Shaun Gallagher’s [2019] ‘Rethinking Nature’ is an attempt to make conceptual space for the relevance of the phenomenological tradition of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, etc., to cognitive scientific explanation within an embodied enactivist approach to cognition. Since cognitive science currently presupposes orthodox scientific naturalism—for which nature is nothing over and above the objective posits of successful (typically natural) science—it makes no allowance for the lived first-person experiences or intersubjective agency that are central to phenomenology; and so, renders them unavailable to Gallagher’s enactivism. (...) Gallagher leading idea is to qualify the scientific naturalist idea of nature as a totality of ‘objective’ (i.e., mind-independent) physical objects in order to make allowance for subjects and their subjectivity in the scientific image of the world. In this proposal Gallagher continues to think within the scientific naturalist commitment to the completeness of the scientific image of the world. In this brief commentary, although I applaud Gallagher’s description of the problem of subjectivity in relation to science, and his general strategy of rethinking nature, I criticize the specific form this rethinking takes. I argue that a better way to include irreducible subjects and subjectivity in a reconception of nature is to drop the requirement that everything in nature must figure in the scientific image of the world. Thus, I propose the advantages of a liberal naturalism (as I call it), and a retention of an objectivist conception of science, over Gallagher’s reformed scientific naturalism. (shrink)

Whether or not Merleau-Ponty’s version of phenomenology should be considered a form of ‘transcendental’ philosophy is open to debate. Although the Phenomenology of Perception presents his position as a transcendental one, many of its features—such as its exploitation of empirical science—might lead to doubt that it can be. This paper considers whether Merleau-Ponty meets what I call the ‘transcendentalist challenge’ of defining and grounding claims of a distinctive transcendental kind. It begins by highlighting three features—the absolute ego, the pure phenomenal (...) field, and the reduction—that Husserl had used to justify claims of a specifically transcendental kind within a phenomenological framework. It then examines how Merleau-Ponty modifies each of these features to focus on the lived body and a factically conditioned phenomenal field, while remaining ambivalent about the reduction. Finally, it assesses whether Merleau-Ponty’s modified position can still legitimately be considered transcendental. I argue that—despite his own rhetoric—this modified position shapes the modality of Merleau-Ponty’s claims in such a way that his phenomenology cannot meet the transcendentalist challenge and therefore should not be considered ‘transcendental.’. (shrink)