In recent years there has been a notable increase in the use of phenomenology as a research method, particularly in educational research. With the rise of phenomenology as a research method, confusion has also arisen concerning what counts as phenomenology, and how best to practice phenomenological research in non-philosophical contexts. Consequently, this article will be concerned with three issues: firstly, to contextualise the debate, I provide a brief overview of three popular and influential approaches to phenomenology as a research method: (...) (1) Giorgi’s descriptive phenomenological method; (2) van Manen’s hermeneutic phenomenology; and, (3) Smith’s interpretative phenomenological analysis; secondly, for the sake of conceptual clarity, I then turn my attention to a critical discussion of these approaches and argue that these approaches tend to converge phenomenology into either a descriptive or interpretative focus that essentially transforms phenomenology into a kind of solipsist subjectivism; and, lastly, to progress the debate forward, I argue that it makes sense to look beyond the qualitative or educational research literature to successful applications of phenomenology in non-philosophical contexts because there are plenty of relevant resources that can offer significant theoretical and methodological support to researchers. (shrink)

Attempts to close the mind-body gap traditionally resort to a priori speculations. Motivated by dissatisfaction with such accounts, neurophenomenology constitutes one of the first attempts to close the mind-body gap non-metaphysically. Nonetheless, it faces significant challenges. Many of these challenges arise from its abandoning of transcendentality and its dim view of bioinformation. In this paper, I propose a superior non-metaphysical alternative: a combination of a reformed biosemiotics and transcendental phenomenology. My approach addresses the difficulties of neurophenomenology, while retaining the merit (...) of mutual constraints. Biosemiotics pays respect to bioinformation while imposing the sign-meaning duality on primitive forms of life, which is a relic of anthropomorphism. To avoid this unjustified commitment, I argue for a sign-free biosemantics which replaces Peirce’s semiotics with Husserl’s theory of meaning and exchanges naturalism for transcendentalism. Meaning, according to the resulting account, is the “intended as such”. The irreality of meaning results from what I term the ‘higher visibility’ of intentionality. I argue that the mind-body gap can be locally closed in a non-metaphysical manner as the result of reflection upon empirical biological investigations. Sign-free biosemantics uncovers the meanings for the organism that are implicit in biological research, while transcendental phenomenology analyses the experiences that biologists undergo when associating the physical with the biological level, while at the same time also analysing the very framework within which they work. Meanwhile, biosemiotics frees phenomenology from its methodological limitations, and the two domains establish mutual constraints in a more radical form than neurophenomenology. (shrink)

Since the end of the last century, there has been several ambitious attempts to naturalize Husserlian phenomenology by way of mathematization. To justify themselves in view of Husserl’s adamant antinaturalism, many of these attempts appeal to the new physico-mathematical tools that were unknown in Husserl’s time and thus allegedly make his position outdated. This paper critically addresses these mathematization proposals and aims to show that Husserl had, in fact, sufficiently good arguments that make his antinaturalistic position sound even today. The (...) starting point of the discussion presented in this paper is the mathematization project introduced by Jean-Michel Roy, Jean Petitot, Bernard Pachoud, and Francisco Varela in their introduction to the book Naturalizing Phenomenology. This proposal was followed by a number of critiques but also by several alternative naturalization attempts clearly inspired by Roy et al.’s ambitious project. The review of some of Husserl’s important arguments often overlooked or misinterpreted by both the naturalization advocates and their critics leads the author of the paper to the twofold conclusion which, on the one hand, explores the deeper reasons for the impossibility of a physical and mathematical treatment of phenomenology, on the other hand, clarifies the sense in which such treatments are possible, namely by way of restriction of the variety of experiential aspects that undergo naturalization and substitution of the aspects amenable to the direct mathematization for the directly unmathematizable ones. In the fourth section of this paper, the author attempts to demonstrate that, contrary to widespread belief, Husserl’s arguments are not obsolete by the standards of the contemporary physico-mathematical approaches employed in the mathematization of phenomenology and indeed stand the test of time. (shrink)

Enactivism and ecological psychology converge on the relevance of the environment in understanding perception and action. On both views, perceiving organisms are not merely passive receivers of environmental stimuli, but rather form a dynamic relationship with their environments in such a way that shapes how they interact with the world. In this paper, I suggest that while enactivism and ecological psychology enjoy a shared specification of the environment as the cognitive domain, on both accounts, the structure of the environment, itself, (...) is unspecified beyond that of contingent relations with the species-typical sensorimotor capacities of perceiving organisms. This lack of specification creates a considerable gap in theory regarding the organization of organisms as coupled with their environments. I argue that this gap can be filled by drawing from resources in developmental systems theory, namely, specifying the environmental state-space as a developmental niche that shapes and is shaped by individual organisms over developmental and, on a population scale, evolutionary time. Defining the environment as an organism’s developmental niche makes it clearer how and why certain contingencies have arisen, in turn, strengthening a joint appeal to both enactivism and ecological psychology as theories asserting complementarity between organisms and their environments. (shrink)

At the beginning of the 20th century, Gestalt psychologists put forward the concept of psychoneural isomorphism, which was meant to replace Fechner’s obscure notion of psychophysical parallelism and provide a heuristics that may facilitate the search for the neural correlates of the mind. However, the concept has generated much confusion in the debate, and today its role is still unclear. In this contribution, I will attempt a little conceptual spadework in clarifying the concept of psychoneural isomorphism, focusing exclusively on conscious (...) visual perceptual experience and its neural correlates. Firstly, I will outline the history of our concept, and its alleged metaphysical and epistemic roles. Then, I will clarify the nature of isomorphism and rule out its metaphysical role. Finally, I will review some epistemic roles of our concept, zooming in on the work of Jean Petitot, and suggest that it does not play a relevant heuristic role. I conclude suggesting that psychoneural isomorphism might be an indicator of robustness for certain mathematical descriptions of perceptual content. (shrink)

Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is first and foremost a science of the structures of consciousness. Since it is intended to yield eidetic, i. e., a priori insights, it is often assumed that transcendental phenomenology and the natural sciences are totally detached from each other such that phenomenological investigations cannot possibly benefit from empirical evidence. The aim of this paper is to show that a beneficial relationship is possible. To be more precise, I will show how Husserl’s a priori investigations on consciousness (...) can be supplemented by research in experimental psychology in order to tackle fundamental questions in epistemology. Our result will be a phenomenological conception of experiential justification that is in accordance with and supported by empirical phenomena such as perceptual learning and the phenomenon of blindsight. Finally, I shall shed light on the systematic limits of empirical research. (shrink)

Approaches to the naturalization of phenomenology usually understand naturalization as a matter of rendering continuous the methods, epistemologies, and ontologies of phenomenological and natural scientific inquiry. Presupposed in this statement of the problematic, however, is that there is an original discontinuity, a rupture between phenomenology and the natural sciences that must be remedied. I propose that this way of thinking about the issue is rooted in a simplistic understanding of the phenomenological reduction that entails certain assumptions about the subject matter (...) of phenomenology and its relationship to the natural sciences. By contrast, Merleau‐Ponty's first work, The Structure of Behavior, presents a radically different approach to the phenomenological reduction, one that traverses the natural sciences and integrates them into phenomenology from the outset. I outline the argument for this position in The Structure of Behavior and then discuss consequences for current methodological issues surrounding the naturalization of phenomenology, focusing on the relationship between empirical sciences of mind, phenomenological psychology, and transcendental phenomenology. This novel exegesis of Merleau‐Ponty's view on the reduction offers new insight into his oft‐quoted remark that the phenomenological reduction is impossible to complete. (shrink)

This paper explores the nature of emotions by considering what appear to be two differing, perhaps even conflicting, approaches to affectivity—an evolutionary functional account, on the one hand, and a phenomenological view, on the other. The paper argues for the centrality of the notion of function in both approaches, articulates key differences between them, and attempts to understand how such differences can be overcome.

By extending Husserl’s own historico-critical study to include the conceptual mathematics of more contemporary times – specifically category theory and its emphatic development since the second half of the 20th century – this paper claims that the delineation between mathematics and philosophy must be completely revisited. It will be contended that Husserl’s phenomenological work was very much influenced by the discoveries and limitations of the formal mathematics being developed at Göttingen during his tenure there and that, subsequently, the rôle he (...) envisaged for his material a priori science is heavily dependent upon his conception of the definite manifold. Motivating these contentions is the idea of a mathematics which would go beyond the constraints of formal ontology and subsequently achieve coherence with the full sense of transcendental phenomenology. While this final point will be by no means proven within the confines of this paper it is hoped that the very fact of opening up for the possibility of such an idea will act as a supporting argument to the overriding thesis that the relationship between mathematics and phenomenology must be problematised. (shrink)

Kurt Gödel wrote (1964, p. 272), after he had read Husserl, that the notion of objectivity raises a question: “the question of the objective existence of the objects of mathematical intuition (which, incidentally, is an exact replica of the question of the objective existence of the outer world)”. This “exact replica” brings to mind the close analogy Husserl saw between our intuition of essences in Wesensschau and of physical objects in perception. What is it like to experience a mathematical proving (...) process? What is the ontological status of a mathematical proof? Can computer assisted provers output a proof? Taking a naturalized world account, I will assess the relationship between mathematics, the physical world and consciousness by introducing a significant conceptual distinction between proving and proof. I will propose that proving is a phenomenological conscious experience. This experience involves a combination of what Kurt Gödel called intuition, and what Husserl called intentionality. In contrast, proof is a function of that process — the mathematical phenomenon — that objectively self-presents a property in the world, and that results from a spatiotemporal unity being subject to the exact laws of nature. In this essay, I apply phenomenology to mathematical proving as a performance of consciousness, that is, a lived experience expressed and formalized in language, in which there is the possibility of formulating intersubjectively shareable meanings. (shrink)

If we want to assess whether or not a naturalized phenomenology is a desideratum or a category mistake, we need to be clear on precisely what notion of phenomenology and what notion of naturalization we have in mind. In the article I distinguish various notions, and after criticizing one type of naturalized phenomenology, I sketch two alternative takes on what a naturalized phenomenology might amount to and propose that our appraisal of the desirability of such naturalization should be more positive, (...) if we opt for one or both of the latter alternatives. (shrink)

The concepts and powerful mathematical tools of Dynamical Systems Theory (DST) yield illuminating methods of studying cognitive processes, and are even claimed by some to enable us to bridge the notorious explanatory gap separating mind and matter. This article includes an analysis of some of the conceptual and empirical progress Dynamical Systems Theory is claimed to accomodate. While sympathetic to the dynamicist program in principle, this article will attempt to formulate a series of problems the proponents of the approach in (...) question will need to face if they wish to prolong their optimism. The main points to be addressed involve the reductive tendencies inherent in Dynamical Systems Theory, its somewhat muddled position relative to connectionism, the metaphorical nature DST-C exhibits which hinders its explanatory potential, and DST-C's problematic account of causality. Brief discussions of the mathematical and philosophical backgrounds of DST, seminal experimental work and possible adaptations of the theory or alternative suggestions (dynamicist connectionism, neurophenomenology, R&D theory) are included. (shrink)

The concept of quality points at a significant philosophical problem. The issue of the ontological status of the qualities of experience and reality leads us to discuss the issues of naturalism and reductionism in philosophy of mind. I argue that a transcendental version of the enactive approach is able to address these issues, thanks to its conception of the relation between subject and object as dependent co-origination. In this way, the enactive approach constitutes an alternative to both the internalism and (...) the externalism about qualities, constituting a process-oriented and relationist framework that can be fruitfully applied to the analysis of different ontological domains. In the conclusive section, I distinguish between an ontological and a metaphysical interpretation of this view, stressing the advantages of the former. (shrink)

Phenomenology has recently come under attack from proponents of speculative realism. In this paper, I present and assess the criticism, and argue that it is either superficial and simplistic or lacks novelty.

This project investigates naturalized metaphysics as a recent trend in analytic metaphysics originating in the naturalist attitude of James Ladyman and Don Ross in their seminal work Everything must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized (2007). The primary focus, however, will be the more recent article “Neo-Positivist Metaphysics” (2012) by Alyssa Ney that originates in this tradition. The project will conclude that naturalized metaphysics is an unsuccessful attempt at an answer to the question ’how is metaphysics possible’. More precisely, the project will establish (...) that any answer to this question must instruct how to succeed at attempts at assertions about the Kantian thing in itself. This requirement is the result of an argument that no other conception of ’reality’ is robust enough to accommodate an ambitious metaphysics. Subsequently, it will be argued that naturalized metaphysics is conceived by its proponents as an attempt at such an answer, but that naturalized metaphysics does not provide the required instruction. This problem occurs because of Carnap’s challenge to metaphysics. Carnap observes that no assertion can be made outside a linguistic framework which has the consequence that metaphysical assertions must be about the conceptual conventions of the linguistic framework rather than the thing in itself. It is the view of Ney and the other proponents of naturalized metaphysics that metaphysics is possible as a naturalized metaphysics; a metaphysics that appropriately defers or yields to the findings of science. The project argues that this requirement does nothing to ensure that Carnap’s challenge is avoided. The challenge is equally significant to naturalized and non-naturalized metaphysics, so long as both require that successful attempts at metaphysics must be assertions about the thing in itself. -/- The project concludes that until or unless Carnap’s challenge is refuted, naturalized metaphysics remain impossible, just like the metaphysics it is supposed to replace. (shrink)

The question “What is the nature of experience?” is of perennial philosophical concern. It deals not only with the nature of experience qua experience, but additionally with related questions about the experiencing subject and that which is experienced. In other words, to speak of the philosophical problem of experience, one must also address questions about mind, world, and the various relations that link them together. Both William James and Kitarō Nishida were deeply concerned with these issues. Their shared notion of (...) “pure experience” is the conceptual cornerstone of their attempt to deal with the philosophical problem of experience. This dissertation is an analysis of “pure experience” and its relevance to several issues in contemporary hilosophy of mind. Drawing upon James’s and Nishida’s “pure experience”, I argue both for a sensorimotor-based, “extended” conception of consciousness and a bodily skills-based account of moral psychology. (shrink)

A contribution to the history of a formerly hotly discussed, but short-lived scientific project: neurophenomenology , the proposal of weaving together Husserlian phenomenology of consciousness and the neuroscience of brain functioning, this article traces back the opening and closing of an apparent window of opportunity, both in phenomenology and in neuroscience, for the eventually unfulfilled realization of that project.

The Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger is best known for his existential analysis (Daseinsanalyse) presented in a series of case studies in the 1940s, but his existential anthropology of mania of the early 1930s has received less attention. He introduced this new existential science as a disciplinary hybrid of existential philosophy and clinical psychiatry, and, in doing so, transformed the genre of narrow medical case study into a broader discourse of philosophical anthropology. The very ambitiousness of his method, however, tended to (...) eclipse the individuality of his manic patient; its delineation of the conditioning structures of manic experience rendered the patient’s life-history and her functional state as secondary to these structures. (shrink)

Intentionality (‘directedness’, ‘aboutness’) is both a central topic in contemporary philosophy of mind, phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, and one of the themes with which both analytic and Continental philosophers have separately engaged starting from Brentano and Edmund Husserl’s ground-breaking Logical Investigations (1901) through Roderick M. Chisholm, Daniel C. Dennett’s The Intentional Stance, John Searle’s Intentionality, to the recent work of Tim Crane, Robert Brandom, Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, among many others. In this paper, I shall review recent discussions (...) of intentionality, including some recent explorations of the history of the concept (paying particular attention to Anselm), and suggest some ways the phenomenological approach of Husserl and Heidegger can still offer insights for contemporary philosophy of mind and consciousness. (shrink)

In recent years there have been attempts to integrate first-person phenomenology into naturalistic science. Traditionally, however, Husserlian phenomenology has been resolutely anti-naturalist. Husserl identified naturalism as the dominant tendency of twentieth-century science and philosophy and he regarded it as an essentially self-refuting doctrine. Naturalism is a point of view or attitude (a reification of the natural attitude into the naturalistic attitude) that does not know that it is an attitude. For phenomenology, naturalism is objectivism. But phenomenology maintains that objectivity is (...) constituted through the intentional activity of cooperating subjects. Understanding the role of cooperating subjects in producing the experience of the one, shared, objective world keeps phenomenology committed to a resolutely anti-naturalist (or ) philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper, I review recent contributions of phenomenology to a variety of disciplines, including the cognitive sciences and psychiatry, and explore (1) controversies about phenomenological methods and naturalization; (2) relations between phenomenology and the enactive and extended mind approaches; and (3) the promise of phenomenology for addressing a number of controversial philosophical issues.

It is always risky to make sweeping statements about the development of philosophy, but if one were nevertheless asked to describe 20th century philosophy in broad strokes, one noteworthy feature might be the following: Whereas important figures at the beginning of the century, figures such as Frege and Husserl, were very explicit in their rejection of naturalism (both are known for their rejection of the attempt to naturalize the laws of logic, i.e., for their criticism of psychologism), the situation has (...) changed considerably. Today many philosophers – not the least within analytical philosophy – would subscribe to some form of naturalism. In fact, naturalism is seen by many as the default metaphysical position. If you don’t subscribe to naturalism you must be subscribing to some form of Cartesian substance dualism. Thus, whereas 20 or 30 years ago one might have been inclined to characterize the development of 20th century philosophy in terms of a linguistic turn, a turn from a philosophy of subjectivity to a philosophy of language, it might today be more apt to describe the development in terms of a turn from anti-naturalism to naturalism. (shrink)

My discussion will focus on what is arguable the main claim of Being No One: That no such things as selves exist in the world and that nobody ever was or had a self. In discussing to what extent Metzinger can be said to argue convincingly for this claim, I will also comment on his methodological use of pathology and briefly make some remarks vis-à-vis his understanding and criticism of phenomenology.

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

This paper analyzes an explicit instantiation of the program of neurophenomenology in a neuroscientific protocol. Neurophenomenology takes seriously the importance of linking the scientific study of consciousness to the careful examination of experience with a specific first-person methodology. My first claim is that such strategy is a fruitful heuristic because it produces new data and illuminates their relation to subjective experience. My second claim is that the approach could open the door to a natural account of the structure of human (...) experience as it is mobilized in itself in such methodology. In this view, generative passages define the type of circulation which explicitly roots the active and disciplined insight the subject has about his/her experience in a biological emergent process. (shrink)

My initial scope will be limited: starting from a neurobiological standpoint, I will analyse how actions are possibly represented and understood. The main aim of my arguments will be to show that, far from being exclusively dependent upon mentalistic/linguistic abilities, the capacity for understanding others as intentional agents is deeply grounded in the relational nature of action. Action is relational, and the relation holds both between the agent and the object target of the action , as between the agent of (...) the action and his/her observer . Agency constitutes a key issue for the understanding of intersubjectivity and for explaining how individuals can interpret their social world. This account of intersubjectivity, founded on the empirical findings of neuroscientific investigation, will be discussed and put in relation with a classical tenet of phenomenology: empathy. I will provide an 'enlarged' account of empathy that will be defined by means of a new conceptual tool: the shared manifold of intersubjectivity. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to spell out what makes the scientific study of pain so distinctive from a philosophical perspective. Using the IASP definition of ‘pain’ as our guide, we raise a number of questions about the philosophical assumptions underlying the scientific study of pain. We argue that unlike the study of ordinary perception, the study of pain focuses from the very start on the experience itself and its qualities, without making deep assumptions about whether pain experiences are perceptual. (...) This in turn puts scientific explanation in a curious position due to pain’s inherently subjective epistemic nature. The reason for this focus on the experience itself and its qualities, we argue, has to do with pain’s complex phenomenology involving an affective/motivational dimension. We argue for the scientific legitimacy of first‐person phenomenological studies and attempts to correlate phenomenology with neural events. We argue that this methodological procedure is inevitable and has no anti‐physicalist ontological implications when properly understood. We end the paper by commenting on a discussion between two prominent pain scientists in the field, Don Price and Howard Fields, about the need to distinguish more dimensions in the phenomenology of pain and how to classify them vis‐à‐vis the recent scientific findings. Our interest in this discussion is not only to introduce some clarifications but also to show how “neurophenomenology” has already been shaping the scientific research and to back our claim about why this methodology is inevitable with an example. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the significance of the concept of noise for cognition and computation. The concept of noise was massively transformed in the twentieth century with the advent of information theory, cybernetics, and computer science, all of which provide formal accounts of information and noise centrally concerned with contingency. We show how the concept has changed from these classical formulations, through developments in mathematics (topology and topos theory), computing (interactive computing and univalent foundations), and cognitive science (predictive processing and (...) cognitive morphodynamics). Ultimately it argues for the central importance of noise not only within a topological conception of cognition and computation, but also in the transcendental-empirical torsion of image schemata and the social interactive elaboration of freedom. (shrink)

Neil Levy (2011) argues that neuroethics as a new discipline distinct from bioethics provides methodological tools to evaluate the validity of our moral intuitions. This naturalistic claim that mor...

The aim of this article is to explore how a self-referential social system, although it is not a human being, can be said to “observe.” For this purpose, the article reformulates Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems as sociological phenomenology, or the de-consciousness philosophized phenomenology, because a social system has the same structure of intentionality as consciousness: Just as consciousness is always consciousness of something, communication is always communication of something. In correlation to this communicative intentionality, communicated environments come and (...) go as social phenomena. A social system is not a thing, but an autonomously observing subject. Hence, this systems theory takes on the role of a second-order observer: It observes how social systems as first-order observers observe self-referentially because phenomena given to the natural attitude of the first-order observer constitute multiple social realities in daily life. Therefore, the theory of self-referential social systems is not objectivism, but a variation of mundane subjectivist phenomenology. (shrink)

What is phenomenology's contribution to contemporary debates in the philosophy of mind? I am here concerned with this question, and in particular with phenomenology's contribution to what has come to be called the problem of consciousness. The problem of consciousness has constituted the focal point of classical phenomenology as well as the main problem, and indeed perhaps the stumbling block, of the philosophy of mind in the last two decades. Many philosophers of mind, for instance, Thomas Nagel, Ned Block, Owen (...) Flanagan, Colin McGinn and David Chalmers, have acknowledged the properly phenomenological character of this problem; Nagel is even willing to entrust the study of phenomenal consciousness to what he calls an “objective phenomenology.” Yet, the phenomenology to which these philosophers resort has little to do with the conceptual framework that was developed within the phenomenological tradition. They put forward an entity they term “phenomenal consciousness,” but only in the hope that it may be explained by means of the theories that currently prevail in the philosophy of mind or in cognitive sciences. (shrink)

This paper aims to address the relevance of the natural sciences for transcendental phenomenology, that is, the issue of naturalism. The first section distinguishes three varieties of naturalism and corresponding forms of naturalization: an ontological one, a methodological one, and an epistemological one. In light of these distinctions, in the second section, I examine the main projects aiming to “naturalize phenomenology”: neurophenomenology, front-loaded phenomenology, and formalized approaches to phenomenology. The third section then considers the commitments of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology with (...) respect to the three varieties of naturalism previously discussed. I argue that Husserl rejected strong and weak forms of epistemological naturalism, strong methodological naturalism, and ontological naturalism. The fourth section presents the argument that Husserl endorsed a weak, conditional form of methodological naturalism. This point is illustrated with Husserl’s proposal of “somatology,” a natural science apt to study the corporeality of the lived body. The final section addresses the complementarity and respective limits of the transcendental phenomenological and the natural scientific frameworks. I argue that, on Husserl’s account, the function of transcendental phenomenology with respect to the natural sciences is to provide them with an epistemological foundation and an ontological clarification. I suggest that certain natural sciences can be understood, within the transcendental phenomenological framework, as “sciences of constitution,” that is, as sciences investigating the contribution of real structures acting as conditions of possibility for the occurrence of certain kinds of comprehensive unities in lived experience. (shrink)

There is a growing realization in cognitive science that a theory of embodied intersubjectivity is needed to better account for social cognition. We highlight some challenges that must be addressed by attempts to interpret ‘simulation theory’ in terms of embodiment, and argue for an alternative approach that integrates phenomenology and dynamical systems theory in a mutually informing manner. Instead of ‘simulation’ we put forward the concept of the ‘extended body’, an enactive and phenomenological notion that emphasizes the socially mediated nature (...) of embodiment. To illustrate the explanatory potential of this approach, we replicate an agent-based model of embodied social interaction. An analysis of the model demonstrates that the extended body can be explained in terms of mutual dynamical entanglement: inter-bodily resonance between individuals can give rise to self-sustaining interaction patterns that go beyond the behavioral capacities of isolated individuals by modulating their intra-bodily conditions of behavior generation. (shrink)

This thesis is about meaning, expression and language in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, and their role in the phenomenological project as a whole. For Merleau-Ponty, expression is the taking up of a meaning given either in perception or in already acquired forms of expression, thereby repeating, transforming or congealing meaning into gestures, utterances, artworks, ideas or theories. Contrary to the predominant view in the literature, the relation of expression to meaning, and in particular the problem of expressing new meanings, was of fundamental (...) importance to Merleau-Ponty from the very beginning, in that it was intrinsically related to the overcoming of what he termed “objective thought”. Admittedly, there is an evolution of his philosophy in this respect: from the early stance where the recasting of certain basic categories is taken as pivotal for the development of a new form of thinking, with arguments drawn also from various empirical and social sciences, to what appears to be an effort at an all-pervading reformulation of philosophical language during his last years. But the remoulding of categories was never for Merleau-Ponty a matter simply of finding a few, better adapted concepts, but from the outset an endeavour to think philosophical arguments through to a point where they reveal their inherent inconsistencies. Recasting philosophical expression is thus a risky enterprise, and this is a point I explore further in Essay 1, that focuses especially upon creative expression in painting and to some extent in literature. In Essay 2 I discuss the notion of Gestalt and how it serves this general project, whereas Essay 3 deals with verbal language, on the basis of Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Saussure’s linguistics. Essay 4 examines bodily expression from the point of view of feminist phenomenology and in particular Judith Butler’s early reading of Merleau-Ponty, and finally Essay 5 discusses expression in the art of dance. (shrink)

It is now conventional wisdom that conscious experience — or in Nagel’s canonical characterization, “what it is like to be” for an organism — is what makes the mind-body problem so intractable. By the same token, our current conceptions of the mind-body relation are inadequate and some conceptual development is urgently needed. Our overall aim in this paper is to make some progress towards that conceptual development. We first examine a currently neglected, yet fundamental aspect of consciousness. This aspect is (...) the spontaneity of consciousness, by which we mean its inner plasticity and inner purposiveness. We then sketch a “neurophenomenological” framework for thinking about the relationship between the spontaneity of consciousness and dynamic patterns of brain activity as studied in cognitive neuroscience. We conclude by proposing that the conscious mentality of sentient organisms or animals is active and dynamic, and that this “enactive” conception of consciousness can help us to move beyond the classical dichotomy between materialism and dualism. (shrink)

Over the past twenty years, Husserlian phenomenology has increasingly drawn the attention of the cognitive community, thereby leading to the emergence of what might be called a phenomenological trend within contemporary cognitive studies. What this phenomenological trend really amounts to is however a matter of debate. The reason is that it embodies, in fact, a multifaceted reflection about the relevance of Husserlian phenomenology to the current efforts towards a scientific theory of cognition, and, to a lesser degree, about the reciprocal (...) relevance of these efforts to the fate of the Husserlian tradition. Indeed, it covers a wide array of perspectives on these questions, ranging from tentative demonstrations of the cognitively misleading character of Husserl's ideas, inasmuch as they would incarnate the same foundational errors as cognitivism, to diametrically opposed views arguing that the naturalist bent of contemporary cognitive science is ill-conceived, and that only the brand of transcendentalism defended by Husserl can provide it with adequate foundations. (shrink)

_sciousness called ‘neurophenomenology’ (Varela 1996) and illustrates it with a_ _recent pilot study (Lutz et al., 2002). At a theoretical level, neurophenomenology_ _pursues an embodied and large-scale dynamical approach to the_ _neurophysiology of consciousness (Varela 1995; Thompson and Varela 2001;_ _Varela and Thompson 2003). At a methodological level, the neurophenomeno-_ _logical strategy is to make rigorous and extensive use of first-person data about_ _subjective experience as a heuristic to describe and quantify the large-scale_ _neurodynamics of consciousness (Lutz 2002). The paper (...) foocuses on_ _neurophenomenology in relation to three challenging methodological issues_ _about incorporating first-person data into cognitive neuroscience: (i) first-person_ _reports can be biased or inaccurate; (ii) the process of generating first-person_ _reports about an experience can modify that experience; and (iii) there is an ‘ex-_ _planatory gap’ in our understanding of how to relate first-person, phenomeno-_ _logical data to third-person, biobehavioural data._. (shrink)

The feeling of being alive still constitutes a major blind spot of contemporary affective sciences research. The mainstream view accepts it as an ‘umbrella notion’ comprising different states, such as M. Ratcliffe’s «feelings of being», T. Fuchs’s «feeling of being alive», E.M. Engelen’s «Gefühl des Lebendigseins», etc. In contrast, I argue for an account of the feeling of being alive as a unique feeling that can be described in several ways. Empirical support for this view comes mainly from Carvalho and (...) Damasio’s hypothesis of the distinctiveness of the interoceptive system as the physiological underpinning of this feeling. This account is also in line with many other approaches recognizing the role of interoception proper in mind and subjectivity grounding, collected by Tsakiris and De Presteer. Over recent decades, Damasio’s organic descriptions have been widely acknowledged as neurophysiological counterparts of philosophical/psychological concepts. However, in my view they have been often misinterpreted, especially due to the mainstream Ratcliffian interpretation mediating his ideas amongst philosophers. Throughout the paper, a critical inquiry into Damasio’s conceptualization is provided, by means of conceptual analysis and an overall taxonomy of the several affective states he has proposed over the past few decades. Ultimately, a critical discussion of his own account of the feeling of being alive is offered from a philosophical viewpoint. (shrink)

Questions about phenomenology’s role in non-philosophical disciplines gained renewed attention. While we claim that phenomenology makes indispensable, unique contributions to different domains of scientific practice such as concept formation, experimental design, and data collection, we also contend that when it comes to explanation, phenomenological approaches face a dilemma. Either phenomenological attempts to explain conscious phenomena do not satisfy a central constraint on explanations, i.e. the asymmetry between explanans and explanandum, or they satisfy this explanatory asymmetry only by largely merging with (...) non-phenomenological explanation types. The consequence of this dilemma is that insofar as phenomenological approaches are explanatory, they do not provide an own type of explanation. We substantiate our two claims by offering three case studies of phenomenologically inspired experiments in cognitive science. Each case study points out a specific phenomenological contribution to experimental practice while also illustrating how phenomenological approaches face the explanatory dilemma we outline. (shrink)

In this article, I introduce engaged phenomenology as an approach through which phenomenologists can more explicitly and critically consider the generative conditions and implications of their rese...

The present article discusses shared epistemological characteristics of two distinct areas of research: the field of first-person inquiry and the field of quantum mechanics. We outline certain philosophical challenges that arise in each of the two lines of inquiry, and point towards the central similarity of their observational situation: the impossibility of disregarding the interrelatedness of the observed phenomena with the act of observation. We argue that this observational feature delineates a specific category of research that we call the non-trivial (...) domain. Unlike the trivial domain, non-trivial research cannot assume the view from nowhere on which the observed phenomena could be regarded as existing independently of the process of observation. Presenting first-person inquiry and quantum mechanics as two of its examples, we show that non-trivial research violates several fundamental observational presuppositions of the trivial domain, exemplified in the principles of classical physics. Drawing on Niels Bohr’s philosophy of quantum mechanics and the constructivist notion of enaction, we stress the constructive, participatory, and irreversible nature of observation in the non-trivial domain. We discuss the possibility of developing a non-representationalist epistemology of the non-trivial, and consider the implications of our discussion for research in the non-trivial domain, as well as for the general understanding of the scientific inquiry. (shrink)

Kant and Heidegger argue that our subjectivity escapes scientific explanation, while also providing the conditions that enable it. This understanding of the relationship between subjectivity and science places limits on the explanatory scope of the sciences. But what makes transcendental reflection on the structure of subjectivity possible in the first place? Fink argues that transcendental philosophy encounters its own limits in attempting to characterize its own conditions of possibility. I argue that the limits of science and transcendental philosophy entail that (...) nature cannot be conceived as a specific object, or as a totality of objects in the world, but only as the ontological ground of phenomenal manifestation in general. Nature is not identical with anything discoverable in either science or phenomenology; it is, rather, the origin from which discovery of phenomena proceeds. (shrink)

This paper examines Fechner’s introduction to experimental psychophysics from a phenomenological perspective. Horst’s analysis is used to demonstrate the phenomenology that is inherent to classical perceptual psychophysics. Horst argues that the psychophysical event of perception can only be understood as an intentional intertwining of subject and object. From this we move to physiological component of psychophysics—that is, the processes that mediate perceptual awareness. Drawing primarily on the work of Rosen, it is argued the phenomenology provides the most appropriate approach for (...) what could be understood as a contemporary psychophysics—one that borrows from recent trends in physics, neuro-physiology, and perception as classical psychophysics had done. This results in a psychiatric neurophenomenology. Examples of the placebo effect and treatment of traumatic brain injury are used to demonstrate the usefulness of a phenomenological psychophysics, one that ultimately meets the demands of Fechner’s original proposal. (shrink)

I examine the following question: Do actions require representations that are intrinsic to the action itself? Recent work by Mark Rowlands, Michael Wheeler, and Andy Clark suggests that actions may require a minimal form of representation. I argue that the various concepts of minimal representation on offer do not apply to action per se and that a non‐representationalist account that focuses on dynamic systems of self‐organizing continuous reciprocal causation at the sub‐personal level is superior. I further recommend a scientific pragmatism (...) regarding the concept of representation. (shrink)