In this paper we explore the notion of rehearsal as a way to develop an embodied and enactive account of imagining. After reviewing the neuroscience of motor imagery, we argue, in the context of performance studies, that rehearsal includes forms of imagining that involve motor processes. We draw on Sartre’s phenomenology of imagining which also suggests that imagining involves motor processes. This research in neuroscience and phenomenology, supports the idea of an embodied and enactive account of imagination.

Kant, Wittgenstein, and Husserl all held that visual awareness of objects requires visual awareness of the space in which the objects are located. There is a lively debate in the literature on spatial perception whether this view is undermined by the results of experiments on a Balint’s syndrome patient, known as RM. I argue that neither of two recent interpretations of these results is able to explain RM’s apparent ability to experience motion. I outline some ways in which each interpretation (...) may respond to this challenge, and suggest which way of meeting the challenge is preferable. I conclude that RM retains some awareness of the larger space surrounding the objects he sees. (shrink)

This paper connects ideas from twentieth century Gestalt psychology, experiments in vision science, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception. I propose that when we engage in simple sensorimotor tasks whose successful completion is open, our behavior may be motivated by practical perceptual awareness alone, responding to invariant features of the perceptual field that are invisible to other forms of perceptual awareness. On this view, we see more than we think we see, as evidenced by our skillful bodily behavior.

This paper charts the journey that led to the author's discovery of phenomenology as a potential research methodology in the field of science education, and describes the impact on his own thinking and approach of his encounters with the work of Husserl and Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Van Manen. Drawing on this theoretical framework, the author argues that, as a methodology for investigating scientific thinking in relation to life experience, learning and curriculum design, phenomenology not only provides a means of accessing (...) subjective knowing and pure perception, but is sufficiently rigorous and systematic to represent the lifeworld experiences of research participants with a high degree of accuracy. In the process, he highlights the uniqueness and value of phenomenology in relation to quantitative and other qualitative research methods. The aim of this paper is to inspire insight into the value in science education research of using a methodology that fosters a deeper understanding of both teachers’ and learners’ lived experience of the scientific world. The challenge to science specialists, whether educators or researchers, would be to shift their default mode of understanding from the object pole to the ego pole, from the physical object to the human subject, from the observable and measurable to the lived as the true source of human knowledge. (shrink)

I argue that we find the articulation of a problem concerning bodily agency in the early works of the Merleau-Ponty which he explicates as analogous to what he explicitly calls the problem of perception. The problem of perception is the problem of seeing how we can have the object given in person through it perspectival appearances. The problem concerning bodily agency is the problem of seeing how our bodily movements can be the direct manifestation of a person’s intentions in the (...) world. In both cases what, according to Merleau-Ponty, obscures a recognition of the phenomenon in question is a conception of our bodily capacities, i.e. our sensibility and our motility, which reduces these to the workings of mechanisms that are blind to meaning. I argue that both the problem concerning perception and the problem concerning bodily agency can be properly called transcendental. The problem of perception is transcendental because it concerns the very intelligibility of appearances and judgements with empirical content. The problem of bodily agency is transcendental in the sense that it concerns the very intelligibility of our bodily capacity to carry out intentions and by implication the intelligibility of our intentions as such. (shrink)

In this paper I piece present an account of Husserl’s approach to the phenomenological reconstruction of consciousness’ immemorial past, a problem, I suggest, that is quite pertinent for defenders of Lockean psychological continuity views of personal identity. To begin, I sketch the background of the problem facing the very project of a genetic phenomenology, within which the reconstructive analysis is situated. While the young Husserl took genetic matters to be irrelevant to the main task of phenomenology, he would later come (...) to see their importance and, indeed, centrality as the precursor and subsoil for the rationality of consciousness. I then argue that there is a close connection between reconstruction and genetic phenomenology, such that reconstruction is a necessary component of the program of genetic phenomenology, and I set out an argument of Husserl’s compelling one to enter into reconstructive territory. With that impetus, I schematically lay out the main contours one finds in Husserl’s practice of reconstructive techniques. We find him taking two distinct approaches, that of the individual viewed egologically (through the abstract lens of a single individual’s consciousness) and as embedded in interpersonal relations. Husserl occasionally calls these the approach “from within” and “from without,” respectively. Ultimately, the two approaches are not only complementary, but require one another. In closing, I argue that these considerations lead to a blurring of lines between the genetic and generative phenomenological registers, which challenges the prevalent view that there is a sharp demarcation of the two. (shrink)

Among the exciting prospects raised by advocates of predictive processing [PP] is the offer of a systematic description of our neural activity suitable for drawing explanatory bridges to the structure of conscious experience. Yet the gulf to cross seems wide. For, as critics of PP have argued, our visual experience certainly doesn’t seem probabilistic.While Clark proposes a means to make PP compatible with the experience of a determinate world, I argue that we should not rush to do so. Two notions (...) of determinacy are conflated in the claim that perception is determinate: ‘univocality’ and ‘full detail’. The former, as Clark argues, is only to be expected in any PP agent that models its world for the purpose of acting on it. But as Husserl argued, and as perceptual psychology has borne out, we significantly overestimate the degree of detail with which we perceive a univocal world.This second form of indeterminacy is due not to the probabilistic nature of PP’s model, but rather to its hierarchical structure, with increasingly coarse-grained representations as we move further from the sensory periphery. A PP system may, or may not, deliver a univocal hypothesis at each of these levels. An action-oriented PP system would only be expected to do so only at the level needed for successful action guidance. A naïve reporter’s overestimation of the degree of determinate detail in their visual experience can thereby be accounted for with a more gradual version of the ‘refrigerator light’ effect: we experience determinate details just to the degree that they’re needed – immediately as they’re needed. (shrink)

According to the decomposition thesis, perceptual experiences resolve without remainder into their different modality-specific components. Contrary to this view, I argue that certain cases of multisensory integration give rise to experiences representing features of a novel type. Through the coordinated use of bodily awareness—understood here as encompassing both proprioception and kinaesthesis—and the exteroceptive sensory modalities, one becomes perceptually responsive to spatial features whose instances couldn’t be represented by any of the contributing modalities functioning in isolation. I develop an argument for (...) this conclusion focusing on two cases: 3D shape perception in haptic touch and experiencing an object’s egocentric location in crossmodally accessible, environmental space. (shrink)

This paper recaps the position of the Bern school of Husserl interpretation, namely the work of Iso Kern and Eduard Marbach. Kern and Marbach have provided detailed accounts in English as to how to read the key issues in Husserl regarding the philosophical and psychological positions and the methods used to create a theoretical practice that goes before empirical work. When it comes to teaching, there is nothing more useful than a demonstrable technique that shows the evidence to which the (...) scholarship refers. This paper notes the meditation technique of mindfulness that calms the mind, aids acceptance and provides a sense of well-being in a direct way. Despite that application, mindfulness also provides an opportunity for the spontaneous experiences of the phenomena of consciousness to show themselves. In this way, direct personal experience of phenomena can be followed by the interpretation of Husserlian phenomenology. Mindfulness is a parallel which makes the words of Husserl, and Heidegger for that matter, come alive. Mindfulness, as a lived experience, is a foil for teaching in order to set students on the track of what Husserl did in order to get to the conclusions that he provided. This return to the phenomena sets the scene for understanding the difference between Husserl and Heidegger and the understanding of phenomenology in general in qualitative psychology. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to explore, from a phenomenologically informed perspective, the phenomenon of the operative spatialization of human thinking, viewed in its relationship with the embodied human organism’s spatial experience. Operative spatialization in this context refers to the cognitive role and functioning of spatial schematizations and differentiations in human thinking. My particular focus is the domain of conceptualization. By drawing on Husserl’s discussion of the (linguistic) process of a sedimentation of meaning, I aim to show that spatialization (...) functions in a structurally ambivalent manner. On the one hand, spatialization predisposes and thus narrows the scope of human conceptual thought. On the other hand, spatialization establishes an implicit cognitive scaffold indispensable for the development and practice of human higher-order thinking. The structure and functioning of this scaffold, I argue, is intrinsically related to the spatial structure and dynamics of human embodiment. Synthesizing insights from phenomenological studies concerning the experiential constitution of space, and classic and recent research findings from fields such as cognitive linguistics and psychology concerning the cognitive dimension of image-schemas and gestural behavior, I argue that the living human body functions centrally as the sense-constitutive ‘site of conversion’ (Husserl) between concrete structures of spatial experience and abstract structures of conceptual thought. (shrink)

This paper explores some of the constructive dimensions and specifics of human theoretic cognition, combining perspectives from (Husserlian) genetic phenomenology and distributed cognition approaches. I further consult recent psychological research concerning spatial and numerical cognition. The focus is on the nexus between the theoretic development of abstract, idealized geometrical and mathematical notions of space and the development and effective use of environmental cognitive support systems. In my discussion, I show that the evolution of the theoretic cognition of space apparently follows (...) two opposing, but in truth, intrinsically aligned trajectories. On the epistemic plane, which is the main focus of Husserl’s genetic phenomenological investigations, theoretic conceptions of space are progressively constituted by way of an idealizing emancipation of spatial cognition from the concrete, embodied intentionality underlying the human organism’s perception of space. As a result of this emancipation, it ultimately becomes possible for the human mind to theoretically conceive of and posit space as an ideal entity that is universally geometrical and mathematical. At the same time, by synthesizing a range of literature on spatial and mathematical cognition, I illustrate that for the theoretic mind to undertake precisely this emancipating process successfully, and further, for an ideal and objective notion of geometrical and mathematical space to first of all become fully scientifically operative, the cognitive support provided by a range of specific symbolic technologies is central. These include lettered diagrams, notation systems, and more generally, the technique of formalization and require for their functioning various cognitively efficacious types of embodiment. Ultimately, this paper endeavors to understand the specific symbolic-technological dimensions that have been instrumental to major shifts in the development of idealized, scientific conceptions of space. The epistemic characteristics of these shifts have been previously discussed in genetic phenomenology, but without devoting sufficient attention to the constructive role of symbolic technologies. At the same time, this paper identifies some of the irreducible phenomenological and epistemic dimensions that characterize the functioning of the historically situated, embodied and distributed theoretic mind. (shrink)

In this paper I examine a set of exceptional aesthetic experiences that remove us from our pragmatic everyday life and involve a specific type of unaffordability. I then extend this notion of unaffordability to experiences of awe and its relation to the sublime. My analysis is guided by considerations of the phenomenologically inspired enactivist approach that supports an affordance-based accounts of aesthetic experience. I review some recent neurophenomenological studies of the experience of awe, and I then sketch out a phenomenology (...) of awe as it approaches the sublime. (shrink)

It is one thing for two or more persons to perceive the same object, and it is quite another for two or more persons to perceive the same object together. The latter phenomenon is called joint attention and has recently garnered considerable interest from psychologists. However, contemporary psychological research has not succeeded in clarifying how persons can share perception of an object. Joint attention thus stands in need of phenomenological clarification. Surprisingly, this has yet to be offered. Phenomenologists have provided (...) thoroughgoing analyses of perceptual experience, but have overlooked the perceptual experiences of co-perceivers; and, while a number of well-known phenomenologists have offered accounts of how one encounters other persons, they have neglected the phenomenon of perceptually attending to an object with other persons. This paper addresses a shortcoming of both contemporary psychological research and the phenomenological tradition by providing a phenomenological analysis of joint attention. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, Volume 10, Edition 2, October 2010: 33-42. (shrink)

Many viewers presented with a round plate tilted to their line of sight will report that they see a round plate that looks elliptical from their perspective. Alva Noë thinks that we should take reports of this kind as adequate descriptions of the phenomenology of spatial experiences. He argues that his so‐called enactive or sensorimotor account of spatial perceptual content explains why both the plate's circularity and its elliptical appearance are phenomenal aspects of experience. In this paper, I critique the (...) phenomenal adequacy of Noë's sensorimotor account of spatial perceptual content. I begin by showing that some of its central claims are in conflict with the phenomenology of perceptual experience. I then argue that shape appearances have no phenomenal reality, thus undermining this central motivation for his account. (shrink)

This paper explores the emergence of the distinctions between the transcendental and the psychological and, correlatively, between phenomenology and psychology that emerge in The Idea of Phenomenology. It is argued that this first attempt to draw these distinctions reveals that the conception of transcendental phenomenology remains infected by elements of the earlier conception of descriptive psychology and that only later does Husserl move to a more adequate—but perhaps not yet fully purified—conception of the transcendental.

As Dieter Lohmar (Citation2002; Citation2012) has shown, in the Logical Investigation Husserl sketches a peculiar type of reduction, the so-called “Reduktion auf den reellen Bestand.” Husserl does not explicitly put this kind of reduction forward, though, and he does definitely not clarify how it works, and what its elements properly are. Lohmar proposes to understand it as a kind of empiricist reduction to mere sense-data. On the contrary, I believe that it should be considered as entailing also the apprehensional forms (...) of sense-data, though not the so-called apprehensional senses. In this article, I will offer some arguments and textual evidence in favour of this claim, and I will conclude by proposing that, despite Husserl’s unclarity on the issue, the reduction to the real components of experience, rather than being simply an ancestor of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction, should be seen as the regulative model of all later forms of reduction. (shrink)