Philosophy, Science and Mindfulness

The current popularity of mindfulness has led to applications in a wide range of academic disciplines – including education, psychology, psychotherapy, and the mind-body health field generally (Purser, Forbes & Burke, 2016) – in addition, to its widespread use in popular culture to publicise everything from colouring books to diet regimes and gardening manuals. Critics of such a commodification of mindfulness applications have pointed to the divorce of such practices from their roots in Buddhist ethics and precepts which – in the worst cases of ‘McMindfulness’ – have resulted in a gross misuse if not outright abuse of mindfulness principles (Purser, 2013; Hyland, 2018). Whilst accepting the force of such criticisms (which I have discussed extensively elsewhere; Hyland, 2016, 2017), this paper takes a broader perspective and sets out arguments for ways in which the mindfulness phenomenon has opened up fruitful avenues of connectivity between Eastern (principally Buddhist) forms of thought and Western conceptions of philosophy and science.