European Journal of Philosophy
August 4, 2026
Elena Holmgren
Abstract Recently, there has been a burgeoning interest in the so‐called group flow state both in positive psychology and in the phenomenology of collective agency. Group flow is a form of collective agency in which agents experience a sense of intensified efficacy coupled with diminished individual ownership of action and heightened shared ownership thereof. This state reveals an...
European Journal of Philosophy
May 29, 2026
Takuya Niikawa, Pablo Fernandez Velasco
One of the central questions in philosophy of mind concerns the intentionality of moods. While it is standard to take the intentional object of moods as either ‘everything’ or ‘nothing’, neither view seems to be explanatorily inadequate. Given this, this paper develops and motivates a positive account of the intentionality of moods, according to which moods are directed at atmospheres. We first...
European Journal of Philosophy
May 12, 2026
Yamina Venuta
Merleau‐Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (2012 [1945]) opens with a detailed critique of traditional philosophical accounts of sensation, generally understood as having Husserl's “content‐apprehension schema” among its targets. The schema sees perception as resulting from the interpretation (“apprehension” or “apperception”) of “raw” sensory contents (or “hyle”). Both the schema's...
European Journal of Philosophy
January 26, 2026
J. Young
Schopenhauer offers ‘nature is not divine but demonic’ as a direct rebuttal of Spinoza's pantheism, his identification of ‘nature’ with ‘God’. And so, one would think, he ought to have been immune to the ‘Spinozism’ that became, as Heine called it, ‘the unofficial religion’ of the age. In fact, I argue, Schopenhauer's Spinozism is at least as deep as that of any of his contemporaries: his debt...
European Journal of Philosophy
December 1, 2025
James Deery
Abstract The imagination seems to enjoy a conceptually unstable double‐life within Merleau‐Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception . Oscillating between a Kantian use of the term, as a ‘necessary ingredient of perception itself’ and a Sartrean depiction of what appears when say, viewing a painting or visualising an absent friend, as a nothingness that is of an entirely different ‘flesh’ to that of...
European Journal of Philosophy
September 1, 2025
Lorenzo Sala
AbstractIn this article, I develop a new account of Wolff's theory of consciousness. In contrast to the received view, I argue that Wolff's texts can be better made sense of by reading ‘perception’ and ‘apperception’ as two radically different acts, each one accounting for radically different aspects of the consciousness of an object and both necessary for its possibility. ‘Perception’ accounts...
European Journal of Philosophy
September 1, 2025
David Rosenthal
AbstractHow do we come to understand the nature of the thoughts that we and others have? And how do we come to have the conceptual resources needed to formulate such understanding? Many would say we understand the nature of thoughts simply by being subjectively aware of our own conscious thoughts. But it is unclear how consciousness could, on its own, provide the conceptual resources required...
European Journal of Philosophy
June 1, 2025
Jonathan Mitchell
AbstractIn The Imaginary Jean‐Paul Sartre makes what will strike many as an implausibly strong claim, namely that perception and imagination are incompatible kinds of experience ‐ I call this the exclusion claim. This paper offers a reconstruction of Sartre's exclusion claim. First, it frames the claim in terms of cross‐modal attention distribution, such that it is not possible to...
European Journal of Philosophy
October 2, 2024
C. Erhard
3 citations
Building on Uriah Kriegel's recent work on the varieties of consciousness, I consider the question of how many irreducible and fundamental kinds of consciousness there are. This is the project of a fundamental classification of consciousness (C‐taxonomy), which will be approached with reference to two figures from the (early) phenomenological tradition, i.e., Franz Brentano and Alexander...
European Journal of Philosophy
July 31, 2024
Lilian Alweiss
Phenomenology questions the centrality that Kant attributes to the “I think.” It claims that on the pre‐reflective level experience is selfless as unity is given. I call this the “unity argument.” The paper explores the significance of this claim by focusing on the work of Edmund Husserl. What interests me is that although the unity argument claims that we can account for the unity of...
European Journal of Philosophy
July 5, 2024
F. Zahnoun, Luca Roccioletti, Erik Myin
1 citation
Much of contemporary philosophy of perception revolves around the question of whether perceptual experience has representational content. On one side of the debate, we find representationalists claiming that perceptual experience is representational in that it always presents the world as being a certain way. Perceptual experience is therefore said to have content, which can be evaluated for...
European Journal of Philosophy
January 30, 2024
S. Geniusas
Husserl is the philosopher who transformed the geological metaphor of sedimentation into a philosophical concept. While tracing the development of Husserl's reflections on sedimentation, I argue that the distinctive feature of Husserl's approach lies in his preoccupation with the question concerning the origins of sedimentations. The paper demonstrates that in different frameworks of analysis,...
European Journal of Philosophy
December 20, 2023
Tris Hedges
Phenomenological discussions of sociality have long been concerned with the relations between the I, the You, and the We. Recently, dialogue between phenomenology and analytic philosophical work on collective intentionality has given rise to a corpus of literature oriented around the first‐person plural “we.” In this paper, I demonstrate how these dominant accounts of the “we” are not...
European Journal of Philosophy
December 1, 2016
Anil Gomes
AbstractIn the section ‘Unity and Objectivity’ ofThe Bounds of Sense, P. F. Strawson argues for the thesis that unity of consciousness requires experience of an objective world. My aim in this essay is to evaluate this claim. In the first and second parts of the essay, I explicate Strawson's thesis, reconstruct his argument, and identify the point at which the argument fails. Strawson's...
European Journal of Philosophy
March 23, 2011
Oliver William Rashbrook
27 citations
Abstract: In this paper I discuss two puzzles that concern the sense in which consciousness can be described as ‘continuous’. The first puzzle arises out of recent work by Dainton and Tye, both of whom appear to oscillate between ascribing the property of ‘continuity’ to the stream of experience, and ascribing it to the objects of experience. The second puzzle concerns the notion that the...