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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
AbstractThis article explores the notion of the unconscious (das Unbewusste) in terms of its nature and constitutive manifestations in consciousness. In contrast to the psychoanalytic formulation, the unconscious is conceptualized here distinctively as sedimentation (die Sedimentierung) within the Husserlian framework. All `experiences sediment and are “stored” in a darkened, affectless region...
In recent work, Mark Johnson has argued that a scientifically updated version of John Dewey’s pragmatism affords human beings the opportunity to feel at home in the world. This feeling at home, however, is not fully problematized, nor explored, nor resolved by Johnson. Rather, Johnson and his collaborators, Don Tucker (2021) and Jay Schulkin (2023), defend this updated pragmatism within the...
Evolutionary fitness threats and rewards are associated with subjectively unpleasant and pleasant sensations, respectively. Initially, these correlations appear explainable via adaptation by natural selection. But here I analyse the major metaphysical perspectives on consciousness – physicalism, dualism, and panpsychism – and conclude that none help to understand the adaptive-seeming...
AbstractHusserl characterizes sleep with the idea of “the relaxation of the will.” One finds a similar approach in the work of Maine de Biran, who explains sleep as “the suspension of the will.” More recently, Brian O’Shaughnessy and Matthew Soteriou have argued that mental actions constitute wakeful consciousness. In clinical practice, patients with disorders of consciousness who show...
Abstract Does artificial intelligence (AI) exhibit consciousness or self? While this question is hotly debated, here we take a slightly different stance by focusing on those features that make possible both, namely a basic or fundamental subjectivity. Learning from humans and their brain, we first ask what we mean by subjectivity. Subjectivity is manifest in the perspectiveness and mineness of...
The contrasts between so-called objective and subjective measures of consciousness have been a dominating topic of discussion for decades. The debate has classically been dominated by two positions – that subjective measures may be completely or partially reduced to objective measures, and, alternatively that they must exist in parallel. I argue that many problems relate to subjective reports...
Abstract The article argues in favour of a pragmatist enactive interpretation of the emergence of the symbolic and contentful mind from a basic form of social communicative interaction in which basic cognitive capacities are involved. Through a critical overview of Radical Enactivists (RECers)’ view about language, the article focuses on Mead’s pragmatist behavioural theory of meaning that...
Abstract Several enactive-phenomenological perspectives have pointed to affectivity as a central aspect of mental disorders. Indeed, from an enactive perspective, sense-making is an inherently affective process. A question remains on the role of different forms of affective experiences (i.e., existential feelings, atmospheres, moods, and emotions) in sense-making and, consequently, in mental...
Abstract: In the context of «reassessing the relationship between explanation and phenomenology», the paper discusses the question in what ways Husserlian phenomenology as a descriptive science of consciousness has an explanatory potential in consciousness studies. It takes a very limited approach to the wide-ranging themes that may come to mind on this topic. At the center is an exploration of...
Abstract Naïve realists hold that the phenomenology of veridical perceptual experience is in part constituted by environmental objects that the subject is perceiving. Although naïve realism is well-motivated by considering the cognitive and epistemic roles of the phenomenology of veridical perceptual experience, it is considered difficult to explain hallucinatory and imaginative experiences....
Abstract This paper develops a mechanistic account of basic mental agency by identifying similarities between two of its major exemplars: endogenous attention and imagination. Five key similarities are identified: (i) that both capacities are driven by currently prioritised goals that are either person-level or apt to become person-level. (ii) that both deliver their outputs to the working...
Abstract Peripersonal space (PPS) is frequently defined as a plastic, pragmatic and goal-directed multisensory buffer that connects the brain-body with its immediate environment. While such characterisations indicate that peripersonal spatiality is profoundly embodied and enactive, comparatively few attempts have aimed to systematically synthesise PPS literature with compatible phenomenological...
Jagna Brudzińska's Bi-Valenz der Erfahrung: Assoziation, Imaginäres und Trieb in derGenesis der Subjektivität bei Husserl und Freud is the first book-length study 1 to investigate the relationship of phenomenology and psychoanalysis from the perspective of Edmund Husserl's genetic philosophy. 2 The book addresses scholars of philosophy and psychology who wish to gain a deeper understanding of...
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...
“IPA”, “DES”, “micro phenomenology”, “phenomenological psychology”, “hermeneutic phenomenological method”, “neurophenomenology”, “reflective lifeworld research”, and “ethnographic phenomenological interviews” are just some examples of the many methods out there. While they all claim to work with subjective experience, it is not easy to identify their specificities and differences. When you work...
Whether a person is pretending, or not, is a function of their beliefs and intentions. This poses a challenge to 4E accounts of pretense, which typically seek to exclude such cognitive states from their explanations of psychological phenomena. Resulting tensions are explored within three recent accounts of imagination and pretense offered by theorists working in the 4E tradition. A path forward...
Abstract Questions about phenomenology’s role in non-philosophical disciplines gained renewed attention. While we claim that phenomenology makes indispensable, unique contributions to different domains of scientific practice such as concept formation, experimental design, and data collection, we also contend that when it comes to explanation, phenomenological approaches face a dilemma. Either...
Through a discussion of the socially extended mind, this paper advances the “not possible without principle” as an alternative to the social parity principle. By charging the social parity principle with reductionism about the social dimension of socially extended processes, the paper offers a new argumentative strategy for the socially extended mind that stresses its existential significance....
Micro-phenomenology is an interview and analysis method for investigating subjective experience. As a research tool, it provides detailed descriptions of brief moments of any type of subjective experience and offers techniques for systematically comparing them. In this article, we use an auto-ethnographic approach to present and explore the method. The reader is invited to observe a dialogue...
Abstract: This paper offers a novel argument against the phenomenal intentionality thesis (or PIT for short). The argument, which I'll call the extended mind argument against phenomenal intentionality, is centered around two claims: the first asserts that some source intentional states extend into the environment, while the second maintains that no conscious states extend into the environment....