Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
April 19, 2022
Sascha Benjamin Fink
7 citations
This philosophical commentary argues that while psychedelics can trigger processes of discovery, they rarely contribute directly to justification or epistemic success—truth, veridicality, aptness, or skillfulness—which are essential for a mental state to count as knowledge. The heavy epistemic work that turns a mental state into knowledge remains largely independent of psychedelic influence. However, the mechanisms Chris Letheby associates with psychedelics do provide crucial epistemic benefits when linked to understanding, offering a broader picture that includes cases where truth or justification is absent.
Die Psychotherapie
February 9, 2024
Dimitris Repantis, Michael Koslowski, Sascha Benjamin Fink
4 citations
Clinical research on psychedelic-assisted therapy for mental disorders has resumed in recent years, with a steadily increasing number of studies and publications. This has raised many ethical questions that have not yet been sufficiently examined and answered. This article provides an overview of the state of clinical research and then addresses the central ethical issues arising from this particular form of therapy. Using current literature and examples from an ongoing study in Germany, ethical questions are examined in detail.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
May 2, 2022
Chiara Caporuscio, Sascha Benjamin Fink
1 citation
A book symposium on Chris Letheby's Philosophy of Psychedelics (2021) examines the tension between psychedelic therapy and philosophical naturalism. The special issue opens with an introduction by Matthew Johnson, followed by Letheby's overview of his main arguments. Seven contributions either critique or expand on Letheby's proposed mechanism for psychedelic therapy or discuss its epistemic implications. The symposium concludes with Letheby's responses to the commentaries.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
February 9, 2026
Sascha Benjamin Fink, Andrew Y. Lee
Conscious experiences have many structural features, such as color experiences varying in hue, saturation, and brightness, decreasing visual acuity from the center to the periphery of the visual field, pain experiences in different magnitudes, and temporal experience flowing as a continuous stream. Structuralism, broadly defined, is an approach to consciousness research focused on investigating these structures. Varieties include methodological structuralism, which holds that scientific methods yield knowledge only of structural features, and ontic structuralism, which claims consciousness is nothing but structure. This special volume collects articles on the structures of conscious experiences and their role in research, aiming to establish a foundation and agenda for a structuralist research program in the science of consciousness.