Ten Years' Viewing from Within: Further Debate

This special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies is the sequel to Ten Years of Viewing from Within, JCS Vol. 16, No. 10-12 (2009), commemorating the tenth anniversary of the publication of The View from Within, JCS Vol. 6, No. 2-3 (1999), where Francisco Varela in collaboration with Jonathan Shear designed the foundations of a research program on lived experience. The commemorative issue aimed to examine and refine this research program on first-person methods, through contributions based on empirical research. At the end of the Introduction, guest editor Claire Petitmengin invited other researchers to participate in this debate, and in response six further commentaries were received, covering many methodological, epistemological and philosophical issues related to the study of consciousness in the first-person. These form the core of the current issue, and are accompanied in some instances by responses from the authors whose work they discuss. The journal's editors hope that these two issues make a positive contribution towards establishing possibility of a first-person discipline and strengthening the emerging research community in this field.