitted Field of Study? (1992), Experiencing Ritual: A New Interpretation of Af-

rican Healing (1992), The Hands Feel It: Healing and Spirit Presence among a Northern Alas-

kan People (1996), Among the Healers: Stories of Spiritual and Ritual Healing around the

World (2005), and Heart of Lightness: The Life Story of an Anthropologist (2005). She is

also the editor of the journal Anthropology and Humanism.

Julia Watkin (1944–2005) was an honorary research associate in philosophy (2003) at

the University of Tasmania and a Kierkegaard specialist. She obtained her BA at the

University of Bristol, from which she also received her doctorate on Kierkegaard. Her

work includes several Kierkegaard books: A Key to Kierkegaard’s Abbreviations and

Spelling/Nøgle til Kierkegaards Forkortelser og Stavemade (1981); Kierkegaard’s book on

Adler, Nutidens religieuse Forvirring (1984); translation of the first volume of Kierke-

gaard’s Writings: Early Polemical Writings (1990); Kierkegaard (1997); and Historical

Dictionary of Kierkegaard’s Philosophy (2001). Watkin also published over a hundred

articles and papers on Kierkegaard in a number of languages and in many countries.

She contributed to publications such as Kierkegaardiana, the Journal of the History of

European Ideas, and International Kierkegaard Commentary. In 1979 she established the

ongoing International Kierkegaard Newsletter (and in 1994 the website International Kier-

kegaard Information). In 1991 she became a member of the International Advisory

Board of the American series International Kierkegaard Commentary (editor Robert L. Per-

kins). She was on the team of the American translation project ‘‘Kierkegaard’s Writ-

ings’’ for fourteen years and was Assistant Director of the Department of Kierkegaard

Research at Copenhagen University. She was lecturer and then senior lecturer in phi-

losophy at the University of Tasmania, where she directed the Søren Kierkegaard Re-

search Unit. She was also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (1969), and a member

of the Danish Kierkegaard Society. She taught and supervised students from many

countries. Her latest book, God and the Modern World, was published in 2005.

Helmut Wautischer is Senior Lecturer in philosophy at California State University,

Sonoma. He received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Graz, Austria.

Trained as an analytic philosopher, he has a fascination with ‘‘first-person’’ ways of

knowing. His primary research interests are in philosophical anthropology and con-

sciousness studies. He is the author of several papers, guest editor of a special issue on

dreaming in the Anthropology of Consciousness (1994), and editor of Tribal Epistemolo-

gies: Essays in the Philosophy of Anthropology (1998). He has presented papers at different

venues such as the American Anthropological Association and the World Congress of

Philosophy, chaired and organized many sessions in conjunction with the Annual

Meetings of the American Philosophical Association, and is coeditor of the online jour-

nal Existenz, at http://www.bu.edu/paiedeia.

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