For as long as philosophers ignore mind-wandering, they will disregard from one-third to one-half of conscious thoughts. Regrettably, mind-wandering is only seldom addressed in phenomenology. The fundamental ambition of this paper is to offer the first systematic phenomenological investigation of mind-wandering that relies on the classical principles of Husserlian phenomenology. The paper begins with a critique of the dominant conceptions of mind-wandering in contemporary psychology and philosophy. Against such a background, the paper develops a new, phenomenologically-grounded conception of mind-wandering. The (...) paper further focuses on the central resources in Husserlian phenomenology, which can be fruitfully employed in the future interdisciplinary research on mind-wandering. Phenomenological reflections on background consciousness, on pre-predicative experience, on passivity and on self-awareness lie at the center of this analysis. The paper concludes with some reflections on the relation between mind-wandering and daydreaming and on the function of mind-wandering in conscious life. (shrink)

I contend that the well-established phenomenological distinction between reflective and pre-reflective self-awareness needs to be further supplemented with more refined distinctions between different modes of pre-reflective self-awareness. Here I distinguish between five modes, which we come across in perception, lucid dreams, non-lucid dreams, daydreams, and episodic memory. Building on the basis of a phenomenological description, I argue that perception entails the pre-reflective self-awareness of the perceiving ego; non-lucid dreams implicate the pre-reflective self-awareness of the dreamed ego; in the case of (...) lucid dreams and daydreams, we are faced with a split pre-reflective self-awareness, which entails the self-awareness of the dreaming and the dreamed ego. Lastly, in the case of episodic recollection, we are confronted with a threefold pre-reflective self-awareness: the self-awareness of the remembered ego, the remembering ego, and of the temporal unity of experience. The phenomenological analysis here offered leads to the conclusion that pre-reflective self-awareness need not be spoken of in the singular, but in the plural, and that while some modes of pre-reflective self-awareness constitute the foundations of selfhood, others enable the subject of experience to flee its facticity and become someone other than it is. (shrink)