ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of this Handbook – its topics, aims, categories, questions, putative answers, approaches, and authors – and how they all may be understood to hang together or to diverge, as structured by three central inquiries. First, while there has been a “philosophy of meditation” in Asian philosophy for millennia, whether there is, can be, or ought to be a Western philosophy of meditation is one of three key questions addressed here. The second is about the extent to which meditation may aid in our philosophical understanding, of mind, consciousness, the self, agency, phenomenology, etc. And the third concerns whether meditation counts as a form of philosophy. Some of our contributors argue for, or tacitly presuppose, positive answers to any of these questions; others do not. This Introduction sets forth many considerations that ought to be brought to bear on these questions. It also explains how and why the chapters are divided into six parts, how they could have been categorized differently and thus alternative sequences in which they may be read, how each chapter fares relative to these questions, and how the chapters tacitly relate to each other.
