Epistemic Character Change: Psychedelic Experiences as a Case Study

In Rob Lovering (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoactive Drug Use. New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2024)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

People tend to think of our intellectual characters as at least partially malleable. We can become more – or less – virtuous or vicious epistemic agents. However, people also tend to think of characterological change as typically slow and incremental. I use recent empirical work on the effects of psychedelic experiences on personality to argue that such circumscribed experiences may be epistemically transformative, for better or worse. We have good, if tentative reasons to believe that psychedelics can alter their user's character traits in ways that may lead her to become a more (or less) virtuous epistemic agent after as little as one or two trips. This, in turn, means that even if psychedelics do not drastically alter our stock of, say, true or justified beliefs, they can still drastically change our epistemic standing. Since, plausibly, the value (or disvalue) of epistemic traits is not exhausted by their capacity to assist or hinder the attainment of the ends of inquiry, psychedelic experiences are epistemically valuable (or disvaluable) in ways hitherto little explored by philosophers of psychedelics.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive

External links

  • This entry has no external links. Add one.
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

The epistemic innocence of psychedelic states.Chris Letheby - 2016 - Consciousness and Cognition 39:28-37.
Compassionate use of psychedelics.Martin Šurkala & Adam Greif - 2020 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 23 (3):485-496.
Philosophy of Psychedelics.Chris Letheby - 2021 - Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Analytics

Added to PP
2024-09-10

Downloads
164 (#141,968)

6 months
164 (#24,390)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Noam Tiran
University of California, San Diego

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references