In this article, I examine stigmatizing and especially patronizing attitudes towards others’ depression that people who are well-intentioned produce. The strategy of the article is to consider the social experience of depression through two separate subfields of philosophy: epistemic injustice and phenomenology. The solution that I propose is a phenomenological account of empathy. The empathetic attitude that I argue for involves actively listening to the depressed individual and taking their depression testimony as direct evidence. The article has been written both (...) for those who seek to better support neurodiverse people in their lives and for depressives (and other neurodivergents) themselves in order to provide them with a better account for advocating for themselves against social stigma. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose an existentialist-phenomenological model that conceives of mental illness through the terminology of Heidegger’s Being and Time. In particular, the concepts of existentiality, disturbance and the relation between ‘being-with’ and ‘the one’, will be implemented in order to reconstruct the experience of mental illness. The proposed model understands mental illness as a disturbance of a person’s existentiality. More precisely, mental illness is conceptualized as the disturbance of a person’s existential structure, the process of which leads to (...) a becoming explicit of the otherwise implicit dynamical structure that constitutes a person’s experience. In particular, the existential component of ‘being-with’ comes to play a central role in the disturbance of existentiality, thus, I will claim, that it enables a person’s structure of experience to be ‘open for normativity’. By adopting a pragmatist stance on Heideggerian phenomenology, the suggested model proves compatible with naturalist and normativist theories of mental illness while still offering a phenomenological description of the phenomenon. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Kyselo argues that an enactive approach to selfhood can overcome ‘the body-social problem’: “the question for philosophy of cognitive science about how bodily and social aspects figure in the individuation of the human individual self” ). Kyselo’s claim is that we should conceive of the human self as a socially enacted phenomenon that is bodily mediated. Whilst there is much to be praised about this claim, I will demonstrate in this paper that such a conception of (...) self ultimately leads to a strained interpretation of how bodily and social processes are related. To this end, I will begin the paper by elucidating the body-social problem as it appears in modern cognitive science and then expounding Kyselo’s solution, which relies on a novel interpretation of Jonas’s concept of needful freedom. In response to this solution, I will highlight two problems which Kyselo’s account cannot overcome in its current state. I will argue that a more satisfactory solution to the body-social problem involves a re-conception of the human body as irrevocably socially constituted and the human social world as irrevocably bodily constituted. On this view, even the most minimal sense of selfhood cannot privilege either bodily or social processes; instead, the two are ontologically entwined such that humans are biosocial selves. (shrink)

Matthew Ratcliffe has argued that existential feelings form a distinct class of bodily and non-conceptual feelings that pre-intentionally structure our intentional experience of others, the world, and ourselves. In this article, I will identify and discuss three interrelated areas of concern for Ratcliffe’s theory of existential feelings. First, the distinct senses in which existential feelings are felt as background bodily feelings and as spaces of possibility calls for further clarification. Second, the nature of the suggested bi-directional relationship between existential feelings (...) and intentional experience remains ambiguous. Third, viewed in light of existential guilt, the categorically non-conceptual nature of existential feelings may not be as definite as presumed. The aim of the article is to draw critical attention to aspects of the theory that would benefit from further development, and therefore, to advance the ongoing discussion about existential feelings. (shrink)

There is a need for inner recollection opposed to our everyday distraction. Our distraction is partly based on anthropological features and partly on social and cultural features. As well as feelings of distraction, we know experiences of being focussed from everyday life. As feelings in which distraction is absent, and as feelings in which we are partly and temporarily released from our own egocentric perspective, they remind us that a different kind of relation to ourselves and the world is possible. (...) Therefore, they can motivate a process of self-transformation aiming at a mystical state of mind, which is of a more profound and enduring kind than ordinary experiences of being focussed. The mystical state of mind is a state in which we transcend ourselves in the face of the universe and thereby relativize our own affective involvement. It is a feeling of an all-encompassing unity which ultimately concerns us; and it is a feeling of love, joy, and peace of mind. Mystical feelings thus shape and restrict spaces of possibilities, and they comprise an altered sense of what it means to be real. Therefore, they can be classified as existential feelings. Still, the mystical state of mind differs from prototypical existential feelings because it is a positive feeling, necessarily comprises active as well as passive moments, and presupposes an explicit way of attending to the world as world. (shrink)

Being in a mood—such as an anxious, irritable, depressed, tranquil, or cheerful mood—tends to alter the way we react emotionally to the particular objects we encounter. But how, exactly, do moods alter the way we experience particular objects? Perceptualism, a popular approach to understanding affective experiences, holds that moods function like "colored lenses," altering the way we perceive the evaluative properties of the objects we encounter. In this essay, I offer a phenomenological analysis of the experience of being in a (...) mood that illustrates the limitations of the colored lens metaphor and demonstrates the basic inadequacy of the perceptualist account of moods. I argue that when we are in a mood, it is common to experience a kind of "emotional disconnection" in which we perceive evaluative properties that would normally elicit strong emotional reactions from us, but nonetheless we find that, in our present mood, we remain emotionally numb to these perceptions. Such experiences of "seeing but not feeling" are difficult to understand from within the perceptualist paradigm. Building on the work of Martin Heidegger, I sketch an alternative, phenomenological analysis of moods that can better account for experiences of emotional disconnection. On this alternative account, being in a mood does not merely alter the content of our perceptions but, rather, alters the way we interpret the overall significance of what we perceive, relative to a certain situational context. (shrink)

Affordances are action-possibilities, ways of relating to and acting on things in our world. They help us understand how these things mean what they do and how we have bodily access to our world more generally. But what happens when this access is ruptured or impeded? I consider this question in the context of psychopathology and reports that describe this experience. I argue that thinking about the bodily consequences of losing access to everyday affordances can help us better understand these (...) reports. An affordance-based approach to psychopathology can illuminate some of the causes, as well as the experiential character and consequences, of affective disorders and diminished spatial agency in self-world disturbances. It also highlights some under-explored ethical and political dimensions of these issues that need further attention. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the relationship between phenomenology and body dysmorphia. This is, to explain, a disorder in which the sufferer perceives, and is obsessed by, defects in appearance which are either non-existent or severely exaggerated. I will see how Husserl’s and Sartre’s analyses of embodiment can explain the radical uncertainty, and anxiety, about appearance that underscores this condition. Their accounts of the body-as-lived reveal first of all an essential intimacy between body and self that the “objective”, material, view of the (...) body covers over. Second, however, their analyses show that there is always also an essential elusiveness of the body before our attempts to grasp or know it. Taken together, these points indicate how body dysmorphia arises. If there is an essential project of the self to know the body, but this is necessarily frustrated, then we can see how an obsession and anxiety surrounding bodily appearance can emerge. (shrink)

In this essay I address the question, “What is the subject matter of phenomenological research?” I argue that in spite of the increasing popularity of phenomenology, the answers to this question have been brief and cursory. As a result, contemporary phenomenologists lack a clear framework within which to articulate the aims and results of their research, and cannot easily engage each other in constructive and critical discourse. Examining the literature on phenomenology’s identity, I show how the question of phenomenology’s subject (...) matter has been systematically neglected. It has been overshadowed by an unending concern with phenomenology’s methodological identity. However, an examination of recent contributions to this literature reveals that a concern with articulating phenomenology’s subject matter has gradually increased, although such articulations remain preliminary. In light of this, I delineate, define, and illustrate three layers of phenomenological research, which I term “existentials,” “modes,” and “prejudices.” While the delineation of these layers is drawn primarily from classical phenomenological texts, they are defined and illustrated through the use of more contemporary literature. Following the articulation of this subject matter, I briefly consider some of the debates—both foundational and applied—that can be facilitated by the adoption of this framework. (shrink)

The enactive approach to cognition and the phenomenological tradition have in common a wide conception of ‘intentionality’. Within these frameworks, intentionality is understood as a general openness to the world. For classical phenomenologists, the most basic subjective structure that allows for such openness is time-consciousness. Some enactivists, while inspired by the phenomenological tradition, have nevertheless argued that affectivity is more basic, being that which gives rise to the temporal flow of consciousness. In this paper, I assess the relationship between temporality (...) and affectivity from both a phenomenological and an enactive perspective. I argue that, as opposed to the classical phenomenological view (which favours temporality), and to the enactive view (which favours affectivity), we must take affectivity and temporality as co-emergent. Jointly, affectivity and temporality constitute the basic structures of intentionality. Additionally, using examples from phenomenological psychopathology, I conclude that all intentionality is defined by an anticipatory and affective structure that gives rise to general feelings related to our bodily possibilities in the world. (shrink)

In this chapter, I consider three ‘promises’ of bringing phenomenology into dialogue with networked learning. First, a ‘conceptual promise’, which draws attention to conceptual resources in phenomenology that can inspire and inform how we understand, conceive of, and uncover experiences of participants in networked learning activities and environments. Second, a ‘methodological promise’, which outlines a variety of ways that phenomenological methodologies and concepts can be put to use in empirical research in networked learning. And third, a ‘critical promise’, which suggests (...) how work done in the realm of critical phenomenology is complementary to and useful for exploring the social justice and emancipatory aims of networked learning researchers. Through this framework, I reflect upon multiple ways in which phenomenology has and might continue to fruitfully inform and shape networked learning research. In doing so, I emphasise that deploying phenomenology in the context of networked learning not only enriches our understanding of networked learning but that phenomenology itself is enriched through testing, finetuning, and expanding its methods, concepts, and understanding, as well as unveiling its own limitations and constraints. (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)

In current philosophy of mind, there is lively debate over whether emotions, moods, and other affects can extend to comprise elements beyond one’s organismic boundaries. At the same time, there has been growing interest in the nature and significance of so-called existential feelings, which, as the term suggests, are feelings of one’s overall being in the world. In this article, I bring these two strands of investigation together to ask: Can the material underpinnings of existential feelings extend beyond one’s skull (...) and skin? To begin, I introduce and adopt a componential-systemic view of extended affectivity. In doing so, I specify the vehicle externalist criteria for extension employed in my analysis. I then define what existential feelings are and pinpoint several key issues in their potential extension. More specifically, I identify sensorimotor ‘know-how’ as a possibly extending component of existential feeling and posit it as the fulcrum of my argument. Finally, I move on to consider the extension of existential feeling via sensory substitution, especially through so-called Tactile Visual Sensory Substitution (TVSS) devices. Informed by both philosophical and empirical studies, I argue that, under certain conditions, (a) the agent’s implicit sensorimotor processing and a TVSS device can become coupled into a new systemic whole, which in turn (b) reconfigures the material underpinnings of the agent’s pre-intentional world-experience. This, I conclude, counts as a cogent case for extended existential feeling. (shrink)

There is a long tradition of employing a phenomenological approach to gain greater insight into the unique experience of psychiatric illness. Researchers in this field have shed light upon a distur...

This paper introduces a novel conceptualisation of mental imagery; namely, that is grease for the mind’s gears (MGT). MGT is not just a metaphor. Rather, it describes an important and overlooked higher-order function of mental imagery: that it aids various mental faculties discharge their characteristic functional roles. MGT is motivated by reflection on converging evidence from clinical, experimental and social psychology and solves at least two neglected conceptual puzzles about mental imagery. The first puzzle concerns imagery’s architectural promiscuity; that is, (...) its ability to assist diverse mental faculties and perform many different functions when doing so. The second puzzle concerns how to square imagery’s architectural promiscuity with its psychopathological relevance; that is, its being a maintaining cause, and possibly even a partial constituent, of several psychological disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder. Mental imagery helps and harms human psychology to extreme degrees and this is something that calls for elucidation. MGT says that instead of facing perplexing heterogeneities here, we instead face a significant unity. On this score, MGT is argued to be superior to the currently dominant conception of imagery in the philosophical literature; namely, as a perception-like state of mind. (shrink)

Dass wir alle in einer gemeinsamen Wirklichkeit leben, setzen wir meist unhinterfragt voraus. Sehen Andere die Welt dann doch einmal anders, mag es uns scheinen, als sähen sie diese einfach nicht so, wie sie wirklich ist. Schwerer fällt uns anzuerkennen, dass andere zuweilen in ganz anderen Wirklichkeiten unterwegs sind als wir selbst. - Tom Poljansek zeigt, wie sich die Vorstellung einer Pluralität menschlicher Wirklichkeiten mit der Annahme einer wahrnehmungsunabhängigen Realität vereinbaren lässt, ohne sich in einen Relativismus der vielen Wirklichkeiten zu (...) verlaufen. In Auseinandersetzung mit »kontinentalen« und »analytischen« Ansätzen legt er eine elegante Theorie menschlicher Wirklichkeiten vor, die konstruktivistische und realistische, phänomenologische und naturalistische Motive unerwartet miteinander verbindet. (shrink)

I begin this article with an increasingly accepted claim: that emotions lend differential weight to states of affairs, helping us conceptually carve the world and make rational decisions. I then develop a more controversial assertion: that environments have non-subjective emotional qualities, which organize behavior and help us make sense of the world. I defend this from ecological and related embodied standpoints that take properties to be interrelational outcomes. I also build on conceptions of experience as a cultural phenomenon, one that (...) coheres around shared environmental contours and public emotional concerns, introducing normative constraints (or what might be called “world grammars”). Endorsing this outlook suggests an argument for the view that cultural spaces have affectively charged, non-subjective, normative openings and closures. These openings and closures engender selectively permeable barriers which cordon space without physically preventing entry, as seen with decorative half walls and elevation changes. An area with such barriers may look emotionally hostile to, say, the dispirited homeless who are in fact less welcome there. Outcomes like these might be thought of as “political affordances.” These affordances can be regarded as normative openings and closures that implicitly filter, and hence segregate, according to various social divisions. Although registering political affordances requires more than the detection of ambient arrays, the notion retains core Gibsonian ideas: that affordances are values, that these values are linked with how a space can be used, and that the existence and nature of such affordances is not a subjective matter. (shrink)

One popular description of current society is that it is a depressed society and medical evidence about depression’s prevalence may well make such an estimation plausible. However, such normative-critical assessments surrounding depression have to date usually operated with a one-sided understanding of depression. This understanding widely neglects the various ways depression manifests as well as its comorbidities. This becomes evident at the latest when considering one of depression’s most prominent and well-known comorbidities: chronic pain. Against this background, we aim in (...) this article to substantiate our leading claim that the phenomenal interconnection between depression and chronic pain must be acknowledged in the global diagnosis of a depressive society. Thus, we argue here for a complementation of the dominant interpretation of a depressed society. This would support the overcoming of oversimplified images and estimations about depression in current society and further, help to recognize chronic pain properly on the larger scale of assessments that address society as a whole. (shrink)

In the spring and summer of 2020, the world broke down. A worldly breakdown often gives rise to forms of moral breakdown, or those “moments” when some worldly event or occurrence forces a person or persons to critically reflect on their until then unquestioned way of being-in-the-world (Zigon 2007). From the persistence of the global pandemic, to the collapse of the economy, to the murder of George Floyd by police officers on camera, to the worldwide response to that injustice, the (...) world and its human inhabitants experienced a breakdown in those months and it became impossible to ever see, hear, understand, or be in the world in the same way again. This special issue of Puncta brings together anthropologists and philosophers who take up a critical phenomenological or hermeneutic approach for thinking the contemporary condition. From the possibility of inhabiting a world conditioned by a global pandemic, to the impossibility of dwelling in conditions of systemic racism, from the question of how to face a future that presents itself as looming, to a present that denies the very possibility of truth: this collection responds to these and more in the hope of showing not only the contemporary conditions of existence, but that other conditions always remain as an ever-present potentiality. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss the illness and recovery of the depressed Moses Herzog, the protagonist of Saul Bellow’s novel _Herzog_ ( 1964 ). Using this novel as a case study, I criticize a one-sided (neuro)biological and drug-based approach to depression. Referring to the hermeneutic anthropology of philosophers like Paul Ricoeur and Marya Schechtman, I argue that the treatment of depression could benefit from a broader approach that takes into account existential and social-cultural factors as well as biological factors. I (...) suggest that narrative psychiatry offers a framework wherein various models of mental illness may be combined in ways that move beyond a pro/contra bio-psychiatry binary. By investigating depression using philosophical ideas and a literary text, this article aims to illustrate how the humanities may contribute to our thinking about depression. (shrink)

In 2020, M. Summa developed a promising approach to understanding the concept of illness. This approach combines a theory of organisms with Responsive Phenomenology to gain a concept of illness. Following on from this, the present article shows that the normative presuppositions can be further explicated and justified by drawing on the theoretical resources of Aristotelian naturalism as propounded by Michael Thompson. Aristotelian naturalism does provide a theoretical option to grasp the normative foundations of human life. However, this article argues (...) that Aristotelian naturalism requires another criterion besides human nature to make the concept of illness intelligible. Following John McDowell’s critique of Aristotelian naturalism, it will be shown that this criterion consists in the capacity for autonomy. From this a concept of illness is developed which describes an impairment of the self-regulated and autonomous realisation of the human form of life. (shrink)

This is a thesis in three parts. It concerns the normative capacity of attributive goodness. Specifically, it critically evaluates Attributivism, the theory that attributive goodness is fundamentally normative, or that the distribution of that property determines when, whether, and in what way agents ought to act. The first third develops, refines and defends Attributivism. Doing so is, in part, a ground-clearing exercise. I distil that theory from the arguments of many other philosophers. In doing so I isolate and precisify its (...) core commitments. I defend it from a number of objections. The second third analyses fundamental normativity. I stipulate that a standard or property is fundamentally normative if its distribution alone can ground normativity. I argue that for anything to be so fundamentally normative, it must minimally meet two criteria. It must be both authoritative and regulatory. The final third evaluates whether or not attributive goodness satisfies the established criteria, and so whether or not Attributivism is correct. I argue that in its canonical form it isn’t. I then develop a revised view of Attributivism that can satisfy the criteria. I argue, however, that the revised view is unsatisfying in almost every respect. Attributivism, revised or otherwise, should be rejected. (shrink)

Psychedelic-assisted Psychotherapy combines the use of psychedelic compounds, such as psilocybin, with psychotherapy. PAP has shown some promise as a novel treatment for Major Depressive Disorder, and empirical research suggests that its efficacy turns on the altered states induced by psychedelic compounds. In this paper we draw on the literature of phenomenology to explain the therapeutic potential of psychedelic experiences. Svenaeus characterises mental illness as a form of suffering that entails three distinct but related experiences of alienation or “unhomelike being-in-the-world”: (...) illness suffering, which relates to embodiment; existential suffering, which relates to self-narratives, and political suffering, which relates to social relationships. Ratcliffe further characterises the experience of MDD in phenomenological terms as a loss of pre-intentional possibility that manifests as excessive noematic feeling in the experience of embodiment, restrictive narratives in the construction of self, and disconnectedness in experience of the social world. We contend that PAP ameliorates the suffering associated with MDD by inducing and consolidating a state of broadened pre-intentional possibility—one that entails sudden, profound and enduring changes in embodiment, self-narratives, and social experience. We argue further that this phenomenological account is consistent with a bio-psycho-social model of mental health and illness, and we frame it as an argument supporting the plausibility of recent claims about treatment success. This helps to justify ongoing future empirical research in this setting. (shrink)

Affordances are action-possibilities, ways of relating to and acting on our world. A theory of affordances helps us understand how we have bodily access to our world and what it means to enjoy such access. But what happens to bodies when this access is somehow ruptured or impeded? This question is relevant to psychopathology. People with psychiatric disorders often describe feeling as though they’ve lost access to affordances that others take for granted. Focusing on schizophrenia, depression, and autistic spectrum disorder, (...) I argue that thinking about the bodily consequences of losing access to everyday affordances can help us better understand these reports. An affordance-based approach to psychopathology can illuminate some of the causes, as well as the experiential character and content, of affective disorders in psychopathology. It can also draw our attention to some under-explored ethical and political dimensions of these issues needing further consideration. (shrink)

Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 55-65, January 2022. Phenomenologists define social impairments as key aspects of depression and argue that depression is irreducible to the individual. In this article I aim to further elaborate this non-reductionist notion of depression by claiming that depression not only corresponds to an impaired experience of social relations, but also arises from a socially impaired world. To pursue this goal, I will challenge the understanding of depression as an affective disorder blocking the affective (...) communication between individual and environment. I will redefine feelings of depression as situated affections, and hence suggest that they are products of the individual's situatedness in a depressogenic environment and they function in initiating an active withdrawal from such environment. (shrink)

Currently, anomalous lived temporality is not included in the main diagnostic criteria or standard symptom checklists. In this article, we present the Transdiagnostic Assessment of Temporal Experience, a structured interview that can be used by researchers and clinicians without a comprehensive phenomenological background to explore abnormal time experiences in persons with abnormal mental conditions regardless of their diagnosis. When extensive data gathered by this scale are available, it will be possible to delineate well-defined anomalous lived temporality profiles for each psychopathological (...) disorder. This instrument may also prove useful for clinicians by providing a more refined assessment of relevant psychopathological symptoms and an in-depth understanding of the patient’s abnormal behaviour as related to specific types of time experience. In the first part of the article, we provide a brief overview of the phenomenological concept of temporality, including pre-phenomenal and phenomenal time, synthesis, conation and synchronization, and of abnormal time experiences in persons affected by psychopathological conditions. In the following part, we describe the basic structure of the interview that comprises seven categories corresponding to the abnormal features of lived temporality: anomalies of synchrony, of time structure, of implicit time flow, of explicit time flow, and anomalous experiences of the past, the present and the future. The paper also includes a section on administration and scoring of the TATE scale, the complete interview and a Likert table for quantifying the frequency, intensity and interference with daily life of the phenomena explored. (shrink)

This article is an introduction to the special issue on philosophy of medicine. Philosophy of medicine is a field that has flourished in the last couple of decades and has become increasingly institutionalized. The introduction begins with a brief overview of some of the most central recent developments in the field. It then describes the six articles that comprise this issue.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a mental health condition in which the experience of a traumatic event causes a series of psychiatric and behavioral symptoms such as hypervigilance, insomnia, irritability, aggression, constricted affect, and self-destructive behavior. This paper investigates two case studies to argue that the experience of PTSD is not restricted to humans alone; we have good epistemic reason to hold that some animals can experience genuine PTSD, given our current and best clinical understanding of the disorder in humans. I (...) will use this evidence to argue for two claims. First, because the causal structure of PTSD plausibly requires reference to a traumatic conscious experience in order to explain subsequent behaviors, the fact that animals can have PTSD provides new evidence for animal consciousness. Second, the discovery of PTSD in animals puts pressure on accounts which hold that animal behavior can be fully explained without reference to subjective experience. (shrink)

This article offers a conceptual analysis of self-respect and self-esteem that informs the ethics of psychotherapy in palliative care. It is focused on Chochinov’s Dignity Therapy, an internationally recognized treatment offered to dying patients who express a need to bolster their sense of self-worth. Although Dignity Therapy aims to help such patients affirm their value through summarized life stories that are shared with their survivors, it is not grounded in a robust theory of self-respect. There is reason to be skeptical (...) about deathbed narratives, and Dignity Therapy can unintentionally encourage distorted representations at odds with the self-respect it aims to affirm. Dignity therapy can also encourage distortions of self-esteem that are in conflict with self-respect. Although Chochinov does not address it, the distinction between self-respect and self-esteem is relevant to deathbed accounts. Dillon’s feminist revisioning of self-respect can inform the practice of Dignity Therapy by encouraging honest life stories through a reckoning with one’s moral complexity, especially in moral generativity cases where patients seek forgiveness, relate atonement, or present their lives as examples to be followed. Her concept of self-esteem allows for therapeutic benefits that are less demanding, but no less significant, than those derived from a moral reckoning. Appropriate affirmations of self-esteem can provide much-needed solace when self-respect is damaged beyond adequate repair. Dillon’s account of self-respect and self-esteem enables a richer understanding of the kinds of personal evaluation and disclosure that Dignity Therapy accommodates. As such, their place in Dignity Therapy needs more critical evaluation than it has received. (shrink)

First-person reports of Major Depressive Disorder reveal that when an individual becomes depressed a profound change or ‘shift’ to one’s conscious experience occurs. The depressed person reports that something fundamental to their experience has been disturbed or shifted; a change associated with the common but elusive claim that when depressed one finds oneself in a ‘different world’ detached from reality and other people. Existing attempts to utilise these phenomenological observations in a psychiatric context are challenged by the fact that this (...) experiential ‘shift’ characteristic of depression appears mysterious and resists analysis in scientific terms. This paper offers a way out of this predicament. The hypothesis proposed is that when an individual becomes depressed, the individual departs from a state of ordinary wakeful consciousness and enters a distinctive global state of consciousness akin to dreaming and the psychedelic state. After unpacking and motivating this hypothesis in the context of research in consciousness science, I outline two of its important implications for the neurobiology of depression and psychedelic psychiatry. The upshot is a promising and conceptually well-motivated hypothesis about depression which is apt for empirical uptake and development. (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.

In this paper I explore health and illness through the lens of enactivism, which is understood and developed as a bodily-based worldly-engaged phenomenology. Various health theories – biomedical, ability-based, biopsychosocial – are introduced and scrutinized from the point of view of enactivism and phenomenology. Health is ultimately argued to consist in a central world-disclosing aspect of what is called existential feelings, experienced by way of transparency and ease in carrying out important life projects. Health, in such a phenomenologically enacted understanding, (...) is an important and in many cases necessary part of leading a good life. Illness, on the other hand, by such a phenomenological view, consist in finding oneself at mercy of unhomelike existential feelings, such as bodily pains, nausea, extreme unmotivated tiredness, depression, chronic anxiety and delusion, which make it harder and, in some cases, impossible to flourish. In illness suffering the lived body hurts, resists, or, in other ways, alienates the activities of the ill person. (shrink)

Depression has been widely studied by researchers from different fields, but its causes, and mechanism of action are still not clear. A difficulty emerges from the shifting from objective diagnosis or analysis to exploration of subjective feelings and experiences that influence the individuals' expression, communication and coping in facing depression. The integration of the experiential dimension of the first-person in studies on depression–and related methodological recommendations–are needed to improve the validity and generalizability of research findings. It will allow the development (...) of timely and effective actions of care. Starting from providing a summary of the literature on theoretical assumptions and considerations for the study of the mind, with particular attention to the experiential dimension of patients with depression, this contribution is aimed to provide practical suggestions for the design of research able to incorporate first- and third-person accounts. It is also aimed to review qualified phenomenological methods for the acquisition and interpretation of experiential data in patients with depression. Recognizing the first-person perspective in the study of depression is a major step toward a better understanding and treatment of this disorder. Theoretical constructs and technique suggestions that result from this review offer a valid starting point for the inclusion of the experiential dimension to common third-person research in the study of the mind. (shrink)

Recently, psychologists have started to distinguish between three kinds of experience of meaning. Drawing on philosophical as well as empirical literature, I argue that the experience of one’s own life making sense involves a sense of narrative justification, so that not just any kind of intelligibility suffices; the experience of purpose includes enthusiastic future-directed motivation against the background of a global sort of hopefulness, or the resonance of what one does right now with one’s values; and finally, the experience of (...) significance consists primarily of feelings of pride and fulfilment, which construe our actions as making a positive difference to the world or as mattering to someone who matters to us. Mutually exclusive philosophical views of what makes our lives meaningful could all be simultaneously correct about the fittingness of these different kinds of experience. (shrink)

Individuals suffering from depression consistently report experiencing a lack of connectedness with others. David Karp (2017, 73), in his memoir and study of depression, has gone so far to describe depression as “an illness of isolation, a disease of disconnectedness”. It has become common, in phenomenological circles, to attribute this social impairment to the depressed individual experiencing their body as corporealized, acting as a barrier between them and the world around them (Fuchs 2005, 2016). In this paper, I offer an (...) alternative view of the experience of social disconnectedness in depression, suggesting that rather than necessarily experiencing their body as object-like, the depressed individual’s bodily is saturated with experiences of lethargy, tiredness, heaviness, sadness, hopelessness and so on, to the exclusion of being able to bodily connect to others. I suggest that depression does not involve a complete social impairment but a specific impairment of affective forms of interpersonal experience. (shrink)

In the present essay we explore a form of linguistic witchery (Wittgenstein) aimed at forging a sense of unity from incompatible visions of reality—namely, the formation of oxymoronic hybrids.

In the article I discuss functionalist interpretations of Husserlian phenomenology. The first one was coined in the discussion between Hubert Dreyfus and Ronald McIntyre. They argue that Husserl’s phenomenology shares similarities with computational functionalism, and the key similarity is between the concept of noema and the concept of mental representation. I show the weaknesses of that reading and argue that there is another available functionalist reading of Husserlian phenomenology. I propose to shift perspective and approach the relation between phenomenology and (...) functionalism from a methodological perspective, specifically taking into account the functionalist explanatory strategy called functional analysis. I discuss the notion of function in Husserl’s works and Husserl’s idea of functional phenomenology. The key argument I develop is that in functional phenomenology we can find an explanatory strategy which is analogous to the strategy of functional decomposition used in functional analysis. I conclude that the proposed functionalist reading of phenomenology opens a new approach to the integration of phenomenology with cognitive sciences. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that phenomenological psychopathologists, despite their critical attitude toward mainstream psychiatry, still hold problematic prejudices about the nature of psychiatric conditions as illness or disorder. I suggest that phenomenological psychopathologists turn to resources in the neurodiversity and mad pride movements to critically reflect upon these prejudices and appreciate the methodological problems that they pose.

According to pluralistic intuitionist theories, some of our moral beliefs are non-inferentially justified, and these beliefs come in both an a priori and an a posteriori variety. In this paper I present new support for this pluralistic form of intuitionism by examining the deeply social nature of moral inquiry. This is something that intuitionists have tended to neglect. It does play an important role in an intuitionist theory offered by Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer-Landau (forth), but whilst they invoke the social (...) nature of moral inquiry in order to argue that ordinary moral intuitions are trustworthy, my argument focuses on what I will call the ‘frontiers’ of moral inquiry. I will show that inclusive and cooperative dialogue is necessary at moral inquiry’s frontiers, and that intuitionists can expect such dialogue to result in both a priori and a posteriori moral beliefs. (shrink)

According to several researchers, core affect lies at the foundation of our affective lives and may be characterized as a consciously accessible state combining arousal (activated-deactivated) and valence (pleasure-displeasure). The interaction between these two dimensions is still a matter of debate. In this paper we provide a novel hypothesis concerning their interaction, by arguing that subjective arousal levels modulate the experience of a stimulus’ affective quality. All things being equal, the higher the arousal, the more a given stimulus would be (...) experienced as pleasant (or unpleasant). While marshaling some preliminary evidence in favor of this hypothesis, we also show how it might be relevant in reframing our conception of depressive disorders (i.e., major and bipolar depression). (shrink)

This paper addresses the nature of sensed-presence experiences that are commonplace among the bereaved and occur cross-culturally. Although these experiences are often labelled ‘‘bereavement hallucinations’’, it is unclear what they consist of. Some seem to involve sensory experiences in one or more modalities, while others involve a non-specificfeelingorsenseof presence. I focus on a puzzle concerning the latter: it is unclear how an experience of someone’s presence could arise without a more specific sensory content. I suggest that at least some of (...) these experiences consist in a dynamic and non-localized experience of significant and salientpossibilities. This can amount to the sense of currentlyrelating toa particular individual and, by implication, a sense of that person’s presence. Where an experience of this kind also includes sensory qualities, they are inessential to the sense of relatedness and perhaps symptomatic of it. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker’s influential concept of epistemic injustice has recently seen application to many areas of interest, with an increasing body of healthcare research using the concept of epistemic injustice in order to develop both general frameworks and accounts of specific medical conditions and patient groups. This paper illuminates tensions that arise between taking steps to protect against committing epistemic injustice in healthcare, and taking steps to understand the complexity of one’s predicament and treat it accordingly. Work on epistemic injustice is (...) therefore at risk of obfuscating legitimate and potentially fruitful inquiry. This paper uses Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis as a case study, but I suggest that the key problems identified could apply to other cases within healthcare, such as those classed as Medically Unexplained Illnesses, Functional Neurological Disorders and Psychiatric Disorders. Future work on epistemic injustice in healthcare must recognise and attend to this tension to protect against unsatisfactory attempts to correct epistemic injustice. (shrink)

What it is about mood, as a specific type of affect, that makes it not easily amenable to standard models of rationality? It is commonly assumed that the cognitive rationality of an affective state is somehow depended upon how that state is related to what the state is about, its so called intentional object; but, given that moods do not seem to bear an intentional relation to an object, it is hard to see how they can be in the offing (...) for rational assessment. In the first part of the paper I outline three ways of attributing intentionality to moods, raising for each one of them a series of problems, thus casting doubt on the viability of an intentionalist grounding for the rationality of moods. I then move to an examination of the view of moods as background feelings, which are intimately related to how we perceive the world; however, in my view, that approach fails to provide standards of assessment that would permit appraising the mood itself as rational or irrational. Finally, I look at an account of moods as mechanisms whose function is to monitor the balance between environmental demands and one’s physical or psychological resources. That is a promising way to proceed in our exploration of mood states; it faces though some formidable phenomenological challenges. All in all, defending the rationality of moods calls for a rethinking of the assumptions that are prevalent in the current literature over the representational dimension of affective states. (shrink)

According to constitution views of persons, we are constituted by spatially coinciding human animals. Constitution views face an ‘overpopulation’ puzzle: if the animal has my brain, there is another thinker where I am. An influential solution to this problem distinguishes between derivative and non‐derivative property possession: persons non‐derivatively have their personal properties, while inheriting others from their constituters. I will show that this solution raises a new problem, by constructing a puzzle with the absurd result that we instantiate certain properties (...) incompatibly. In setting up the puzzle, I demonstrate the relevance of the bodily awareness and self‐awareness literatures to overpopulation puzzles. (shrink)

Major depression is a prevalent mental disorder that leads to persistent negative mood and tremendous suffering in affected individuals. However, the biological realization of this disorder and associated symptom clusters remain poorly understood. Recently, phenomenological accounts of major depressive disorder and contributions to the emerging predictive processing account have provided valuable insights into the phenomenological and neuro-functional components that lead to manifestations of major depressive episodes. The purpose of this paper is to weave together these different strands of research to (...) develop a predictive processing account of major depressive disorder. In doing so, I will relate personal-level descriptions of associated phenomenal experiences to a sub-personal-level predictive processing account of the functional realization of major depression. I will argue that pervasive symptoms of the disorder, which include a diminished sense of agency, fatigue, social withdrawal, and rumination, are integrated by existential feelings of loss and impossibility. These phenomenal experiences, I will argue, are associated with dysfunctional processes of prediction error minimization, which are characterized by an overall decrease of the causal contributions of active inference and by distorted precision estimates. The emerging account promises to contribute to a better understanding of the complex processes that give rise to depressive experiences. (shrink)

The aim of my paper is to review the discussion concerning various difficulties which surround the definition of depression and the methods of diagnosing and treating the disease against the background of the now dominant reductionist paradigm in psychiatry, as well as to answer the question whether a new approach to psychiatric disorders proposed by philosophers of psychiatry working within the phenomenologically inspired embodied and enactive paradigm indeed offers a solution to these difficulties. I present the issues specific to the (...) subject of depression in light of the more general problems related to biological psychiatry that have recently caused much debate. In the second part of the paper, I consider enactive, phenomenological and embodied theories of depression and the possibilities of new methods of treatment. My goal is to assess whether these theories indeed add anything important to the conceptions that are already present in psychiatry. I conclude that even if the embodied philosophy of psychiatry does not solve many of the problems faced by modern psychiatry, it can, nevertheless, provide a useful theoretical basis for future changes. (shrink)