Deeper Learning with Psychedelics: Philosophical Pathways through Altered States

Through a philosophical lens, this book explores the powerful educational capabilities of classic psychedelics.

Finalist for the 2024 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Education category

In both clinical and informal settings, psychedelics users often report they have undergone something profound and even life-altering. Yet there persists a confounding inability to articulate just what has been imparted. Informed by multidisciplinary emerging research, this book provides an account of the specifically educational aspects of psychedelics and how they can render us ready to learn. Drawing from indigenous peoples worldwide who typically revere these substances as "plant teachers" and from canonical thinkers in the western tradition such as Plato, Spinoza, Kant, and Heidegger, the author proposes an original set of categories through which to understand the educational capabilities of "entheogens" (psychedelics with visionary qualities). It emerges that entheogens' real power lies not in destabilizing and decentering-"turning on and dropping out"-but as powerful aids in restoring and reenchanting our shared worlds.

David J. Blacker is Professor of Philosophy of Education and Legal Studies at the University of Delaware. He is the author of Democratic Education Stretched Thin: How Complexity Challenges a Liberal Ideal, also published by SUNY Press, among other books.