ZAND Seminar 12.12.2023

ZAND Seminar, Tuiesday 12.12.2023, 5pm CET
Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes
On the Need for Metaphysics in Psychedelic Therapy and Research
This talk will summarise Dr Sjöstedt-Hughes’ recent paper on integrating metaphysics into psychedelic therapy, but also thereby showing how it may have wider societal applications. We shall look at the academic meanings of ‘metaphysics’, contrasting it to ‘mysticism’, and look at how it dovetails into certain psychedelic experiences. A ‘Metaphysics Matrix’ will be presented that offers a variety, a menu, of options concerning the interpretation of psychedelic phenomenology, a matrix that traverses positions in the metaphysics of mind such as physicalism, dualism, idealism, neutral monism, panpsychism, pantheism, and the transcendent. Moreover, we shall see how the mind-matter problem may have important ramifications for mental health therapy.
Dr Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes is a Philosopher of Mind and Metaphysics who specializes in the thought of Whitehead, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Spinoza—and in fields pertaining to panpsychism and altered states of consciousness. He is a lecturer at The University of Exeter. Peter is the author of Noumenautics (2015), Modes of Sentience (2021), co-editor and contributor of Bloomsbury’s Philosophy and Psychedelics (2022), the TEDx Talker on ‘psychedelics and consciousness‘, and he is inspiration to the recreation of inhuman philosopher Marvel Superhero, Karnak.