Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
August 26, 2026
Xabier E. Barandiaran, Tiago Rama
Abstract Teleosemantics explains meaning by appealing to the biological norms that make error possible, but most work in the field still anchors those norms in evolutionary “selected-effect” functions. We develop an organismic alternative grounded in the self-maintenance of autonomous systems. Elaborating upon and within sensorimotor theory and enactivism, we reconceptualise goals as higher...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
August 15, 2026
Christos Kalpakidis
Abstract This paper reconstructs and defends Jean-Paul Sartre’s realism about consciousness as articulated in the Introduction to Being and Nothingness, situating his position within contemporary debates on illusionism and anti-realism in the philosophy of mind. While Sartre’s descriptions of consciousness as “nothingness” and his emphasis on the contingency of the subject–world relation may...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
August 13, 2026
Uzair Khan
Abstract Ego-dissolution experiences are perhaps the most philosophically germane effect of psychedelic drugs. Psychedelic ego-dissolution self-reports, in varying expressions, often claim completely selfless episodes. Some have called the experiences referred to in these reports ‘total ego dissolution,’ arguing that they lack all self-awareness while being phenomenally conscious. I identify...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
August 12, 2026
Victor Machado Barcellos
Abstract This paper investigates whether the concept of “phenomenal consciousness” is an integral component of ordinary folk psychology or a theoretical construct devised within a specific epistemic community. Advocates of what I term the Folk- “Consciousness” Thesis argue that laypeople already possess such a concept, citing experimental findings in support of this view. In contrast, I draw on...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
July 28, 2026
Joona Taipale
The Freudian concept of the unconscious is generally presented in terms of a region of the mind that is inaccessible to consciousness. Against this background, classical phenomenologists insisted that, be it latent dream-thoughts or repressed wishes, the mind can disguise the inappropriate content and repress the unwanted only if it somehow “knows” what it thereby represses and disguises. What...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
July 25, 2026
James Deery
Abstract This paper aims to contribute to the growing interest in the role of imagination in Merleau-Ponty’s thought by exploring how the phenomenon of mental imagery would be characterised under Merleau-Ponty’s framework, and questioning whether or not his conception of mental imagery is of relevance to contemporary research and debates on the topic. To frame the investigation, I will...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
July 25, 2026
Sarah Bro Trasmundi
Abstract This article revisits Alva Noë’s claim that perception is a skilful activity enacted through sensorimotor engagement, asking what happens when the temporal conditions that scaffold such skill become unstable. Drawing on ethnographic material from Sámi reindeer herding and Inuit hunting and herding practices in Arctic environments, I argue that action and perception can slip out of...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
June 20, 2026
Søren Overgaard, Laura Oppi, Kasper Møller Nielsen et al.
Abstract It is surprisingly difficult to provide an account of hallucination that captures all the cases that clinicians typically class as hallucinations, without at the same time admitting cases that would not typically be classed as such. Most attempts to specify exactly what a hallucination is supposed to be fails to meet at least one of these conditions, as we show in the first part of the...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
June 18, 2026
Michael Schnegg, Julian Sommerschuh
Abstract Both phenomenology and anthropology study lived experience, but they have traditionally done so in different ways. Phenomenology aims to identify universal structures of experience via the epoché, reduction and eidetic variation. Anthropology, by contrast, foregrounds cultural diversity as documented through ethnography. Ethnographic accounts provide thousands of cases of lived...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
June 17, 2026
Zamir Kadodia
Abstract The language of the “pathology paradigm” is not merely a vocabulary for describing autism—it participates in shaping the “affective atmospheres” that autistic people inhabit and move through. Drawing on some recent contributions to the phenomenology of affective atmospheres from Joel Krueger, Tonino Griffero, and Enara García, this paper develops the concept of “neuronormative...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
June 16, 2026
Rick Bellaar, Jasper Feyaerts
This article explores the notion of first-person authority (FPA) in self-disorders (SD). It will be argued that the ‘ipseity disturbance model’ (IDM) of SD cannot account for the FPA of reports of disturbed mineness in SD. Moreover, it will be argued that the phenomenological account of a ‘loss of common sense’ - typically coupled with the IDM - cannot account for the FPA of reports of...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
May 14, 2026
Javier Sánchez-Cañizares
Abstract Irruption Theory (IT) offers a novel approach to understanding mind-brain interaction in decision-making. IT suggests that the mind’s influence on brain dynamics can manifest as “irruption” — the emergence of noise or physical fluctuations that alter brain activity. Lately, Irruption-Absorption Theory (IAT) has also incorporated the idea of “absorption,” which refers to the mental...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
May 14, 2026
Marcelo Lopes
Abstract Philosophical approaches to psychopharmacology have paved the way for an important but still largely unexplored area in the philosophy of psychiatry. Some of these approaches have addressed conceptual, explanatory, and moral questions posed by psychopharmaceuticals, while shedding light on epistemological and methodological issues inherent to psychopharmacological practice. Yet, most...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
May 12, 2026
Daniel Neumann
Abstract The term “cognitive phenomenology” may be understood as referring to the idea that there is something it is like to entertain thoughts. One of the main problems in the debates on cognitive phenomenology is the question of how it should be construed, for instance in terms of being in a particular phenomenal state. In order to give a concise idea of what cognitive phenomenology is, I...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
May 2, 2026
Justin Aaron Moll
Abstract Sometimes our ability to make sense of the world breaks down. Such breakdowns of sensemaking give rise to a range of phenomena, including extreme experiences such as crisis and epiphany, as well as day-to-day forms of learning, frustration, or indifference. Various accounts in the domains of phenomenology and the neurocognitive and neurophysiological sciences capture facets of...
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...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
April 1, 2026
István Fazakas, Mathilde Bois, Tudi Gozé
7 citations
Contemporary phenomenological psychopathology has raised questions concerning selfhood and its possible alterations in schizophrenia spectrum disorders. Although the notion of the self is central to several accounts of anomalies, it remains a question how exactly the radically minimal experiential features of selfhood can be altered. Indeed, the risk is to reduce the notion of selfhood so...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
April 1, 2026
Enrico Petracca
4 citations
The “scaling-up” problem concerns radical embodied cognition’s (REC) supposed inability to extend its explanatory reach beyond simple cognitive phenomena. This paper questions the problem’s main assumption, that is, the possibility of sorting phenomena according to their inherent cognitive complexity or representation-hunger. To do so, I focus on a class of phenomena whose degree of...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
April 1, 2026
Ståle Finke, Thomas Netland, Mattias Solli
2 citations
This article takes its point of departure from the second (embodied) linguistic turn represented by the enactivist notion of humans as linguistic bodies, using resources from Hans Georg Gadamer in order to propose a view of the relation between art and everyday experience as one of symbolic transformation. Conceiving art as a form of linguistic phenomenon wherein one can engage in original...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
April 1, 2026
Joshua Rust
This paper is an investigation into the possibility of institutional agency and proceeds via the elaboration of two, nested claims. First, if genuine agency is attributable to certain social institutions, it would not be the full-blown, intentional agency that characterizes human activity, but would rather fall under a minimal modality of agency. Moreover, since enactivists aim to articulate...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
March 23, 2026
Evan Thompson
This article contains my response to the commentaries by Mazviita Chirimuuta, Tom Froese, Miriam Kyselo, and Claudia E. Vanney on The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience (Frank et al., 2024 ).
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
March 16, 2026
Joshua Sealy
This paper reframes disability and pathology through a developmental-relational lens, introducing the phenomenological congruence framework to complement existing models. The ecological-enactive model, ecological functional model, and microactivist affordances approaches offer valuable insight into disability but do not fully account for how developmental trajectories shape people’s capacity to...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
March 12, 2026
Eliza Ramos de Andrade
In Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and for a Phenomenological Philosophy ( Ideas I ), particularly in paragraphs 73 to 75, we find a clear differentiation made by Husserl between pure transcendental phenomenology and mathematics. Both are considered eidetic sciences, but they differ in the nature of their essences, or, as highlighted by the author, “transcendental phenomenology belongs to a...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
March 3, 2026
Ezequiel A. Di Paolo
I reflect on Alva Noë’s appeal to the concept of style to describe how we access the world and how we become our own selves. Noë’s recent work has addressed the topic of style directly, but the strands of his perspective are woven throughout his Action in Perception book, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary with this special issue. Style is an expansive, flexible concept. It can be...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
February 13, 2026
Henrique Mendes
1 citation
Abstract This article critically examines the theoretical landscape of 4E cognition—embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive cognition—to assess whether it constitutes a true departure from the traditional framework in the cognitive sciences grounded in computationalism, representationalism, functionalism, internalism, and realism. While many proponents of 4E cognition claim to defend such a...