Analiza i Egzystencja
November 25, 2025
Paweł Gwiaździński, Magdalena Reuter
The microphenomenological interview method offers a second-person approach to studying subjective experience, addressing limitations of both third-person methods (which miss subjective consciousness) and first-person methods (which rely on the researcher's own experience). Developed by Claire Petitmengin, this method involves an interviewer guiding a participant to articulate the diachronic and synchronic structure of their lived experience, making it suitable for empirical cognitive science research seeking objective yet participant-centered data.
Analiza i Egzystencja
November 25, 2025
Paweł Gwiaździński, Magdalena Reuter
This article describes how to analyze a microphenomenological interview and compares that method with other qualitative approaches. The microphenomenological interview, developed by Claire Petitmengin, is a second-person technique that addresses challenges in studying subjective experience, such as distraction, goal preoccupation, and difficulty verbalizing lived experience. The analysis identifies minimal units of meaning (descriptemes) in structural sentences, which form descriptive categories. Through abstraction operations on synchronic and diachronic levels, increasingly general categories emerge. The method is contrasted with Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, Transdiagnostic Assessment of Temporal Experience, Grounded Theory, Front-Loaded Phenomenology, and Ethnography, and is shown to be a distinctive qualitative method for examining subjective experience.
Analiza i Egzystencja
January 1, 2025
A. Biłat
Bertrand Russell's writings on mysticism fall into two groups. One group, including parts of Mysticism and Logic (1914), criticizes key tenets of mystical philosophy found in Parmenides, Spinoza, and Hegel. The other group, including parts of The Essence of Religion (1912), presents a concept of non-dogmatic mysticism as a spiritual attitude toward the world, defined by a specific type of contemplation and mystical emotions. This article offers a rational reconstruction of that concept, considering its philosophical context and connections to the contemporary psychology of mystical experience developed in the tradition of W. James and W. T. Stace. It provides a new perspective on Russell's early thought, revealing the complex structure and philosophical and psychological significance of his concept of mysticism.
Analiza i Egzystencja
November 4, 2024
Jacek Jarocki
Analytic philosophy of mind abandoned its original anti-metaphysical stance during the twentieth century and adopted materialism, which was meant to align with the early program of analysis. By the end of the century, materialism faced a crisis, and efforts to resolve it have reshaped recent philosophical debates about the mind. Current trends suggest possible directions for the field in the coming decades.
Analiza i Egzystencja
December 1, 2016
Jacek Jarocki
Bertrand Russell's neutral monism, a metaphysical view that the fundamental constituents of reality are neither mental nor physical but neutral, evolved through three phases. Initially Russell rejected it due to epistemological commitments. In The Analysis of Mind he proposed a first neutral monism with deflationary theories of object and subject. A second neutral monism, from 1927, introduced intrinsic and extrinsic properties. The author argues Russell's agnostic metaphysics is too reductive for dualists and too mysterious for materialists, and may be more epistemological than metaphysical, potentially misconstrued within the Cartesian mind-matter framework.