This paper aims at contributing to the ongoing efforts to get a firmer grasp of the systematic significance of the entanglement of idealism and empiricism in Helmholtz's work. Contrary to existing analyses, however, the focal point of the present exposition is Helmholtz's attempt to articulate a psychological account of objectification. Helmholtz's motive, as well as his solution to the problem of the object are outlined, and interpreted against the background of his scientific practice on the one hand, and that of (...) empiricist and (transcendental) idealist analyses of experience on the other. The specifically psychological angle taken, not only prompts us to consider figures who have hitherto been treated as having only minor import for Helmholtz interpretation (most importantly J.S. Mill and J.G. Fichte), it furthermore sheds new light on some central tenets of the latter's psychological stance that have hitherto remained underappreciated. For one thing, this analysis reveals an explicit voluntarist tendency in Helmholtz's psychological theory. In conclusion, it is argued that the systematic significance of Helmholtz's empirico-transcendentalism with respect to questions of the mind is best understood as an attempt to found his empirical theory of perception in a second order, normative account of epistemic subjectivity. (shrink)

This essay aims to show that a phenomenological account of animal behavior can shed light on an ethological approach to alterity, and vice versa. The interface between ethology and phenomenology–which, as it is argued, is intelligible only with reference to a shared dimension of affection–is framed by means of the phenomenological concept of intentionality, which appears as a generative force of the organism, its behavior and surrounding world. This means that intentionality does not shape stable structures, but plastic and dynamic (...) processes that bound both the genesis of an organism and its surrounding world. Formation is thus understood as an epigenetic development, which suggests that natural forms are the result of a movement that goes from the general to the particular, from the most broad and regular structures of experience, to the multifarious proliferation of perspectives. (shrink)

According to Foxall (2007), simple acts may best be explained in terms of behavior of the organism as a whole, but complex behavioral patterns, usually described by mental terms, can only be explained by neurocognitive psychology, in which the mind is conceived as an internal mechanism. This proposed division of psychological labor is faulty, first because there is no distinct dividing line between simple (non-mental) and complex (mental) behavior, and second because behavioral psychology alone or neurocognitive psychology alone can describe (...) both simple and complex behavioral patterns. The neurocognitive approach to the mind is based on a science of efficient causes. A post-Skinnerian behavioral approach to the mind, "teleological behaviorism," is based on a science of final causes. Teleological behaviorism studies mental life itself while neurocognitivism studies its underlying mechanism. Both are required for a complete understanding of the mind. (shrink)