One of the more ambitious and yet fruitful attempts in recent years to untangle general questions about the nature of aesthetic phenomena and their socially constituted nature rests in Lambert Zuidervaart’s critical hermeneutical theory of artistic truth. In this paper, I explore one part of Zuidervaart’s project, namely his conception of “aesthetic validity as a horizon of imaginative cogency.” I seek to develop Zuidervaart’s conception by bringing his thesis into dialogue with phenomenological analyses of “horizon” and the collective intentional approach (...) to institutional and social objects. Zuidervaart relies primarily on Gadamer’s view of horizon, but does not offer very much by way of clarification as to exactly what a horizon is. Phenomenological analysis of horizon should serve to add content to the idea of horizon. I contend that the Husserlian notion is both more informative and has more utility for Zuidervaart’s project. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In spite of the supposed lack of attention paid to it by Husserl in his early works on time, the future is an important topic for phenomenology that gains increasing relevance in his late works. Regarding the experience of the future, phenomenology can approach the subjective possibility of anticipating what is not yet given, both actively and passively. A new perspective on the subject’s relation to the future arises thanks to the consideration of practical phenomena. What is at stake (...) here is the possibility of doing something with what is not yet given. In this sense, our principal concern is to contextualize Husserĺs reference to the relationship between willing and future in the framework of his more general analysis of the future; at the same time, we seek to answer a question that arises in the analysis of time: the problem of novelty, and the possibility of creativity. (shrink)

The recent move to naturalize phenomenology through a mathematical protocol is a significant advance in consciousness research. It enables a new and fruitful level of dialogue between the cognitive sciences and phenomenology of such a nuanced kind that it also prompts advancement in our phenomenological analyses. But precisely what is going on at this point of ‘dialogue’ between phenomenological descriptions and mathematical algorithms, the latter of which are based on dynamical systems theory? It will be shown that what is happening (...) is something more than a mere ‘passing of the baton’ from phenomenology to mathematics. For this sophisticated naturalization to prove a worthy endeavour it must produce more than just correlation, it must prove some form of interrelation to the extent that phenomenology is deterministic. But such interrelational and deterministic requirements are the start of a slippery slope, and it will be argued that this slope only loses more friction once a further demand of formal and precise descriptions is made of phenomenology. Such deterministic and formally precise demands misconstrue phenomenology’s ideal goal of a unification of genuine/originary reason and truth. Not a deductive and definitive discipline, phenomenology is rather from the outset descriptive and critical. Phenomenology’s descriptive beginnings will thus be employed as an essential barrier to the naturalization of phenomenology. (shrink)

In this article, I address the question of violence with respect to the phenomenological difference between the transcendental and the empirical field. In the first part, I phenomenologically address the notion of violence, developing a concept required for an account of the phenomenon of violence. Thus, I correlate it with the notion of vulnerability, arguing that violence cannot be understood irrespective of vulnerability. However, a proper phenomenological account has to indicate the subjective conditions of possibility of a phenomenon as it (...) is given in experience. Therefore, we should ask: what is the status of violence when we are talking about the transcendental field? This question leads to the second part of my article, where I address the notion of violence from the perspective of the difference between the pure and the empirical ego, as it has been traced out by Husserl. If from the point of view of an empirical ego the concept of violence is meaningful, from the point of view of the transcendental ego it seems to be absurd. This is particularly significant, because Husserl is talking about the transcendental ego as being immortal. The pure ego is thus invulnerable and this means that violence—understood from the point of view of both the violating subject and the violated one—is something that cannot be linked to the transcendental field. The question that arises—how is violence possible on the empirical level, since it is impossible on the transcendental level?—is a question to which Husserl cannot respond. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have held that we visually experience objects’ occluded parts, such as the out-of-view exterior of a voluminous, opaque object. That idea is supposed to be what best explains the fact that we see objects as whole or complete despite having only a part of them in view at any given moment. Yet, the claim doesn’t express a phenomenological datum and the reasons for thinking we do experience objects’ occluded parts, I argue, aren’t compelling. Additionally, I anticipate (...) and reply to attempts to salvage the idea by appeal to perceptual expectation and amodal completion. Lastly, I address potential concerns that the only way to capture the phenomenal character of perceiving voluminous objects is to say experience outstrips what’s in view, providing a description of such experience without any implication of that idea. (shrink)

Despite extensive discussion of naïve realism in the wider philosophical literature, those influenced by the phenomenological movement who work in the philosophy of perception have hardly weighed in on the matter. It is thus interesting to discover that Edmund Husserl’s close philosophical interlocutor and friend, the early twentieth-century phenomenologist Johannes Daubert, held the naive realist view. This article presents Daubert’s views on the fundamental nature of perceptual experience and shows how they differ radically from those of Husserl’s. The author argues, (...) in conclusion, that Daubert’s views are superior to those of Husserl’s specifically in the way that they deal with the phenomenon of perceptual constancy. (shrink)

In current debates, many philosophers of science have sympathies for the project of introducing a new approach to the scientific realism debate that forges a middle way between traditional forms of scientific realism and anti-realism. One promising approach is perspectivism. Although different proponents of perspectivism differ in their respective characterizations of perspectivism, the common idea is that scientific knowledge is necessarily partial and incomplete. Perspectivism is a new position in current debates but it does have its forerunners. Figures that are (...) typically mentioned in this context include Dewey, Feyerabend, Leibniz, Kant, Kuhn, and Putnam. Interestingly, to my knowledge, there exists no work that discusses similarities to the phenomenological tradition. This is surprising because here one can find systematically similar ideas and even a very similar terminology. It is startling because early modern physics was noticeably influenced by phenomenological ideas. And it is unfortunate because the analysis of perspectival approaches in the phenomenological tradition can help us to achieve a more nuanced understanding of different forms of perspectivism. The main objective of this paper is to show that in the phenomenological tradition one finds a well-elaborated philosophy of science that shares important similarities with current versions of perspectivism. Engaging with the phenomenological tradition is also of systematic value since it helps us to gain a better understanding of the distinctive claims of perspectivism and to distinguish various grades of perspectivism. (shrink)

This paper engages with Manuel DeLanda’s Deleuze-inspired ‘assemblage theory’ from a perspective sympathetic to Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory. It first outlines DeLanda’s proposed new ‘philosophy of society’, focusing on his major works in this vein, and registers some scepticism as to its originality for sociology. It then introduces and responds to DeLanda’s critique of Bourdieu. Rather than simply reject assemblage theory outright, however, I draw on selected insights from DeLanda to push field theory in new directions. More specifically, I conceptualise (...) the interplay of fields and assemblages and use notions of ‘exteriority’ and ‘possibility space’ to help conceive individual plurality of social positioning and its effects for subjectivity and practice. (shrink)

In several papers, Mark Wrathall argued that French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, identifies a sui generis type of grounding, one not reducible to reason or natural causality. Following the Phenomenological tradition, Merleau-Ponty called this form of grounding “motivation,” and described it as the way in which one phenomenon spontaneously gives rise to another through its sense. While Wrathall’s suggestion has been taken up in the practical domain, its epistemic import has still not been fully explored. I would like to take up (...) the epistemic dimension of Wrathall’s thought in this paper. Following Wrathall, I explain how motivation can help us understand the manner in which perceptions ground singular, experiential judgments. But I extend this work in two ways. First, I suggest some additional considerations that support Wrathall’s view. Second, I argue that motivation can also help account for the way perceptions ground general judgments. My aim here will not be so much to rule out other answers to these longstanding epistemological questions, as to show that motivation carves out an attractive epistemological space. (shrink)

Sellars has taught us that we do not have direct epistemic access to sense data. Therefore, the latter cannot work as the bedrock of our knowledge. At the same time, through the myth of genius Jones, Sellars has tried to explain how we become able to rationally refer to sense data. What is more, it even seems that, following Jones’ teachings, the Rylean folk have become able to observe sense data. How could this be possible if sense data are merely (...) mythical entities? By making use of some ideas and reflections from Husserl on perceptual experience, categorial intuition, and knowledge, I suggest a way to overcome the riddle. My solution, however, will partially contrast with Sellars’ idea that sense data are, in the end, something internal to the subject. (shrink)

Experimental phenomenology is the study of appearances in subjective awareness. Its methods and results challenge quite a few aspects of the current debate on consciousness. A robust theoretical framework for understanding consciousness is pending: current empirical research waves on what a phenomenon of consciousness properly is, not least because the question is still open on the observables to be measured and how to measure them. I shall present the basics of experimental phenomenology and discuss the current development of experimental phenomenology, (...) its main features, and the many misunderstandings that have obstructed a fair understanding and evaluation of its otherwise enlightening outcomes. (shrink)

Based on Husserl’s distinction between mode of living presence (Modus der Leibhaftigkeit) and mode of certainty (Glaubensmodus der Gewißheit), which coincide in normal univocal perception, the paper argues for a distinction between two different types of accordance (Einstimmigkeit) in perceptual experience – local accordance and global accordance. While local accordance is characterized by the unfolding of appearances in agreement with lines of accordance instituted by recent perceptual apprehensions within a certain spatio-temporal domain, global accordance is characterized by the agreement between (...) appearances unfolding in local accordance with previous and simultaneous apprehensions concerning the spatio-temporal surroundings of this domain. As will be shown, to perceive something in local accordance amounts to perceiving it in the mode of living presence, while to perceive something in global accordance amounts to perceiving it in the belief mode of certainty (relative to a certain surrounding). In light of these considerations, an account of the perception of figments and immersion is put forward which does not invoke make-belief or the idea of an as-if-perception. (shrink)

My central research focus over the past 30 years has been the articulation of what I call a radically temporal approach to philosophy. In the papers below, written between 2001 and 2022, I treat the varying ways in which radically temporal thinking manifests itself in the phenomenological perspectives of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Eugene Gendlin. I also discuss Jacques Derrida's deconstructive project and George Kelly's personal construct theory as examples of radically temporal thinking. With the aim of clarifying and (...) further defining the nature of this family of orientations, I have delineated the important ways in which it differs from a range of interlinked approaches in philosophy and psychology that includes hermeneutic and radical constructivisms, social constructionism, 4EA (Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, Extended, and Affective) cognition, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of corporeal intersubjectivity, autopoietic self-organizing systems theory and American pragmatism. Among the authors whose work I have submitted to critique from the radically temporal perspective are: Francisco Varela (autopoietic self-organizing systems), Shaun Gallagher, Evan Thompson, Matthew Ratcliffe, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Dan Zahavi, Hanne De Jaegher, Michel Bitbol, Thomas Fuchs (enactive, embodied ('4EA') cognition), Gilles Deleuze (Deleuzian biopolitics), Ken Gergen and John Shotter ( social constructionism), Kym Maclaren ( critical phenomenology) and Jan Slaby (critical neuroscience). I argue that these authors' accounts of the relation between affect, motivation and intention, attention , reflective and pre-reflective self-consciousness, the basis of mathematical naturalism and sensori-motor models of behavior, and the relation between the body, language and culture remain burdened by traditional presuppositions that the radically temporal philosophies of Heidegger et al put into question. (shrink)

In this chapter we first elucidate the subjective flow of time particularly as developed by Husserl. We next discuss time and timescales in predictive processing. We then consider how the phenomenological analysis of time can be naturalized within a predictive processing framework. In the final section, we develop an analysis of the temporal disturbances characteristic of depression using the resources of both phenomenology and predictive processing.

Over the years, phenomenology has provided illuminating descriptions of discrimination, with its mechanisms and effects being thematised at the most basic levels of embodiment, (dis)orientation, selfhood, and belonging. What remains somewhat understudied is the lived experience of the discriminator. In this paper I draw on Husserl's phenomenological account of normality to reflect on the ways in which we discriminate at the prereflective levels of perceptual experience and bodily being. By critically reflecting on the intentional structures undergirding discriminatory practices, I argue (...) that discrimination is characteristic of a naïve normalising attitude which is habitually interested in securing a familiar experience of a static normality. I first demonstrate how this attitude problematically tends to reproduce, enforce, and further sediment discriminatory and exclusionary norms. Further, I provide an internal critique which problematises discrimination—without recourse to external normative standards—on three fronts: as epistemically unproductive, experientially obscuring, and normatively non-instantiating. In discriminatory acts we see an abnormal refusal to enrich, revise, and genetically establish new normative commitments, new ways of seeing, and a new normality. (shrink)

It is a familiar story that, where Kant humbly draws a line beyond which cognition can’t reach, Husserl presses forward to show how we can cognize beyond that limit. Kant supposes that cognition is bound to sensibility and that what we experience in sensibility is mere appearance that does not inform us about the intrinsic nature of things in themselves. By contrast, for Husserl, it makes no sense to say we experience anything other than things in themselves when we enjoy (...) sensory perception. Kant’s conception, then, by doing just that, is nonsensical. I argue that Husserl’s account does not deliver on its promise. Things as they are in themselves are just as cognitively out of reach on Husserl’s understanding of them as they are on Kant’s. Further, the charge of nonsense Husserl raises against Kant’s conception of things in themselves applies—indeed, with greater force—to his own. (shrink)

The notion of hyle seems problematic for a phenomenological foundation of experience. For this very reason, its completed invalidity was generally postulated. At the same time, there are many reflections in Husserlian writings that help us understand it better. This paper attempts to show how hyletic experience, by existing in the lived body, triggers in parallel rhythmic, vibrating, and sonorous experiences as bodily experiences. Sounds are experienced by the body before any reflections or conscious experiences of them. In this way, (...) the aporetical instance of hyletic data founds a proposal of resolution in the fundamental corporeal experience of sound. (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)

Contemporary accounts on fictional emotions, i.e., emotions experienced towards objects we know to be fictional, are mainly concerned with explaining their rationality or lack thereof. In this context dominated by an interest in the role of belief, questions regarding their phenomenal quality have received far less attention: it is often assumed that they feel “similar” to emotions that target real objects. Against this background, this paper focuses on the possible specificities of fictional emotions’ qualitative feel. It starts by presenting what (...) I call the “phenomenological question” about the qualitative feel of fictional emotions (section 1) and by showing that this is irreducible to questions about their cognitive, intentional, evaluative, and embodied nature (section 2). Drawing on some insights from early phenomenologists, the next two sections elaborate criteria to distinguish between real and sham emotions on the one side (section 3) and between genuine and non-genuine emotions on the other (section 4). Finally, I apply this orthogonal distinction to the particular case of fictional emotions (section 5). The paper argues that fictional emotions are neither sham emotions nor quasi-emotions, but full-fledged emotional experiences, despite them displaying the distinctive phenomenology of emotions experienced as non-genuine. In the particular case of fictional emotions, they are non-genuine because our psychology is in fact in a state dominated by aesthetic enjoyment. (shrink)

This paper argues that Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutical philosophy attempts to reopen the question of human transcendence in contemporary terms. While his conception of language as self-transcending is deeply Husserlian, Ricoeur also responds to the analytical challenge when he deploys a basic distinction in Fregean logic in order to clarify Heidegger’s phenomenology of world. Ricoeur’s commitment to a transcendental view is evident in his conception of narrative, which enables him to emphasize the role of the performative in literary reading. The meaning (...) of the self in time provides Ricoeur with a discursive basis for distinguishing his own position from that of Kant and other philosophers in the transcendental tradition. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I provide an interpretation and defense of Merleau-Ponty's thesis of the primacy of perception, namely, the thesis that all knowledge is founded in perceptual experience. I take as an interpretative and argumentative key Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological conception of motivation. Whereas epistemology has traditionally accepted a dichotomy between reason and natural causality, I show that this dichotomy is not exhaustive of the forms of epistemic grounding. There is a third type of grounding, the one characteristic of the grounding relations (...) found in perception: motivation. I argue that introducing motivation as a form of epistemic grounding allows us to see how Merleau-Ponty's thesis of the primacy of perception avoids both rationalism and empiricism. Whereas empiricism has argued that all the content of our knowledge is grounded in causal interactions between the world and our senses, and rationalism has held that experience does not suffice as a reason for knowledge, thinking of the relation between experience and knowledge in terms of motivation accommodates the best insights of rationalism and empiricism. Motivation allows us to see how knowledge can be grounded in experience without the content of knowledge being reducible to that of experience. (shrink)

The recent investigations into knowledge and its elements viz facts, skills and objects have become prominent in various subfields of philosophy and other areas like linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience and artificial intelligence. These investigations have been mainly on understanding the relation between the intentionality and its referential entities to know how they enrich knowledge with their existence. This article starts with an exploration of the fundamental aspects of judgemental sense from the knowledge origins perspective. To explain the consequences of this, (...) I start with reconstructing the notion of categorial intuitions described in Husserl’s sixth Logical Investigations by relating it to ‘knowledge origination’ as an intuitive fulfilment of signifying acts. This offers a relation of perceptual synthesis, operating implicitly among the signifying intentions upon grasping intended objects, in view of language structures such as copulas. This leads to the synthesis of intuitive aspects mainly from the categorial elements for a judgemental sense or thinking and the attitude from the very sphere of perception. The tension between categorial intuitions is understood as foundational acts and founded acts. Husserl’s sixth Logical Investigation describes the notion of passive synthesis, the genesis of categoriality in every realm of sensibility that allows one to formulate the relational role among the ‘act of knowing’ and phenomenological approaches to the judgemental sense. Thus, the investigation focuses on perceptual judgements and categories, which fulfils the judgemental sense of categorial elements and attitude. (shrink)

Zahavi offers a model of ‘I’, You and We consciousness that is grounded in the transcendentality of a minimal pre-reflective self-awareness , which he calls ‘for-meness’. Zahavi’s formulation of transcendental self-belonging as ‘for me-ness’ relies on the notion of a felt non-changing self- identity accompanying all intentional experiences. Zahavi’s treatment of the subject and object poles of experience as, respectively, self-inhering internality and externality, makes of self-awareness an alienating opposition between a purely self-identical felt for-meness and an external object, a (...) fracture between self-identity and otherness.I argue that for Husserl the pure ego’s unchanging in-itself identity over time is merely an anonymous zero point of activity and is not felt or sensed, and thus there is no experienced for-meness to self-awareness. There is instead a relation of ownness between the ego and the object pole, consisting of a constant, that is, essential, underlying structural feature of the ego’s changing relation to objects of intentional acts. I believe that this essential structural intimacy of associative relationship between the noetic and noematic poles of intentional constitution is what Husserl is attempting to capture when he characterizes the constitution of the subject's stream of lived-experience in terms of ‘my ownness’. Zahavi thinks that what gives an intended object its ‘mineness’ is the fact that as foreign to me, it is intended by a ‘me’ that is familiar with itself. But this self-familiarity’ speaks only of my proximity to myself as pure self-identity, not of my proximity to my world. Husserl’s notion of ‘ownness’ understands the subject-object relation not as fracture between self-identity and otherness (“a ruptured structure which is completely foreign to its nature“) but as an intimate synthetic unification and belonging.Heidegger makes an even more radical break with Cartesianism by replacing the subject object structure of intentionality with the self-world temporal structure of Dasein. In different ways , Husserl’s concept of ‘ownness’ and Heidegger’s notion of ‘ownmost’ capture the profound intimacy of relation between self and world that reveals itself after Zahavi’s idealized internal-external binary has been deconstructed. (shrink)

In 1930 Husserl wrote that phenomenology is ‘a transcendental idealism that is nothing more than a consequentially executed self-explication in the form of an egological science, an explication of my ego as subject of every possible cognition, and indeed with respect to every sense of what exists, wherewith the latter might be able to have a sense for me, the ego.’ In transcendental-phenomenological theory, according to Husserl, ‘every sort of existent itself, real or ideal, becomes understandable as a “product” of (...) transcendental subjectivity, a product constituted in just that performance.’ This appears so inimical to the fundamental bases of feminist theory that the question of the very possibility of a ‘feminist phenomenology’ inevitably arises, not least because so much associated with the contributions of feminist theory to philosophy concern precisely the critique of the transcendental, isolated, disembodied subject. This chapter explores the different kinds of feminist phenomenology of pregnancy and birth with this problem in mind. Although phenomenology has developed and transformed itself in ways more accommodating to feminist theory we are still entitled to ask what makes it phenomenology? What are the presuppositions of any feminist phenomenology if it is still to count as phenomenology, rather than descriptive social-psychology or feminist metaphysics or feminist ethics? Is phenomenology essentially tied to first-personal description, or can third-person accounts be a legitimate part of its analyses? If third-person descriptions are accepted as a legitimate, what considerations govern the inevitable interpretative aspect of their analysis? Can there be any phenomenology, feminist or otherwise, without some conception of transcendental subjectivity? And what is at stake in the continued use of the transcendental problematic, granted its immanent phenomenological criticism and its various theoretical transformations? This chapter addresses the question of the philosophical specificity of feminist phenomenology by pursuing its distinction from the use of phenomenological research methods in practice disciplines and qualitative psychology, via two of the pivotal questions raised above: can there be any phenomenology, feminist or otherwise, without some conception of transcendental subjectivity? And what is the role of third person testimony in phenomenology? I will argue that the first of these questions remains a problem for feminist phenomenology, in a way that is not easily solved with recourse to third person testimony, the use of which remains under-theorized in the feminist phenomenological literature. Finally, I will show how the problem of transcendental subjectivity is particularly acute for the feminist phenomenology of pregnancy and birth when we consider the generative metaphorics of its philosophical origin in Kant’s philosophy. (shrink)

This dissertation combines two scientific disciplines and research fields, namely philosophy and psychopathology. Within such a wide field of investigation, two precise perspectives are to be adopted in this inquiry: stemming from the first field, the phenomenological perspective on subjectivity and intersubjectivity; stemming from the second, the psychopathological perspective on schizophrenia. The combination of philosophy and psychopathology has often proven fruitful. Moreover, the main motivation for such combined approach is justified by the strong belief that, when critically used, phenomenology offers (...) a viable method of studying the first-personal perspective of experience, including the experiences of people with mental disorders. Philosophical analysis can thereby be used as a means to evaluate the meaning and adequacy of psychopathological concepts and ideas. As a result, phenomenological psychopathology may help understand what is often claimed to be incomprehensible. Particularly for the understanding of schizophrenia, this is taken to be a valuable contribution. For more than twenty years now, the phenomenological approach to schizophrenia has developed a strong and influential hypothesis on the basic alterations of this disorder. Schizophrenia, it is claimed, is a disorder of subjectivity, and more specifically, a disorder of the minimal self. Simultaneously, and often in conjunction, philosophical research on the self has vastly proliferated. The vivid interaction between these two fields makes the phenomenology of schizophrenia a good example of effective interdisciplinary work. Within the philosophical debate on subjectivity, intersubjectivity, or the relation between self and other, is currently a key topic. However, this has not significantly influenced the psychopathology of schizophrenia yet. The initial and fundamental claim of this dissertation is indeed that a renewed evaluation and inclusion of intersubjectivity, next to subjectivity, is to increase the validity of the phenomenological approach to schizophrenia. This would allow the previous hypothesis on schizophrenia as minimal self disorder to be challenged, criticized, or complemented, which would accordingly increase the significance and its clinical value. What I will attempt to do in this dissertation is then to thoroughly evaluate the role of intersubjectivity in schizophrenia. It will hence become clear what this role and its significance are. Consequently, I will finally argue that the basic alterations of schizophrenia concern both subjectivity and intersubjectivity. My argument is developed in four chapters. In the first, I introduce the topic of the self, including the distinction between the minimal and the extended self. This chapter equally introduces schizophrenia as a psychiatric concept, and three different clinical approaches are discussed, among which the phenomenological approach in most detail. After the topics of the self and schizophrenia, I introduce intersubjectivity, notably from a developmental-psychological perspective. By way of status quaestionis, I recapitulate the current research on intersubjectivity and schizophrenia. It will become clear that this research is relatively scarce. I then conclude the chapter with a full formulation of the two research questions informing this dissertation, namely Is schizophrenia an intersubjectivity-disorder? and Which self-concept is suited to define schizophrenia as a self and intersubjectivity disorder? The second chapter examines the phenomenology of intersubjectivity. The exact delineation of what is meant here by intersubjectivity will allow the reader to acknowledge its extent and variety. This chapter is aimed to provide the necessary philosophical tools to analyse schizophrenia in the light of intersubjectivity. In the third chapter I turn to psychopathology. In the first section, I analyse the work of seven major psychopathologists on schizophrenia. The goal of this section is to look for elements of intersubjectivity in their accounts of schizophrenia. Many of these psychopathologists have been influential for the development of the current self-disorder hypothesis, and the investigation intends to show how some crucial intersubjective elements in their work have been neglected. In the second section of this chapter, I focus on the symptoms, signs, and phenomena of schizophrenia that relate to intersubjectivity. This chapter finally offers all the material needed to positively answer the first research question. In the fourth chapter, I bring together psychopathology and philosophy, and I attempt to answer the two research questions. Since Chapter 3 allows me to affirmatively answer the first question, I examine whether the current self-disorder hypothesis is adequate to integrate intersubjectivity disturbances. It will appear that it is not, and the first section of this chapter consequently deals with the question why intersubjectivity and its disturbances have been neglected until now. In the second section it will become clear that no different self-concept is required, but that schizophrenia primarily concerns a particular capacity or orientation of subjectivity. I introduce the concept of open subjectivity and thereby answer the second research question. By describing schizophrenia as a disturbance of open subjectivity, I am finally able to integrate both self-disturbances and intersubjectivity-disturbances into a coherent and unified theory. To conclude this dissertation, I summarize and recapitulate its major issues, questions, and results in Chapter 5. Both clinical implications and possible future research are also discussed here. (shrink)

In this paper, I present the enactive theory of color that implies a form of color relationism. I argue that this view constitutes a better alternative to color subjectivism and color objectivism. I liken the enactive view to Husserl’s phenomenology of perception, arguing that both deconstruct the clear duality of subject and object, which is at the basis of the other theories of color, in order to claim the co-constitution of subject and object in the process of experience. I also (...) extend the enactive and phenomenological account of color to the more general topic of the epistemological and ontological status of sensory qualities (qualia), outlining the fields of enactive phenomenology and enactive ontology. (shrink)

• An adequate conceptual framework is still needed to account for phenomena that (i) have a first-person, subjective-experiential or phenomenal character; (ii) are (usually) reportable and describable (in humans); and (iii) are neurobiologically realized.2 • The conscious subject plays an unavoidable epistemological role in characterizing the explanadum of consciousness through first-person descriptive reports. The experimentalist is then able to link first-person data and third-person data. Yet the generation of first-person data raises difficult epistemological issues about the relation of second-order awareness (...) or meta-awareness to first-order experience (e.g. (shrink)

Clarifying the essential experiential structures at work in our everyday moral engagements promises both (1) to provide a perspicacious self-understanding, and (2) to significantly contribute to theoretical and practical matters of moral philosophy. Since the phenomenological enterprise is concerned with revealing the a priori structures of experience in general, it is then well positioned to discern the essential structures of moral experience specifically. Phenomenology can therefore significantly contribute to matters pertaining to moral philosophy. In this paper I would like to (...) contribute to the relatively small yet burgeoning field of phenomenological ethics. I endea­vour to do so by first identifying and consolidating the basic level of sense-bestowal, and then outlining the a priori structures of volition in order to demonstrate how such phenomenologically discerned structures are required for moral experience. Specifically, in section one I locate moral experience as at the level of meaning that is phenomenologically identified as the life-world, and then vindicate the life-world by illustrating how it is immune to naturalistic rationalisation. By thus both securing the level of meaning that is of concern and importantly delimiting the scope of our analysis, I proceed in section two to relate the volitional analyses of Aristotle, Husserl, and Heidegger. This relation is achieved thanks to a conceptual point of con­tinuity: ‘prohairesis’. By examining the function of this concept (as an intentional structure) and its phenomenological continuity, the ground is then prepared for further phenomenological analyses of the virtues. (shrink)

Current scientific research on consciousness aims to understand how consciousness arises from the workings of the brain and body, as well as the relations between conscious experience and cognitive processing. Clearly, to make progress in these areas, researchers cannot avoid a range of conceptual issues about the nature and structure of consciousness, such as the following: What is the relation between intentionality and consciousness? What is the relation between self-awareness and consciousness? What is the temporal structure of conscious experience? What (...) is it like to imagine or visualize something, and how is this type of experience different from perception? How is bodily experience related to self-consciousness? Such issues have been addressed in detail in the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, inaugurated by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and developed by numerous other philosophers throughout the 20th century. This chapter provides an introduction to this tradition and its way of approaching issues about consciousness. We first discuss some features of phenomenological methodology and then present some of the most important, influential, and enduring phenomenological proposals about various aspects of consciousness. These aspects include intentionality, self-awareness and the first-person perspective, time-consciousness, embodiment, and intersubjectivity. We also highlight a few ways of linking phenomenology and cognitive. (shrink)

In 1913, in a draft for a new Preface for the second edition of the Logical Investigations, Edmund Husserl reveals to his readers that "The source of all my studies and the first source of my epistemological difficul­ties lies in my first works on the philosophy of arithmetic and mathematics in general", i.e. his Habilitationsschrift and the Philosophy of Arithmetic: "I carefully studied the consciousness constituting the amount, first the collec­tive consciousness (consciousness of quantity, of multiplicity) in its simplest and (...) higher levels (consciousness of sums, sums of sums etc.). I immediately separated proper (intuitive) and symbolic consciousness, in the characteriza­tion of the former I hit the radical difference of categorial consciousness [...] and sensuous consciousness of unity." Later on, in the Third Investigation, Husserl makes some very specific claims, that are of considerable importance to assess the development of his early works and their relation to his later phenomenology: "This first work of mine (an elaboration of my Habilitationsschrift, [...], 1887) should be compared with all assertions of the present work on compounds, moments of unity, complexes, wholes and objects of higher order. I am sorry that in many recent treatments of the doctrine of "Gestalt-qualities", this work has mostly been ignored, though quite a lot of the thought-content of later treatments by Cornelius, Meinong etc., of questions of analysis, apprehension of plurality and complexion is already to be found, differently expressed, in my Philosophy of Arithmetic. I think it would still be of use today to consult this work on the phenomenological and ontological issues in question, especially since it is the first work that attached importance to acts and objects of higher order and investigated them thoroughly." Hence, at the time of the Ideas, Husserl retrospectively considers his first works4 as being still relevant for phenomenological issues. Not only does Husserl advance a very interesting priority claim with respect to Von Ehrenfels’ development of the notion of Gestalt and Meinong’s development of Gegenstandstheorie, but also a strong affirmation of continuity and coherence of his position from 1887 all the way up to 1913, encompassing the alleged “revolution” in his position from psychologism to anti-psycho­logism in the 1890s. Indeed, according to much of the recent secondary literature, in 1894, right in the middle of the ten “incubation” years between the Philosophy of Arithmetic and the Logical Investigations, Frege’s destruc­tive review would have converted Husserl to antipsychologism practically overnight. This gives us two conflicting interpretations: on the one hand, Husserl himself in 1913 still seems to approve of the Philosophy of Arithmetic and even considers it to contain valuable phenomenological material, on the other, it is routinely dismissed by much of the secondary literature as hope­lessly psychologistic. So which one is it: do we have a phenomenological arithmetic or a psychologistic arithmetic in Husserl’s first book? On balance, I think that Husserl in his Philosophy of Arithmetic developed a position that does not fall prey to the exaggerated and poorly aimed critiques of Frege, while at the same time, as a descriptive psychology of the genesis and constitution of number, it can certainly be considered as providing phenome­nologically meaningful analyses, though of course not made from within an explicitly transcendental phenomenological framework. (shrink)