From Intentional Experience to Embodied Being-in-the-World

Abstract

This preprint constitutes Phase III of the Rethinking Mind research project, a historical and conceptual investigation of changing approaches to mind, cognition, and intelligence. The paper reconstructs the development of phenomenology from Edmund Husserl through Martin Heidegger to Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It argues that phenomenology expanded the appropriate unit of analysis for understanding mind: from Husserl’s intentional correlation between consciousness and its objects, through Heidegger’s account of practical being-in-the-world, to Merleau-Ponty’s embodied subject–world relation. Rather than presenting this development as a simple linear progression, the paper identifies both continuity and transformation among the three thinkers. It examines how intentional experience, practical involvement, the lived body, and situated existence collectively challenge accounts that isolate cognition from the world in which it occurs. The paper also considers the implications of this phenomenological transformation for embodied and situated cognition, 4E approaches, robotics, and artificial intelligence. It argues that phenomenology provides conceptual resources for questioning the identification of intelligence exclusively with internal information processing, while acknowledging that it does not independently prove that computation is insufficient, that embodiment produces consciousness, or that artificial experience is impossible. This manuscript is a preprint and has not undergone formal peer review.