Cambridge University Press eBooks
July 8, 2026
Hannes Gustav Melichar, Philipp Schmidt-Boddy, Thomas Fuchs et al.
This chapter introduces the philosophical rationale for investigating emotions in their dimensions of embodiment and existential vulnerability, drawing on phenomenology, psychopathology, and psychotherapy as complementary perspectives. Grounded in phenomenology and enactivism, it argues that emotions are essentially embodied, intersubjective phenomena through which we experience the world as...
Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience
May 15, 2026
Felix Tretter, Henriette Löffler-stastka, Hans Braun et al.
Ten years ago, we published a position paper in this journal, criticizing reductionist claims of neurobiology related to mental disorders and important theoretical concepts like free will. Our interdisciplinary group of experts highlighted the need for and the challenges of integrating different approaches and system levels in neuroscience. We argued-and still argue-that such an integrative and...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
April 6, 2026
Thomas Fuchs
1 citation
The feeling of being alive points to an intricate connection between the organic process of life and foundational subjective experience, or between life and experience ( Leben and Erleben ). Based on this premise, I argue that self-experience cannot be understood as an internal mental space or a “self-model” that could be produced and localized in the brain, but rather that it is a...
Frontiers in Psychology
2025
Thomas Fuchs
2 citations
The paper argues for an embodied and enactive view of linguistic concepts as a solution to the "scaling up" problem, namely the transition from embodied experience to symbolic and abstract thought. Drawing on phenomenology, neurobiology, conceptual metaphor theory and enactivism, it aims to demonstrate the constitutive role of the body and intersubjectivity in concept formation. Concrete...
Phenomenology and Mind
2024
Thomas Fuchs
Not only our conscious expectations, wishes and intentions are directed towards the future, but also pre- or unconscious tendencies, hunches and anticipations. Using a term coined by Ernst Bloch, they can be summarized as the not-yet-conscious. This not-yet-consciousness usually unfolds spontaneously and without a plan; it is not expected or striven for, but rather emerges in consciousness in...
Human Flourishing in a Technological World
September 21, 2023
Thomas Fuchs
Abstract In this chapter, Thomas Fuchs argues, from a psychiatrist’s perspective and against the intrinsically mind-body-dualistic understanding of human beings advocated by transhumanists, that processes of life and processes of consciousness are inseparably linked through the living body as a whole. In the unity of the person, both aspects are intertwined: the body is alive and therefore also...
Frontiers in Psychiatry
June 21, 2023
Lily A. L. Martin, David Melchert, Monika Knack et al.
4 citations
Introduction: Basic self-disorders on the one hand and motor symptoms on the other hand are discussed as endophenotypes of schizophrenia psychopathology. However, the systematic interaction between motor symptoms and the self-experience of patients is rarely studied. Methods: In a previous study we defined motor markers of schizophrenia via a data-driven analysis of patients' gait patterns. In...
Front Psychiatry
April 11, 2023
Marcin Moskalewicz, Thomas Fuchs
8 citations
This paper presents and discusses a manuscript by one of the core founders of phenomenological psychopathology, Erwin W. Straus, concerning psychotic disorders of space and time (see attached Supplementary material). Written in June 1946, the manuscript is published for the first time as supplementary material to this paper. It is a clinical case-study of a patient with psychotic depression...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
December 26, 2022
Thomas Fuchs
18 citations
Abstract Not only our conscious expectations, wishes and intentions are directed towards the future, but also pre- or unconscious tendencies, hunches and anticipations. Using a term of Ernst Bloch, they can be summarized as the not-yet-conscious . This not-yet-conscious mostly unfolds spontaneously and without plan; it is not directly anticipated or aimed at, but rather comes to awareness in...
Frontiers in Psychology
2020
Thomas Fuchs
From an embodied and enactive point of view, the mind-body problem has been reformulated as the relation between the lived or subject body on the one hand and the physiological or object body on the other ("body-body problem"). The aim of the paper is to explore the concept of circularity as a means of explaining the relation between the phenomenology of lived experience and the dynamics of...
Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia
September 11, 2015
Michela Summa, Thomas Fuchs
13 citations
This paper develops a phenomenological analysis of the disturbances of self-experience in dementia. After considering the lack of conceptual clarity regarding the notions of self and person in current research on dementia, we develop a phenomenological theory of the structure of self-experience in the first section. Within this complex structure, we distinguish between the basic level of...
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy
2010
Thomas Fuchs
74 citations
The Psychopathology of Hyperreflexivity Thomas Fuchs The structure of human embodiment is fundamentally characterized by a polarity or ambiguity between Leib and Körper, the subjective body and the objectified body, or between being-body and having-a-body. This ambiguity, emphasized, above all, by Helmuth Plessner and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is also of crucial significance for psychopathology....
Psychopathology
2002
Thomas Fuchs
The paper illustrates the present role of phenomenological psychopathology by outlining its methods and focusing on some of its major issues: embodiment or body scheme, intentionality, time consciousness and intersubjectivity. The application of these categories to the analysis of psychotic disorders is demonstrated. Special emphasis is given to the relationship between phenomenology and...