Patients’ experience of symptoms does not follow the body–mind divide that characterizes the classification of disease in the health care system. Therefore, understanding patients in their entirety rather than in parts demands a different theoretical approach. Attempts have been made to formulate such approaches but many of these, such as the biopsychosocial model, are still basically dualistic or methodologically reductionist. In primary care, patients often present with diffuse symptoms, making primary care the ideal environment for understanding patients’ undifferentiated symptoms and (...) disease patterns which could readily fit both bodily and mental categories. In this article we discuss theoretical models that have attempted to overcome this challenge: The psychosomatic approach could be called holistic in the sense of taking an anti-dualistic stance. Primary care theorists have formulated integrative views but these have not gained a foothold in primary care medicine. McWhinney introduced a new metaphor, ‘the body–mind’, and Rudebeck advocated cultivating ‘bodily empathy’. These views have much in common with both phenomenological thinking and mentalization, a psychological concept for understanding others. In the process of understanding patients there is a need for the physician to enter an intersubjectivity that aims at understanding the patient’s experiences and sensations without initially jumping to diagnostic conclusions or into a division into mental and physical phenomena. Mentalization theory could form the basis of an approach to a more comprehensive understanding of patients. The success of such an approach is, however, dependent upon structural and organizational conditions that do not counteract it. (shrink)

The subjective experience of schizophrenia, its cause, and its course have been consistent topics of interest within the phenomenological tradition since its inception. After 80 years of study and the efforts of many investigators, however, phenomenological contributions have so far had only a modest impact on current understandings of this disorder. In this article, the author reviews the methodological and theoretical issues involved in the development of a phenomenological approach to understanding schizophrenia. Drawing examples from his own empirical research, the (...) author illustrates the three steps of description, understanding, and explanation required by an application of the phenomenological method to this empirical domain. He then considers obstacles to the acceptance of insights generated through this method by the mainstream psychiatric community. In conclusion, he suggests that the promise offered by a phenomenological approach will most likely be fulfilled when investigators appeal to the phenomenological conviction in intentionality to provide the guidelines for an empirical science of subjective life. (shrink)

Lacking in the philosophy of sport is discussion of the gendered numbers of sets played in Grand Slam tennis. We argue that the practice is indefensible. It can be upheld only through false beliefs about women or repressive femininity ideals. It treats male tennis players unfairly in forcing them to play more sets because of their sex. Its ideological consequences are pernicious, since it reinforces the respective identifications of the female and male with physical limitation and heroism. Both sexes have (...) compelling reason to reject the practice. (shrink)

This paper aims to conceptualize the phenomenology of attentional experience as ‘embodied attention.’ Current psychological research, in describing attentional experiences, tends to apply the so-called spotlight metaphor, according to which attention is characterized as the illumination of certain surrounding objects or events. In this framework, attention is not seen as involving our bodily attitudes or modifying the way we experience those objects and events. It is primarily conceived as a purely mental and volitional activity of the cognizing subject. Against this (...) view, the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty shows that attention is a creative activity deeply linked with bodily movements. This paper clarifies and systematizes this view and brings it into dialogue with current empirical findings as well as with current theoretical research on embodied cognition. By doing this, I spell out three main claims about embodied attention: the transcendentalism of embodiment for attention, the bodily subjectivity of attention, and the creativity of embodied attention. (shrink)

In this essay, I examine Luce Irigaray’s aesthetic of sexual difference, which she develops by extrapolating from Paul Klee’s idea that the role of painting is to render the non-visible rather than represent the visible. This idea is the premise of her analyses of phenomenology and psychoanalysis and their respective contributions to understanding art and sexual identity. I claim that Irigaray assembles an aesthetic of sexual difference that exceeds these familiar intellectual traditions, one that articulates the encounter of non-visible, material (...) forces that engender modes of sexuate being and becoming. I further claim that this encounter is the very matter of artistry and art-making. (shrink)

The purpose of professional education programs is to prepare aspiring professionals for the challenges of practice within a particular profession. These programs typically seek to ensure the acquisition of necessary knowledge and skills, as well as providing opportunities for their application. While not denying the importance of knowledge and skills, this paper reconfigures professional education as a process of becoming. Learning to become a professional involves not only what we know and can do, but also who we are. It involves (...) integration of knowing, acting, and being in the form of professional ways of being that unfold over time. When a professional education program focuses on the acquisition and application of knowledge and skills, it falls short of facilitating their integration into professional ways of being. In addition, through such a focus on epistemology, ontology is overlooked. This paper explores what it means to develop professional ways of being where the focus is becoming, not simply knowing as an end in itself. (shrink)

The purpose of professional education programs is to prepare aspiring professionals for the challenges of practice within a particular profession. These programs typically seek to ensure the acquisition of necessary knowledge and skills, as well as providing opportunities for their application. While not denying the importance of knowledge and skills, this paper reconfigures professional education as a process of becoming. Learning to become a professional involves not only what we know and can do, but also who we are (becoming). It (...) involves integration of knowing, acting, and being in the form of professional ways of being that unfold over time. When a professional education program focuses on the acquisition and application of knowledge and skills, it falls short of facilitating their integration into professional ways of being. In addition, through such a focus on epistemology (or theory of knowing), ontology (or theory of being) is overlooked. This paper explores what it means to develop professional ways of being where the focus is becoming, not simply knowing as an end in itself. (shrink)

This article offers a philosophical-empirical account of embodied skilful performance in the practice of plant biotechnology. Drawing on the work of Merleau-Ponty and others, we elaborate how skilful performance emerges from and through reciprocal relations encompassing the body-in-the-world and the world-in-the-body. The contribution of this article lies in offering an account of skilful performance that is attentive to a perceiving, motile, feeling body entwined with world. In genetically modifying plants, scientists direct their senses of touch and vision to manipulating plant (...) materials and matter, ‘reading’ subtle changes in tissue cultures, plantlets and so on. In rhythmic movements, they extend their bodies through skilful use of complex equipment, while calling on ‘intuition’ to guide their work. Skilful performance, then, relies on our lived body that is not merely a physical object among other objects, nor a passive instrument for the mind, but dynamic and inescapably entwined with people and things in a world in flux. Bringing to the fore how perceiving, motile, feeling bodies are implicated in skilful performance has significant implications for education and workplace training. (shrink)

In higher education, the conventional design of educational programs emphasises imparting knowledge and skills, in line with traditional Western epistemology. This emphasis is particularly evident in the design and implementation of many undergraduate programs in which bodies of knowledge and skills are decontextualised from the practices to which they belong. In contrast, the notion of knowledge as foundational and absolute has been extensively challenged. A transformation and pluralisation has occurred: knowledge has come to be seen as situated and localized into (...) various 'knowledges', and the status of the body has taken on renewed significance in epistemological debates. Rather than thinking of knowledge as transcending the body, the embodiment of knowledge has become a key factor in understanding the nature of knowledge and what it means to know. In this paper, we adopt a phenomenological perspective in exploring the notion of embodied knowing as it relates to higher education programs and, more specifically, the ways in which information and communication technologies (ICTs) are used in these programs. (shrink)

Despite an increasing array of ‘quality indicators’ and substantial investments in educating professionals, there continues to be clear evidence of discordant, or even negligent, practice by accredited professionals. We refer to discordant professional practice as being ‘out of tune’ with what is accepted as good practice. In a conceptual/theoretical analysis, we use discordant practice as a backdrop to exploring ways of being professionals. Our analysis is grounded in Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world. We explore how being-in-the-world can be uncanny and discordant, (...) while at the same time, dwelling in the world implies familiarity and a sense of being ‘at home’. We also draw upon Merleau-Ponty’s arguments that know-how is performed, settling in the body to become habitual, while also incorporating others and things in the accomplishment of practice. We argue that conceiving know-how as knowing/being provides insights into what is entailed in learning to be professionals. (shrink)

Despite a recent surge in publications on Tourette Syndrome, we still lack substantial insight into first-personal aspects of “what it is like” to live with this condition. This is despite the fact that developments in phenomenological psychiatry have demonstrated the scientific and clinical importance of understanding subjective experience in a range of other neuropsychiatric conditions. We argue that it is time for Tourette Syndrome research to tap into the sophisticated frameworks developed in the philosophical tradition of phenomenology for describing experience (...) in a way that integrates discrete symptoms into an overarching experiential framework concerning the self, the body, and its modes of experience. Following a historical introduction that contextualises the pertinence of phenomenology to psychopathology, we distinguish this approach from the existing, psychologically oriented studies on TS that are also qualitative. We then outline gaps and opportunities for future research, including the sorts of questions that might be utilised in phenomenological interviews and why they are of potential benefit to research programs in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. In conclusion we address some of the broader implications for phenomenology of the body and philosophy of action. (shrink)

I discuss Husserl’s account of intersubjectivity in the fifth Cartesian Meditation. I focus on the problem of perceived similarity. I argue that recent work in developmental psychology and neuroscience, concerning intermodal representation and the mirror neuron system, fails to constitute a naturalistic solution to the problem. This can be seen via a comparison between the Husserlian project on the one hand and Molyneux’s Question on the other.

In this article I discuss some of the findings of an on-going ethnographic study of two once-weekly circuit training classes held in one of the growing number of private health and fitness clubs. The article has four aims. First, to demonstrate and explore the active role of the body in a central practice of body modification/maintenance: i.e. circuit training. Second, to demonstrate that circuit training is a social structure which both shapes the activity of the agent and is shaped by (...) that (shaped) agent. I aim also to explore this structuration process. Third, to draw out a number of aspects of the sociality of body maintenance/modification. Training, I argue, is a form of symbolic interaction, localized within specific and durable social networks. The final aim of the article is to weave these various claims together into a coherent overall account of circuit training as a form of body modification. As an investigation of the embodied nature of practices of body maintenance and the active role of social agents in relation to these practices the article rejoins an important strand of sociological investigations of ‘the body’. At the same time, however, the article seeks to challenge those approaches, often rooted in Foucauldian analysis, which portray the body as ‘docile’ in relation to body maintenance. Foucauldian inspired studies often reify practices of modification as ‘technologies’ or ‘apparatuses’, ignoring the active role of embodied agents in these practices and eliding the difference between texts which prescribe ways of acting and the more messy and complex reality of those ways of acting. (shrink)

This article aims to do two things. The first of these is to introduce the concept of reflexive body techniques into the debate on body modification/maintenance. The value of the concept in relation to this debate, in part, is that it ensures that we conceive of the body as both a subject and an object, modifier and modified, and that we thereby avoid the trap of conceptualizing modification in dualistic (mind/body or body/society) terms. Second, the article seeks to explore the (...) pattern of distribution of practices of modification (conceived as reflexive body techniques) through society and to reflect upon the potential usefulness of multi-dimensional scaling as a tool for doing this. This aim is related to the first aim as it is argued that the concept of reflexive body techniques serves to identify and anchor practices ofmodification in a way that is amenable to both quantitative and qualitative forms of analysis, as well as theoretical investigation. (shrink)

This article compares the concept of habitus, as formulated in the work of Mauss and Bourdieu, with the concept of habit, as formulated in the work of Merleau-Ponty and Dewey. The rationale for this, on one level, is to seek to clarify these concepts and any distinction that there may be between them – though the article notes the wide variety of uses of both concepts and suggests that these negate the possibility of any definitive definitions or contrasts. More centrally, (...) however, the purpose of the comparison is to draw out a number of important issues and debates which, it is argued, further work must address if the concepts of habit and habitus are to continue to prove useful and illuminating in social science. (shrink)

This is a brief response to Loïc Wacquant’s article, ‘Homines in extremis’. The response makes four contributions. First, I consider some of the reasons for the confusion surrounding the habitus concept, arguing that this confusion may be lessened (without any obvious loss) if we revert to ‘habit’ or ‘disposition’. Second, I argue that, irrespective of these terminological quibbles, it is vital that we do not conflate ‘habitus’ and ‘embodied actor’ as some accounts do. There is more to the embodied actor (...) than her habits and she can only have habits because this is so. Third, I begin to explore the point of view offered by ‘carnal ethnography’ and call for further clarification of that point of view. Finally, I note that Wacquant’s ethnography has the effect of rendering certain of Bourdieu’s ideas in a more concrete manner and foregrounding sociability, which the latter is sometimes inclined to ignore. This, I suggest, is a positive development. (shrink)

Evidence affirms that aesthetic engagement patterns our movements, often with us barely aware. This invites an examination of pre-reflective engagement within cities and also aesthetic experience as a form of the pre-reflective. The invitation is amplified because design has political implications. For instance, it can draw people in or exclude them by establishing implicitly recognized public-private boundaries. The Value Sensitive Design school, which holds that artifacts embody ethical and political values, stresses some of this. But while emphasizing that design embodies (...) implicit values, research in this field lacks sustained attention to largely unconscious background biases or values, rooted in cultural attitudes and personal interests, that lead theorists and planners—often too narrowly—to promote design organized around specific values such as defensibility. In examining these points, I draw on J. J. Gibson, a central figure for some writing on aesthetics and cities, and whom pragmatists and phenomenologists in turn influenced. Taking a cue from pragmatists in particular, I argue Gibson’s perceptual theory of affordances entails a theory of values, meaning our perception and therewith movements are inherently value-based. I advocate design that accounts for relatively constantly held values such as safety, while also handling the vast pluralism that exists and not crushing the aesthetic vibrancy of city life. (shrink)

This article connects value-sensitive design to Gibson’s affordance theory: the view that we perceive in terms of the ease or difficulty with which we can negotiate space. Gibson’s ideas offer a nonsubjectivist way of grasping culturally relative values, out of which we develop a concept of political affordances, here understood as openings or closures for social action, often implicit. Political affordances are equally about environments and capacities to act in them. Capacities and hence the severity of affordances vary with age, (...) health, social status and more. This suggests settings are selectively permeable, or what postphenomenologists call multistable. Multistable settings are such that a single physical location shows up differently – as welcoming or hostile – depending on how individuals can act on it. In egregious cases, authoritarian governments redesign politically imbued spaces to psychologically cordon both them and the ideologies they represent. Selective permeability is also orchestrated according to business interests, which is symptomatic of commercial imperatives increasingly dictating what counts as moral and political goods. (shrink)

This article focuses on situations and emotional perception. To this end, I start with the Kuleshov effect wherein identical shots of performers manifest different expressions when cut to different contexts. However, I conducted experiments with a twist, using Darth Vader and non-primates, and even here expressions varied with contexts. Building on historically and conceptually linked Gibsonian, Gestalt, phenomenological and pragmatic schools, along with consonant experimental work, I extrapolate these results to defend three interconnected points. First, I argue that while perceiving (...) expression is sometimes about reading minds, it is more squarely about perceiving solicitations or closures for action. Second, I frame expressions as a subcategory of Gibson’s affordances. This includes those showing up through context, in turn suggesting Kuleshov-like scenarios are not mere perceptual tricks. Third, I maintain that situations—with or without other human beings—have action-motivating expressive qualities or what Gestalt theorists called physiognomic characters, following Werner. These likewise emerge through ecological relations, and are very much like affordances and in the world as much as them. With resemblance theories, my account agrees that we perceive expression in the world. However, it indicates a broad range of cases in which expression shows up as consequences of overall situations that solicit or close actions, as opposed to mere resemblance between entities and human expressions. (shrink)

Predictive processing theorists have claimed PTSD and depression are maladaptive and epistemically distorting because they entail undesirably wide gaps between top-down models and bottom-up information inflows. Without denying this is sometimes so, the “maladaptive” label carries questionable normative assumptions. For instance, trauma survivors facing significant risk of subsequent attacks may overestimate threats to circumvent further trauma, “bringing forth” concretely safer personal spaces, to use enactive terminology, ensuring the desired gap between predicted worries and outcomes. The violation of predictive processing can (...) go in the opposite direction too, as when depression coincides with energy-depletion, and hence objectively strenuous situations in which things look farther away because they are (accurately anticipated to be) harder to reach. These examples partly encapsulate what predictive processing theorists call “active inference,” yet with differences. In the first case, actions fruitfully obviate predictions rather than fulfilling them. In the second, mental models do not dysregulate bodily processes, making coping harder. Instead, problems (e.g., personal obstacles, gastric illness) deplete energy, eliciting a depressive and adaptive slow-down. Some predictive proponents apply correspondence criteria when alleging mismatches between internal models and the world, while incongruously asserting that the brain did not evolve to see things veridically, but to execute actions. An alternative is to adopt pluralistic, pragmatic epistemologies suited to the complexity of mind. The upshot is that mental outlooks can depart from the norm without epistemically being distorted and that mismatches between anticipatory worries and outcomes, when they actually exist, can be a measure of adaptive and epistemic success. (shrink)

The body image with respect to physical disability has long been a woefully under-theorized area of scholarship. The literature that does attend to the body image in cases of physical abnormality or functional impairment regularly offer poorly articulated or problematic definitions of the concept, effectively undermining its historic analytic scope and depth. Here, I revisit the epistemic roots of the body image while also engaging the rich contemporary literature from a body studies perspective in order to situate the narratives of (...) amputees about the relationship between dismemberment, prosthetization, phantom limb syndrome, and body image. Stories about living with artificial, fleshy, phantomed, and residual limbs unquestionably reveal a number of peculiarities unique to amputees. However, they also offer a distinctively productive ingress into the analytic utility of a ‘re-visioned’ conceptualization of the body image more broadly speaking. Indeed, the body image can function as a robust investigative tool for exploring the intersubjective, processual, and relational features of embodiment and corporeality. (shrink)

This paper explores women's accounts of prostitution in terms of the lived experience of the body, drawing on life story narratives and arts images created by women in the sex industry. These narratives show that women's experiences of prostitution constitute a spectrum of (dis)embodiment that is inflected, not determined, by settings and contexts. Theoretical approaches to embodiment were sought that acknowledged tensions between violation and a sense of empowerment. Therefore, the ontology of selling sex, and associated experiences such as violence, (...) drug use and self-harm are explored using feminist applications of Merleau-Ponty's notion of the `habit body'. A key focus is how the body is constituted by embodied experiences of abuse (e.g. the work of Parkins and of Weiss), and how women negotiate ownership of the body within commercial sex transactions. This highlights the process of repositioning the body by selling sex, in accordance with the accumulated experiences of the habit body. Thus, to borrow from Wendy Parkins, women perceive that they are acting meaningfully through the body, even when reproducing dynamics of objectification and dissociation. (shrink)

In recent years, the societal and personal impacts of pain, and the fact that we still lack an effective method of treatment, has motivated researchers from diverse disciplines to try to think in new ways about pain and its management. In this paper, we aim to develop an enactive approach to pain and the transition to chronicity. Two aspects are central to this project. First, the paper conceptualizes differences between acute and chronic pain, as well as the dynamic process of (...) pain chronification, in terms of changes in the field of affordances. This is, in terms of the possibilities for action perceived by subjects in pain. As such, we aim to do justice to the lived experience of patients as well as the dynamic role of behavioral learning, neural reorganization, and socio-cultural practices in the generation and maintenance of pain. Second, we aim to show in which manners such an enactive approach may contribute to a comprehensive understanding of pain that avoids conceptual and methodological issues of reductionist and fragmented approaches. It proves particularly beneficial as a heuristic in pain therapy addressing the heterogenous yet dynamically intertwined aspects that may contribute to pain and its chronification. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose an examination of the shared connections between the French philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the Austro-Hungarian movement theorist, Rudolf Laban.In many ways Merleau-Ponty''s philosophy demonstrates a synthesis of the best in existen-tialism and phenomenology. In like manner, Rudolf Laban was a synthesizer of experiences and theories of movement.

By dovetailing the classical concepts of virtue, beauty, harmony and happiness with the cardinal values of modern imagination, life and freedom, Agnes Heller galvanizes modernity's anthropological reflexivity and hints at the prospect of a classicism pertinent to the present. Beyond nostalgia for an ancient past or apology for a contemporary present, her moral anthropology is approached via a dialectical elucidation of aspects of epicurean theory attuned to modernity's complexity. Under the contemporary condition of waning postmodern challenges, escalating confusion and cynicism, (...) moral anthropology's task is as one of probing modernity's destiny for a non-predatory humanism that combines the existential wisdom of ancient theory with modern values. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that it is misleading to regard the brain as the physical basis or “core machinery” of moods. First, empirical evidence shows that brain activity not only influences, but is in turn influenced by, physical activity taking place in other parts of the organism. It is therefore not clear why the core machinery of moods ought to be restricted to the brain. I propose, instead, that moods should be conceived as embodied, i.e., their physical basis should (...) be enlarged so as to comprise not just brain but also bodily processes. Second, I emphasise that moods are also situated in the world. By this I do not simply mean that moods are influenced by the world, but that they are complexly interrelated with it, in at least three different ways: they are shaped by cultural values and norms; they are materially and intersubjectively “scaffolded”; and they can even “experientially incorporate” parts of the world, i.e., include the experience of parts of the world as part of oneself. (shrink)

This paper considers the importance of the body for self-esteem, communication, and emotional expression and experience, through the reflections of those who live with various neurological impairments of movement and sensation; sensory deafferentation, spinal cord injury and Möbius Syndrome. People with severe sensory loss, who require conscious attention and visual feedback for movement, describe the imperative to use the same strategies to reacquire gesture, to appear normal and have embodied expression. Those paralysed after spinal cord injury struggle to have others (...) see them as people rather than as people in wheelchairs and have been active in the disability movement, distinguishing between their medical impairment and the social induced disability others project onto them. Lastly those with Möbius reveal the importance of the face for emotional expression and communication and indeed for emotional experience itself. All these examples explore the crucial role of the body as agent for social and personal expression and self-esteem. (shrink)

Cultural messages promote putting forward one’s best effort, and yet any level of success, or the effort itself, can lead to being regarded as a threat. People forming everyday social comparisons may feel threatened by those attempting to do their best, and may react to neutralize the perceived threat. The urge to undermine someone regarded as a threat can result in direct reprisal, social strain, or other repercussions that can range from unpleasantness to life-changing trauma. Given the potential for negative (...) outcomes, the experience of being regarded as a threat while attempting to do one’s best merits close examination. (shrink)

While today there is much discussion about the ethics of artificial intelligence, less work has been done on the philosophical nature of AI. Drawing on Bergson and Ricoeur, this paper proposes to use the concepts of time, process, and narrative to conceptualize AI and its normatively relevant impact on human lives and society. Distinguishing between a number of different ways in which AI and time are related, the paper explores what it means to understand AI as narrative, as process, or (...) as the emergent outcome of processes and narratives. It pays particular attention to what it calls the “narrator” and “time machine” roles of AI and the normative implications of these roles. It argues that AI processes and narratives shape our time and link past, present, and future in particular ways that are ethically and politically significant. (shrink)

Dreyfus’s work is widely known for its critique of artificial intelligence and still stands as an example of how to do excellent philosophical work that is at the same time relevant to contemporary technological and scientific developments. But for philosophers of technology, especially for those sympathetic to using Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein as sources of inspiration, it has much more to offer. This paper outlines Dreyfus’s account of skillful coping and critically evaluates its potential for thinking about technology. First, it (...) is argued that his account of skillful coping can be developed into a general view about handling technology which gives due attention to know-how/implicit knowledge and embodiment. Then a number of outstanding challenges are identified that are difficult to cope with if one remains entirely within the world of Dreyfus’s writings. They concern questions regarding other conceptualizations of technology and human–technology relations, issues concerning how to conceptualize the social and the relation between skill, meaning, and practices, and the question about the ethical and political implications of his view, including how virtue and skill are related. Acknowledging some known discussions about Dreyfus’s work, but also drawing on other material and on the author’s previous writings, the paper suggests that to address these challenges and develop the account of skillful coping into a wider scoped, Dreyfus-inspired philosophy of technology, it could take more distance from Heidegger’s conceptions of technology and benefit from engagement with work in postphenomenology, pragmatism, the later Wittgenstein, and virtue ethics. (shrink)

As educators, we tend to go about a typical day anticipating lessons, discussing pedagogical practices with colleagues, and engaging students with thoughtfully developed instruction. As attentive practitioners, we take a few minutes and reflect on the day’s proceedings and construct revised pedagogical strategies to better meet the needs of the students. However, what aspects of the pedagogical lifeworld would we think about if we decided to step back from the complexities, deadlines, and commitments that are part of the daily teaching (...) routine, and take the time to really ponder pedagogy? I believe that Gloria Dall’Alba would encourage us to pick up her book and enter into the world of education as seen through a phenomenological perspective... (shrink)

The concern of this article is to establish the difference between physiognomy and expression as it may be understood phenomenologically. The work of Merleau-Ponty founds the phenomenological appreciation of physiognomy, and Gestalt psychological studies on perceptual organization elaborate the specifics of physiognomic structure despite the naturalist assumptions of that school of psychology. Physiognomy is the organized structural specification of expression in the phenomenon that presents itself. This view is an alternative to conventional topical but nonthematic considerations on physiognomy . Art (...) therapy with its use of various media is a venue in which the physiognomy of clients' art products is a display of integralness or pathology. It is an immediate access to the world of the patient. The work of the Gestalt psychologist Rudolf Arnheim and of the art therapist Mala Betensky are associated with the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty in order to advance understanding of the significance of physiognomy in experience, in behavior, and in art therapy. (shrink)

Fitness and recreation centres populate today’s modern urban communities and cater to a wide range of people seeking health, fitness and social connection through physical activity. While women’s experiences in these spaces have received some scholarly attention from feminist scholars and scholars of the body, little research has explored women’s lived experiences of the change room. In this paper, I argue that everyday spaces such as change rooms and locker rooms are important spaces in which social understandings of the female (...) body manifest. In such spaces, the materiality of the body and the social meanings ascribed to the female body are illuminated and negotiated by those who inhabit and move through them. Using Sartre and Merleau-Ponty as theoretical guides, I discuss how it is for women to see and be seen in a public change room, and how these spaces illuminate the complex relationship women have with their bodies in contemporary society. (shrink)

Phenomenology has remained a sheltering place for those who would seek to understand not only their own “first person” experiences but also the first person experiences of others. Recent publications by renowned scholars within the field have clarified and extended our possibilities of access to “first person” experience by means of perception (Lingis, 2007) and reflection (Zahavi, 2005). Teaching phenomenology remains a challenge, however, because one must find ways of communicating to the student how to embody it as a process (...) rather than simply to learn about it as a content area. Another challenge issues from the fact that most writings on applied phenomenology emphasize individual subjectivity as the central focus, while offering only indirect access to the subjectivity of others (for example, by way of analyzing written descriptions provided by the individual under study). While one finds in the literature of psychotherapy plentiful elucidations of the “we-experience” within which therapists form impressions of their clients’ experience, there is still need for a more thoughtful clarification of our rather special personal modes of access to the experience of others in everyday life. This paper will present “second person perspectivity” as a mode of resonating with the expressions of others and will describe class activities that can bring students closer to a lived understanding of what it means to be doing phenomenology in the face of the other. (shrink)

The problem of narrative validity is discussed in reference to psychologists' criticisms of verbal report data and in dialogue with Jean-Paul Sartre's understanding of self-knowledge in general and of self-deception in particular. Sartre's notion of "purifying reflection" is invoked as a way of seeing through the distortions and deceptions inherent in narrative accounts of lived experience. Excerpts from empirically-based phenomenological investigations of desire and sexual compliance will be used as illustrations of both the content and process of phenomenologically-based narrative research.

The relationship between self-consciousness, Aristotelian ontology, and Cartesian duality is far closer than it has been thought to be. There is no valid inference either from considerations of Aristotle's hylomorphism or from the phenomenological distinction between body and living body, to the undermining of Cartesian dualism. Descartes' conception of the self as both a reasoning and willing being informs his conception of personhood; a person for Descartes is an unanalysable, integrated, self-conscious and autonomous human being. The claims that Descartes introspectively (...) encounters the self and that the Cartesian extent of inner space is self-contained are profound errors, distortions through the lenses of modern theories. (shrink)

Wayne D. Christensen and Cliff A. Hooker.

In this paper, first, I will focus on the divergent interpretations of two leading Sellars’ scholars, Willem deVries and James O’Shea, as regards Sellars’ view on the being of the normative. It will be suggested that this conflict between deVries’ and O’Shea’s viewpoints can be resolved by the provision of an account of what I shall call ‘ready-tohand’ normativity, which incorporates the insights of both deVries’ and O’Shea’s interpretive perspectives, while at the same time going beyond them. It shall be (...) further argued that the resulting ‘phenomenologically’ informed view of normativity, pointing as it does towards its ideal integration not only with practical action but also with perceptual experience, in the form of what I shall call ‘kinaesthetic’ normativity, can potentially pose problems to Sellars’ own view on the matter, and, in particular, to the way normativity can allegedly be ‘stereoscopically fused’ with the ultimate ontology of the ideal scientific image. However, I shall argue that these problems are not unsurpassable: although the possibility of a specifically ‘kinaesthetic’ form of normativity seems to have eluded Sellars’ grasp, his views about the way in which the productive imagination is implicated in perceptual experience, do indeed provide the conceptual resources that make possible the stereoscopic fusion of this kind of normativity with the ontology of the ideal scientific image. (shrink)

Theorizing about children’s early development is beset with interpretational complexities. I argue that there is a general tendency to over-interpret the experimental findings, and that one of the main causes of this is the difficulty of disengaging from our adult frame of reference when theorizing about the young child’s mind. One domain where this holds is children’s ability to differentiate themselves from others. In relation to this I first critically analyze some cases of interpretational complexities, and then apply my methodological (...) and conceptual concerns to children’s perspective-taking abilities. This has a specific bearing on the classical false-belief task, which is a perspective-taking task. Part II proposes a new, what I call, a ‘Piagetian reading’ of the false-belief test. My new interpretation of the test suggests two different ways of perspective-taking of which one is egocentric in Piaget’s sense. Concluding Part III elaborates on some implications of the proposed reading of the test for a number of findings in the Theory-of-Mind field. (shrink)

This study aims to portray children’s lived spaces in rural Taiwan during the 1960s. Taiwan started to develop into a prosperous and industrialized country with a stronger and dynamic economy during the 1960s while it maintained an authoritarian, single-party government. Today, Taiwan has transformed into a country that is not only economically developed, but also socially Westernized. The lived spaces of children in suburban Taiwan have gone through a drastic change during the last 50 years. This study attempts to provide (...) descriptions of children’s lived space during the 1960s as a different way that space could be lived in comparison to the present westernized space and gives insights into an Other kind of the lived space of society today. I interviewed two native Taiwanese adults who were about 10 years old during the 1960s. I asked them to draw a picture of their childhood home and to describe their everyday experience in that space. Both participants described a childhood home similar to a traditional san-ho-yuan architecture that has an open space in the center of a three-wing building. The architecture of children’s lived spaces in rural Taiwan during the 60s invites intimate familial encounters, engagements with nature and domestic animals, and communal activities for children. With the narratives of the participants, attention was drawn to how children are living in the present day Taiwanese architecture where they are provided with a separate and distinct lived space that does not allow for close and intimate encounters with adults, other children, and nature. The concluding remark underlies the challenges of forming a sense of identity in the given lived space that children face today. (shrink)

Radical embodied cognitive science is split into two camps: the ecological approach and the enactive approach. We propose that these two approaches can be brought together into a productive synthesis. The key is to recognize that the two approaches are pursuing different but complementary types of explanation. Both approaches seek to explain behavior in terms of the animal–environment relation, but they start at opposite ends. Ecological psychologists pursue an ontological strategy. They begin by describing the habitat of the species, and (...) use this to explain how action possibilities are constrained for individual actors. Enactivists, meanwhile, pursue an epistemic strategy: start by characterizing the exploratory, self-regulating behavior of the individual organism, and use this to understand how that organism brings forth its animal-specific umwelt. Both types of explanation are necessary: the ontological strategy explains how structure in the environment constrains how the world can appear to an individual, while the epistemic strategy explains how the world can appear differently to different members of the same species, relative to their skills, abilities, and histories. Making the distinction between species habitat and animal-specific umwelt allows us to understand the environment in realist terms while acknowledging that individual living organisms are phenomenal beings. (shrink)

Preston & de Waal are understandably cautious in applying their model to autism. They emphasise multiple cognitive impairments in autism, including prefrontal-executive, cerebellar-attention, and amygdala-emotion recognition deficits. Further empirical examination of imitation ability in autism may reveal deficits in the neural and cognitive basis of perception-action mapping that have a specific relation to the empathic deficit.

What happens when we glance around a room? How do we trust what we see in fleeting moments? In The World at a Glance, Edward S. Casey describes how glancing counts for more of human perception than previously imagined. An entire universe is perceived in a glance, but our quick and uncommitted attention prevents examination of these rapid acts and processes. While breaking down this paradox, Casey surveys the glance as an essential way by which we acquaint ourselves with the (...) world. This experiential tour-de-force reveals what happens in a blink of an eye. It will become a landmark study in phenomenology, philosophy, environmental philosophy, and the philosophy of mind. (shrink)