"Feeling and Knowing - Making Minds Conscious" by Antonio Damasio.

I've previously written about an earlier book by Damasio - "The Feeling of What Happens."

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/724418

Damasio is a cognitive scientist who has written extensively about mental processes. The earlier book, published in 1999, did include a discussion of consciousness, but in a broad context of how the mind works with a heavy emphasis on anatomy and physiology. The newer book, published in 2021, focuses on feeling and consciousness from a process and functional perspective. In it, Damasio describes the mental processes that combine to make us conscious as well as the functions that consciousness carries out in the overall process of maintaining the internal equilibrium of human and other organisms.

Damasio clearly intends the discussion to address issues related to the "hard problem" of consciousness from the "what's the big deal" point of view. I'm sure it won't be convincing to those find the idea of the hard problem compelling.

Definitely a short book for the price, but it helped me start to put words to how I have always seen this issue.

"Philosophy as therapy," has always interested me. There is this neat New Yorker article on it. It would be interesting to me if anyone had ever tried to set up a retreat with this in mind.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/when-philosophers-become-therapists

But then I've been reading about Patristic philosophy, particularly from Syria and Egypt, because this is probably one of the key eras where philosophy is practiced as a sort of therapy on a large scale.



The Philokalia is another great example here, although obviously not focused on the laity.