Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
January 30, 2026
Konstantinos Morfis, Anthony Hatzimoysis
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...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
January 24, 2026
Marius Werz
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...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
January 7, 2026
Miriam Kyselo
1 citation
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...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
December 10, 2025
Daniel Villiger
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...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
November 11, 2025
Philipp Schmidt-Boddy
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...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
October 16, 2025
Rasmus Sinn, Marc Borner
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...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
October 13, 2025
Francesca Righetti
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...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
September 1, 2025
Jeff Yoshimi
4 citations
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...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
September 1, 2025
Juan Diego Bogotá
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...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
August 12, 2025
Jacopo Colelli
2 citations
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...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
June 11, 2025
Manuela Kirberg, Jonathan Robinson, Jennifer Windt
3 citations
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...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
June 7, 2025
Bronwyn Finnigan
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...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
March 4, 2025
Thomas Kreter-Schönleber, Robert Christian Wolf
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...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
February 8, 2025
Daniel Villiger
1 citation
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...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
2025
Catherine Legg, André Sant'Anna
4 citations
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,...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
December 18, 2024
Sofia Tzima, Jan Slaby
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...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
November 22, 2024
Onerva Kiianlinna
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...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
October 16, 2024
M. D. de Boer, Kristin Zeiler
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...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
September 2, 2024
Francesca Righetti
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...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
August 7, 2024
Daniel D. Hutto
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...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
July 19, 2024
P. March
For enactivists and pragmatists alike, sense-making is a systemic process of bringing the organism and environment into reciprocity. Steiner (2023) distinguishes enactivism from pragmatism by arguing that intention is compatible with enactivism but not pragmatism. After reviewing Steiner’s analysis, I consider its ontological consequences and phenomenological implications which I suggest cause...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
July 4, 2024
L. Malafouris
Philosophical preoccupation with the hard problem of self-consciousness often takes human becoming for granted. In archaeology, the opposite is the norm. The emphasis is on when and how we became human while the problem of self (how did the ability to think about one’s own self come about? ) is largely neglected. This article suggest that those two aspects of human becoming cannot be...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
June 7, 2024
Laura Candiotto
7 citations
Abstract Sentience, as the capacity to feel pleasure and pain, is often understood as a property of an organism, and the main problem is to determine whether an organism possesses this property or not. This is not just an armchair worry. Sentient ethics grounds its normative prescriptions on sentience, so assessing if an organism possesses sentience is crucial for ethical reasoning and...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
May 27, 2024
Janna Van Grunsven, Lavinia Marin, A. Gammon et al.
While 4E approaches to cognition are increasingly introduced in educational contexts, little has been said about how 4E commitments can inform pedagogy aimed at fostering ethical competencies. Here, we evaluate a 4E-inspired ethics exercise that we developed at a technical university to enliven the moral imagination of engineering students. Our students participated in an interactive tinkering...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
May 22, 2024
Zbigniew Orbik
3 citations
Abstract Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenological philosophy, developed the concept of the so-called pure transcendental consciousness. The author of the article asks whether the concept of consciousness understood this way can constitute a model for AI consciousness. It should be remembered that transcendental consciousness is the result of the use of the phenomenological method, the...