European Journal of Philosophy
October 22, 2026
Tyeson Davies-Barton
Abstract This article examines the significance of what Edmund Husserl calls “the paradox of human subjectivity” for the metaphysical realism‐idealism debate in transcendental phenomenology. I distinguish two plausible interpretations of the paradox that are relevant to this debate. I term the first a vicious circle of mutual dependence: the world is characterized as being ontologically...
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 14, 2026
Keith Allen
David Katz was an empirical psychologist with a deep and abiding interest in phenomenology. This paper reconstructs his theory of colour and colour perception, central to which is a distinctive account of the perception of illumination and empty space. Katz's views were an important influence on both the Gestalt psychologists and phenomenologists such as Merleau‐Ponty, and have contemporary...
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
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
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
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
September 1, 2024
Joseph K. Schear
Abstract: Robert Pippin has long defended the Hegelian ‘satisfactions of self‐consciousness’ against virtually all attacks, including Heidegger's. He now concedes in a striking reversal that ‘Heidegger is right’. Pippin diagnoses his past allegiance to the Western rationalist tradition culminating in Hegel as resting on ‘a misplaced confidence in the inescapably self‐reflective character of any...
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
Farid 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
September 12, 2023
Manuel Fasko
3 citations
Abstract In this paper, I argue for a novel interpretation of Shepherd's notion of selfhood. In distinction to Deborah Boyle's interpretation, I contend that Shepherd differentiates between the mind and the self. The latter, for Shepherd, is an effect arising from causal interactions between mind and body—specifically those interactions that give rise to our present stream of consciousness, our...
European Journal of Philosophy
August 15, 2023
Dimitris Apostolopoulos
4 citations
Abstract I argue that Sartre's Transcendence of the Ego draws on Kant's theory of spontaneity to articulate its metaphysical account of consciousness's mode of being, to defend its phenomenological description of the intentional structure of self‐consciousness, and to diagnose the errors that motivate views of consciousness qua person or substance. In addition to highlighting an overlooked...
European Journal of Philosophy
June 21, 2023
Chang Liu
4 citations
Abstract Representationalism is a philosophical position which reduces all phenomenal conscious states to intentional states. However, starting from the phenomenal consciousness, the phenomenal intentionality theory provides an explanation of all sorts of intentionality. Against Michael Shim's interpretation, I argue that, although Hussserl's phenomenology is certainly considered as an antipode...
European Journal of Philosophy
May 21, 2023
Guillaume Fréchette, Hamid Taïeb
1 citation
What does it mean for a thought, idea, belief, or wish to be about something? And what do we mean when we say that we are aware of thinking, presenting, believing, or wishing when we do? Much of the philosophy of mind of the 20th and 21st centuries has focused on these two questions. Perhaps due to a certain dominant way of doing the history of philosophy in England and the United States after...
European Journal of Philosophy
June 1, 2022
Matt E. M. Bower
AbstractOne key difference between perceptual experience and thought is the distinctly sensory way perception presents things to us. Some philosophers nevertheless suggest this sensory phenomenal character does not exhaust the way things are made manifest to us in perceptual experience. Edmund Husserl maintains that there is also a significant non‐sensory side to perception's phenomenal...
European Journal of Philosophy
September 10, 2021
Angela Mendelovici
In Brentano’s Philosophical System: Mind, Being, Value, Uriah Kriegel argues that Brentano’s work forms a “live philosophical program” (p. 14, italics omitted) that contemporary philosophy has much to learn from and that is promising and largely correct. To this end, Kriegel argues that Brentano’s notion of consciousness is the contemporary notion of phenomenal consciousness, that Brentano’s...
European Journal of Philosophy
July 25, 2018
B. Rousse
In this paper, I critically examine Dan Zahavi's multidimensional account of the self and show how the distinction he makes among “ pre ‐ reflective minimal, ” “ interpersonal, ” and “ normative ” dimensions of selfhood needs to be refined in order to accommodate what I call “ pre ‐ reflective self ‐ understanding. ” The latter is a normative dimension of selfhood manifest not in reflection and...
European Journal of Philosophy
July 11, 2018
Casey Doyle
6 citations
Abstract This essay addresses the question how we know our conscious thinking. Conscious thinking typically takes the form of a series of discrete episodes that constitute a complex cognitive activity. We must distinguish the discrete episodes of thinking in which a particular content is represented in phenomenal consciousness and is present “before the mind's eye” from the extended activities...
European Journal of Philosophy
February 2, 2017
Joshua Shepherd
In this paper, I examine the claim that self-consciousness is highly morally significant, such that the fact that an entity is self-conscious generates strong moral reasons against harming or killing that entity. This claim is apparently very intuitive, but I argue it is false. I consider two ways to defend this claim: one indirect, the other direct. The best-known arguments relevant to...