Describes the various senses as sensory systems that are attuned to the environment. Develops the notion of rich sensory information that specifies the distal environment. Includes a discussion of affordances.

My aim in this paper is to go some way towards showing that the maintenance of hard and fast dichotomies, like those between mind and body, and the real and the virtual, is untenable, and that technological advance cannot occur with being cognisant of its reciprocal ethical implications. In their place I will present a softer enactivist ontology through which I examine the nature of our engagement with technology in general and with virtual realities in particular. This softer ontology is (...) one to which I will commit Kant, and from which, I will show, certain critical moral and emotional consequences arise. It is my contention that Kant’s logical subject is necessarily embedded in the world and that Kant, himself, would be content with this view as an expression of his inspired response to the ‘‘scandal to philosophy... that the existence of things outside us... must be accepted merely on faith’’ [Bxl]. In keeping with his arguments for the a priori framing of intuition, the a priori structuring of experience through the spontaneous application of the categories, the synthesis of the experiential manifold, and the necessity of a unity of apperception, I will present an enactivist account of agency in the world, and argue that it is our embodied and embedded kinaesthetic engagement in our world which makes possible the syntheses of apprehension, reproduction and recognition, and which, in turn, make possible the activity of the reproductive or creative imagination. (shrink)

This expanded second edition carries forward the initial insights into the biological and existential significances of animation by taking contemporary research findings in cognitive science and philosophy and in neuroscience into critical and constructive account. It first takes affectivity as its focal point, elucidating it within both an enactive and qualitative affective-kinetic dynamic. It follows through with a thoroughgoing interdisciplinary inquiry into movement from three perspectives: mind, brain, and the conceptually reciprocal realities of receptivity and responsivity as set forth in (...) phenomenology and evolutionary biology, respectively. It ends with a substantive afterword on kinesthesia, pointing up the incontrovertible significance of the faculty to cognition and affectivity. Series A. (shrink)

This article makes five main points. Individual human consciousness is formed in the dynamic interrelation of self and other, and therefore is inherently intersubjective. The concrete encounter of self and other fundamentally involves empathy, understood as a unique and irreducible kind of intentionality. Empathy is the precondition of the science of consciousness. Human empathy is inherently developmental: open to it are pathways to non-egocentric or self-transcendent modes of intersubjectivity. Real progress in the understanding of intersubjectivity requires integrating the methods and (...) findings of cognitive science, phenomenology, and contemplative and meditative psychologies of human transformation. (shrink)

First published in 1945, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s monumental _Phénoménologie de la perception _signalled the arrival of a major new philosophical and intellectual voice in post-war Europe. Breaking with the prevailing picture of existentialism and phenomenology at the time, it has become one of the landmark works of twentieth-century thought. This new translation, the first for over fifty years, makes this classic work of philosophy available to a new generation of readers. _Phenomenology of Perception _stands in the great phenomenological tradition of Husserl, (...) Heidegger, and Sartre. Yet Merleau-Ponty’s contribution is decisive, as he brings this tradition and other philosophical predecessors, particularly Descartes and Kant, to confront a neglected dimension of our experience: the lived body and the phenomenal world. Charting a bold course between the reductionism of science on the one hand and "intellectualism" on the other, Merleau-Ponty argues that we should regard the body not as a mere biological or physical unit, but as the body which structures one’s situation and experience within the world. Merleau-Ponty enriches his classic work with engaging studies of famous cases in the history of psychology and neurology as well as phenomena that continue to draw our attention, such as phantom limb syndrome, synaesthesia, and hallucination. This new translation includes many helpful features such as the reintroduction of Merleau-Ponty’s discursive Table of Contents as subtitles into the body of the text, a comprehensive Translator’s Introduction to its main themes, essential notes explaining key terms of translation, an extensive Index, and an important updating of Merleau-Ponty’s references to now available English translations. Also included is a new foreword by Taylor Carman and an introduction to Merleau-Ponty_ _by Claude Lefort. Translated by Donald A. Landes. (shrink)

Editorial preface to the fourth edition and modified translation -- The text of the Philosophische Untersuchungen -- Philosophische untersuchungen = Philosophical investigations -- Philosophie der psychologie, ein fragment = Philosophy of psychology, a fragment.

How the Body Shapes the Mind is an interdisciplinary work that addresses philosophical questions by appealing to evidence found in experimental psychology, neuroscience, studies of pathologies, and developmental psychology. There is a growing consensus across these disciplines that the contribution of embodiment to cognition is inescapable. Because this insight has been developed across a variety of disciplines, however, there is still a need to develop a common vocabulary that is capable of integrating discussions of brain mechanisms in neuroscience, behavioural expressions (...) in psychology, design concerns in artificial intelligence and robotics, and debates about embodied experience in the phenomenology and philosophy of mind. Shaun Gallagher's book aims to contribute to the formulation of that common vocabulary and to develop a conceptual framework that will avoid both the overly reductionistic approaches that explain everything in terms of bottom-up neuronal mechanisms, and inflationistic approaches that explain everything in terms of Cartesian, top-down cognitive states. Gallagher pursues two basic sets of questions. The first set consists of questions about the phenomenal aspects of the structure of experience, and specifically the relatively regular and constant features that we find in the content of our experience. If throughout conscious experience there is a constant reference to one's own body, even if this is a recessive or marginal awareness, then that reference constitutes a structural feature of the phenomenal field of consciousness, part of a framework that is likely to determine or influence all other aspects of experience. The second set of questions concerns aspects of the structure of experience that are more hidden, those that may be more difficult to get at because they happen before we know it. They do not normally enter into the content of experience in an explicit way, and are often inaccessible to reflective consciousness. To what extent, and in what ways, are consciousness and cognitive processes, which include experiences related to perception, memory, imagination, belief, judgement, and so forth, shaped or structured by the fact that they are embodied in this way? (shrink)

Damasio, an eminent neuroscientist explores the science of human emotion and what the great Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza can teach of how and why we feel. Damasio shows how joy and sorrow, those most defining of human feelings, are in fact the cornerstones of our survival and culture.

Language is coordination. Pursuing this, the present Special Issue of Pragmatics & Cognition challenges two widely held positions. First, the papers reject the claim that language is essentially ‘symbolic’. Second, they deny that minds represent verbal patterns. Rather, language is social, individual, and contributes the feeling of thinking. Simply, it is distributed. Elucidating this claim, the opening papers report empirically-based work on the anticipatory dynamics of reading, their cognitive consequences, Shakespearean theatre, what images evoke, and insight problem-solving. Having given reasons (...) for rejecting linguistic autonomy, the papers turn to theory building. Initially, attention is given to a possible origin for semiotic cognition. Then, it is claimed that language functions by realizing values. Next, it is argued that human dynamics are co-regulated by cultural and biological symbols. Finally, in a review article, the distributed view of language is used to contrast Clark’s organism-centered cognition with what is here called ecologically extended cognition. (shrink)

The "Cartesian Meditations" translation is based primarily on the printed text, edited by Professor S. Strasser and published in the first volume of Husserliana ...

Theories of embodied cognition abound in the literature, but it is often unclear how to understand them. We offer several interpretations of embodiment, the most interesting being the thesis that mental representations in bodily formats (B-formats) have an important role in cognition. Potential B-formats include motoric, somatosensory, affective and interoceptive formats. The literature on mirroring and related phenomena provides support for a limited-scope version of embodied social cognition under the B-format interpretation. It is questionable, however, whether such a thesis can (...) be extended. We show the limits of embodiment in social cognition. (shrink)

As yet, there is no enactive account of social cognition. This paper extends the enactive concept of sense-making into the social domain. It takes as its departure point the process of interaction between individuals in a social encounter. It is a well-established finding that individuals can and generally do coordinate their movements and utterances in such situations. We argue that the interaction process can take on a form of autonomy. This allows us to reframe the problem of social cognition as (...) that of how meaning is generated and transformed in the interplay between the unfolding interaction process and the individuals engaged in it. The notion of sense-making in this realm becomes participatory sense-making. The onus of social understanding thus moves away from strictly the individual only. (shrink)

This is a book about how we see: the environment around us (its surfaces, their layout, and their colors and textures); where we are in the environment; whether or not we are moving and, if we are, where we are going; what things are good for; how to do things (to thread a needle or drive an automobile); or why things look as they do.The basic assumption is that vision depends on the eye which is connected to the brain. The (...) author suggests that natural vision depends on the eyes in the head on a body supported by the ground, the brain being only the central organ of a complete visual system. When no constraints are put on the visual system, people look around, walk up to something interesting and move around it so as to see it from all sides, and go from one vista to another. That is natural vision—and what this book is about. (shrink)

Machine consciousness exists already in organic systems and it is only a matter of time -- and some agreement -- before it will be realised in reverse-engineered organic systems and forward- engineered inorganic systems. The agreement must be over the preconditions that must first be met if the enterprise is to be successful, and it is these preconditions, for instance, being a socially-embedded, structurally-coupled and dynamic, goal-directed entity that organises its perceptual input and enacts its world through the application of (...) both a cognitive and kinaesthetic imagination, that I shall concentrate on presenting in this paper. It will become clear that these preconditions will present engineers with a tall order, but not, I will argue, an impossible one. After all, we might agree with Freeman and Núñez's claim that the machine metaphor has restricted the expectations of the cognitive sciences (Freeman & Núñez, 1999); but it is a double-edged sword, since our limited expectations about machines also narrow the potential of our cognitive science. (shrink)

Linking the process of rational decision making to emotions, an award-winning scientist who has done extensive research with brain-damaged patients notes the dependence of thought processes on feelings and the body's survival-oriented regulators. 50,000 first printing.

The publication of this book is an event in the making. All over the world scientists, psychologists, and philosophers are waiting to read Antonio Damasio's new theory of the nature of consciousness and the construction of the self. A renowned and revered scientist and clinician, Damasio has spent decades following amnesiacs down hospital corridors, waiting for comatose patients to awaken, and devising ingenious research using PET scans to piece together the great puzzle of consciousness. In his bestselling Descartes' Error, Damasio (...) revealed the critical importance of emotion in the making of reason. Building on this foundation, he now shows how consciousness is created. Consciousness is the feeling of what happens-our mind noticing the body's reaction to the world and responding to that experience. Without our bodies there can be no consciousness, which is at heart a mechanism for survival that engages body, emotion, and mind in the glorious spiral of human life. A hymn to the possibilities of human existence, a magnificent work of ingenious science, a gorgeously written book, The Feeling of What Happens is already being hailed as a classic. (shrink)

"Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us," writes Alva Noe. "It is something we do." In Action in Perception, Noe argues that perception and perceptual consciousness depend on capacities for action and thought — that ...

"Knowing how we know" is the subject of this book. Its authors present a new view of cognition that has important social and ethical implications, for, they assert, the only world we humans can have is the one we create together through the actions of our coexistence. Written for a general audience as well as for students, scholars, and scientists and abundantly illustrated with examples from biology, linguistics, and new social and cultural phenomena, this revised edition includes a new afterword (...) by Dr. Varela, in which he discusses the effect the book has had in the years since its first publication. (shrink)

A noted philosopher and member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Science examines flaws in current understandings about consciousness while proposing a radical solution that argues that consciousness must not be limited to the confines of the brain.

The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness is a translation of Edmund Husserl's Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins. The first part of the book was originally presented as a lecture course at the University of Göttingen in the winter semester of 1904–1905, while the second part is based on additional supplementary lectures that he gave between 1905 and 1910. In these essays and lectures, Husserl explores the terrain of consciousness in light of its temporality. He identifies two categories of temporality—retention and (...) protention—and outlines how temporality provides the form for perception, phantasy, imagination, memory, and recollection. He demonstrates a distinction between cosmic and phenomenological time and explores the relevance of phenomenological time for the constitution of temporal objects. The ideas Husserl developed here are explored further in his Ideas and were pursued until the end of his philosophical career. (shrink)

Through an investigation of Husserl's concept of horizontal intentionality, the article basically argues that the horizon is intrinsically intersubjective, and that it entails an implicit reference to the intentions of possible Others. Against this background it is argued that our perceptual experience of an embodied Other, our factual encounter with the Other, is not the most basic and fundamental type of intersubjectivity. On the contrary, it presupposes a type of intersubjectivity which belongs a priori to the structure of constituting subjectivity.

At the bottom of all human activities are “values,” the conviction that some things “ought to be” and others not. Science, however, with its immense interest in mere facts seems to lack all understanding of such‘requiredness.’… A science … which would seriously admit nothing but indifferent facts … could not fail to destroy itself.

This article makes five main points. Individual human consciousness is formed in the dynamic interrelation of self and other, and therefore is inherently intersubjective. The concrete encounter of self and other fundamentally involves empathy, under- stood as a unique and irreducible kind of intentionality. Empathy is the precondi- tion of the science of consciousness. Human empathy.

The primary aim of this essay is to present a case for a heavily revised notion of heterophenomenology. l will refer to the revised notion as ‘enkinaesthesia’ because of its dependence on the experiential entanglement of our own and the other’s felt action as the sensory background within which all other experience is possible. Enkinaesthesia2 emphasizes two things: (i) the neuromuscular dynamics of the agent, including the givenness and ownership of its experience, and (ii) the entwined, blended and situated co-affective (...) feeling of the presence of the other(s), agential (for example, human, horse, cat, beetle) and non-agential (for example, cup, bed, apple, paper) and, where appropriate, the anticipated arc of the other’s action or movement, including, again where appropriate, the other’s intentionality. When the ‘other’ is also a sensing and experiencing agent it is their - in this case, the pair’s - affective intentional reciprocity, their folding, enfolding, and unfolding, which co-constitutes the conscious relation and the experientially recursive temporal dynamics that lead to the formation and maintenance of the deep integral enkinaesthetic structures and melodies which bind us together, even when they pull us apart. Such deeply felt enkinaesthetic melodies emphasise the dialogical nature of the backgrounded feeling of being. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes various ways in which language can act on our affect or emotion experience. From the commonsensical consideration that sometimes we use language merely to report or describe our feelings, I move on to discuss how language can constitute, clarify, and enhance them, as well as induce novel and oft surprising experiences. I also consider the social impact of putting feelings into words, including the reciprocal influences between emotion experience and the public dissemination of emotion labels and descriptions, (...) and how these influences depend on the power of labelling to make complex feelings visible and thus easily accessible. Finally, I address and reinterpret some psychological findings on the so-called “verbal overshadowing” effect. (shrink)

This paper attempts to elucidate the nature of kinesthetic memory, demonstrate itscentrality to everyday human movement, and thereby promote fresh cognitive andphenomenological understandings of movement in everyday life. Prominent topics in this undertaking include kinesthesia, dynamics, and habit. The endeavor has both a critical and constructive dimension.

The author takes the reader on a tour that covers such topics as computers, evolution, Descartes, Schrodinger, and the nature of perception, language, and invididuality. He argues that biology provides the key to understanding the brain. Underlying his argument is the evolutionary view that the mind arose at a definite time in history. This book ponders connections between psychology and physics, medicine, philosophy, and more. Frequently contentious, Edelman attacks cognitive and behavioral approaches, which leave biology out of the picture, as (...) well as the currently fashionable view of the brain as a computer. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

An ontogenetically-informed epistemology is necessary to understandings of apprenticeship learning. The methodology required in this enterprise is a constructive phenomenology, a phenomenology that takes into account the fact that as infants, we were apprentices of our own bodies: we all learned our bodies and learned to move ourselves. The major focus of this essay is on infant social relationships that develop on the ground of our original corporeal-kinetic apprenticeship. It shows how joint attention, imitation, and turn-taking - all richly examined (...) areas in infant social development - are the foundation of apprenticeship learning in later adult life. The relationship between each infant capacity and later apprenticeship learning is demonstrated in examples from present-day research, specifically, research in the areas of medicine, sport, music, and tailoring, and research carried out by philosophers on apprenticeship learning. (shrink)

First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.