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...
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...
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...
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...
Abstract This paper examines the link between Immanuel Kant’s notion of transcendental self-consciousness and Dan Zahavi’s notion of pre-reflective self-consciousness in order to address the problem of reflection. Zahavi emphasizes the identity in pre-reflective self-consciousness, according to which the subject is conscious of itself as the one undergoing an experience, that is the...
Abstract Enactivism is undergoing a metaphysical shift. In pursuit of a more open-ended account of organismic becoming, several theorists have turned to the “affirmationist” ontologies of Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze. These frameworks conceive becoming as a non-teleological process in which identities emerge as contingent actualizations of pre-individual fields. In this paper, I argue...
Embodied agency and the blindspot of medical scienceModern science is driven by a "life-as-machine metaphysics", according to which the world is given and objectively there, to be quantified and divided up into more basic, material elements (Frank et al., 2024, p. 92).In this view, human lived experience plays no or next to no explanatory role (ibid., 7-8).This is the blindspot of modern...
One way to theorize about we-identities-the identities that individual subjects have as 'one of us'-is in terms of the uniformity, interchangeability, and prototypicality of group members. The social-psychological theory of self-categorization epitomizes this approach, which has strongly influenced contemporary phenomenological research on the we. This paper argues that this approach has one...
Abstract Mystical experiences are among the most extraordinary and meaningful experiences one can have. While such experiences have been studied for more than a century, it is still an open question how the brain can produce them. The present paper provides a possible answer by examining mystical experience from the lens of the REBUS hypothesis—a theory that explains the neurocognitive...
This paper sheds light on the role of inner speech and self-talk in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) by providing a literature review of existing empirical studies on related phenomena. Building on these insights, it explores how processes of linguistic self-relation may affect an individual’s sense of self. More specifically, it examines how processes of inner speech contribute to the...
Abstract Jean-Paul Sartre develops a phenomenological account of dreaming in his early work on the imaginary. Providing a brief but rich analysis, he emphasizes the active and imaginative nature of consciousness during dreaming and distinguished it sharply from perception. This paper revisits Sartre’s dream theory in light of the neuroscientific and philosophical framework of Predictive...
Why should we be interested in the relationship between dreaming and memory?Dreaming and Memory: Philosophical Issues sets out to explore this issue, offering rigorous and thought-provoking investigations into how these two phenomena might illuminate one another.Bringing together a range of philosophical perspectives, the volume navigates the blurred boundaries of these two cognitive...
Abstract Lopes (2021) has argued against my use of neural networks and dynamical systems theory in neurophenomenology. Responding to his argument provides an opportunity to articulate a pluralist approach to neurophenomenology, according to which multiple theoretical frameworks—symbolic, dynamical systems, connectionist, etc.—can be used to study consciousness and its relationship to neural...
Abstract Predictive processing is an increasingly popular explanatory framework developed within cognitive neuroscience. It conceives of the brain as a prediction machine that tries to minimise prediction error. Predictive processing has also been employed to explain aspects of conscious experience. In this paper, I critically evaluate current predictive processing approaches to the...
Abstract This paper introduces Phenomenological Cognitivism, a methodological framework grounding psychological explanations within pure experience to elucidate their intentional properties and their embeddness within the layered structure of first-person-experience. Unlike practical phenomenological approaches, which primarily employ phenomenology as a heuristic for data collection, concept...
Abstract Spontaneous thoughts and experiences, such as dreaming and mind wandering, form a significant part of our conscious mental lives. Yet, the precise phenomenological and content-related similarities and differences between dreaming and waking mind wandering remain insufficiently understood. In this study, we address this gap by comparing 340 dreaming and mind wandering questionnaire...
Abstract There is substantial evidence that mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) have beneficial effects for a range of disorders, though their underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Prominent developers of MBIs have proposed the Buddhist concept of no-self as a core mechanism driving their efficacy. The idea of no-self has been interpreted as the process of reducing, attenuating or...
Abstract Contemporary models of neural network function describe the brain as an “active system”, intrinsically generating patterns of activity that pre-structure top-down processing prior to extrinsic stimulation. In this context, self-relatedness is proposed to be one fundamental feature of this spontaneous brain activity. Self-relatedness has been postulated as a neuronal mechanism...
Abstract According to L.A. Paul, undergoing an experience is transformative if we learn something we cannot learn without having the experience and if it substantially changes our point of view. While the implications of transformative experiences have primarily been discussed in the context of rational choice, their underlying concept has also proven fruitful in the context of unchosen...
This paper addresses some apparent philosophical tensions between realism and enactivism by means of Charles Peirce's pragmatism. Enactivism's Mind-Life Continuity thesis has been taken to commit it to some form of anti-realist 'world-construction' which has been considered controversial. Accordingly, a new realist enactivism is proposed by Zahidi (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences,...
This text maps out a territory for political philosophy of mind, with emphasis on habit, affect and an expanded notion of the social niche. We first survey the historical development of classic philosophy of mind towards the articulation of political philosophy of mind and discuss further influences for the field. We then outline commitments to relationality, dynamism, and emergence, to adopt a...
Two types of systemic models of the mind – the enactivist and the representationalist model – are often depicted as contradictory and mutually exclusive. In this article, I investigate whether they can meaningfully coexist in a viable account of forming aesthetic judgments. I argue that the two models can simultaneously contribute to the understanding of aesthetic judging as an affective...
Since its inception, phenomenological philosophy has engaged with empirical data of lived experiences. Recently, phenomenological philosophy itself has branched out into performing systematic qualitative research, resulting in a heterogeneous field of qualitative phenomenological philosophy. By introducing and outlining the research approach of ‘Qualitative Critical Phenomenology’ (QCP), this...
This paper investigates the embodied dimensions of episodic memory through a phenomenological analysis. Contemporary philosophical theories understand episodic memory as a mental representation of a past event ‘happening in the head’. A philosophical account that seemingly supports an embodied understanding of episodic memory comes from phenomenology. Phenomenology has traditionally understood...
Advocates of radical enactivism maintain that contentful cognition is kinky, and that we need a kinky explanation of its natural origins (Hutto & Satne 2017, Hutto, D. D., & Myin, E. (2017). Evolving enactivism. MIT Press.). In advancing this idea, they maintain that there are qualitatively important cognitive differences between creatures capable of full-fledged contentful thought and speech...