Sharon Hewitt Rawlette is an analytic philosopher by training, with a PhD from New York University, where she studied under Thomas Nagel and Sharon Street. Her dissertation in metaethics — published in 2016 as The Feeling of Value — won NYU’s Dean’s Outstanding Dissertation Award. She taught for two years as Florence Levy Kay Fellow in Ethics at Brandeis University before leaving academia to pursue her interests in creative writing and cottage farming.
Almost as soon as she left academe, she discovered the scientific literature on parapsychology. In March 2019, she published a paper on the epistemic import of psychic-seeming coincidences, and in May 2019 she released her book The Source and Significance of Coincidences, which analyzes the extensive evidence that coincidences are more than just chance events and actually point to a meaningful reality beyond the bounds of current science. She has presented her research at the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and at the Esalen Institute’s Center for Theory and Research. In Nov. 2021, her essay “Beyond Death,” on the best evidence for the survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death, received recognition as a runner-up in the essay contest sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Beyond Death is available for free on the BICS website as well as in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook formats.
Sharon is currently at work on a book integrating her various fields of research to provide a holistic, phenomenal value-based solution to the problem of mental causation. Its working title is “Qualia & Nonlocality.”
If you are particularly interested in her scholarly work, you can also find Sharon on Academia.edu or ResearchGate.
Scholarly Publications
“Analytic Hedonism and Observable Moral Facts,” in R.Y. Chappell, D. Meissner, and W. MacAskill, eds., An Introduction to Utilitarianism (2022).
“L’archétype du trickster comme gardien des frontières de notre réalité,” in Laurent Kasprowicz and Romuald Leterrier, eds., Phénomènes: Et si notre réalité était un rêve? (Paris: Guy Trédaniel, 2022), 155–172.
“Stephen E Braude,” Psi Encyclopedia (London: The Society for Psychical Research, 2022).
Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness (2021).
“Phone Calls from the Dead? Exploring the Role of the Trickster,” Journal of Scientific Exploration 34, no. 1 (2020): 116–126.
“Coincidence or Psi? The Epistemic Import of Spontaneous Cases of Purported Psi Identified Post-Verification,” Journal of Scientific Exploration 33, no. 1 (2019): 9–42.
The Feeling of Value: Moral Realism Grounded in Phenomenal Consciousness (King George, VA: Dudley & White, 2016).
“What Do Our Intuitions about the Experience Machine Really Tell Us about Hedonism?” Philosophical Studies 151, no. 3 (2010): 331–349.
Recent Academic Presentations
“The Impossible Efficacy of Intention? Psi as a Model for Value-Based Holistic Causation” (lecture, Archives of the Impossible II, Rice University, Houston, TX, May 13, 2023), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anx1SvECwNw&t=3s
Sharon Hewitt Rawlette, PhD 