Might the seat of conscious experience exist in 'prototime', a conjectured aspatial, quasi-temporal reality out of which space-time emerges? Schneider and Bailey argue that if space-time is emergent, this might help us to understand the place of consciousness in the physical world. Although I agree that their hypothesis suggests a possible solution to the 'hard problem' of consciousness — the...
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...
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...
Embodied self‐awareness (ESA) is a crucial yet often neglected aspect of counselor education that involves the skillful integration of present‐moment somatic attunement in the therapeutic encounter. We examine embodiment in light of phenomenological philosophy, contemporary neuroscience, and critical pedagogy to distinguish ESA from conceptual thought and to clarify the difference between...
The aim of the research is the philosophical-phenomenological explication and comprehension of the liturgical mode of religious life as a specific form of everyday religious experience. Drawing on the Orthodox tradition, the article clarifies the understanding of liturgy as a mode of religious life, reconstructs the temporal, spatial, bodily-affective, and communicative structures of liturgical...
This paper aims to develop a phenomenology of the experience of self and its transformation through the interrelated experiences of form, substance, and essence. The objectives are two fold: (1) to articulate a structural vocabulary for describing how selfhood is lived, fragmented, and transformed, and (2) to demonstrate how this framework might illuminate and facilitate the resolution of...
Abstract A spectre of anti-physicalism haunts philosophy of mind: we seem unable to explain how the phenomenal arises from the physical. Rather than repeat clichés about the profundity of this explanatory gap, in this paper, I defend a set of Trivialisms, which suggest the phenomenal explanatory gap may not be as special as widely assumed. I start with surveying Schaffer’s modest Trivialism,...
The field of consciousness research has reached a somewhat contentious atmosphere. From “adversarial collaborations”, where consciousness theories compete, to open letters where researchers label some theories as pseudoscience, the subject is becoming harder to investigate and results difficult to interpret as there is still a significant aura of mysticism rooted in dualism and its modern...
This study presents the first comprehensive psychometric comparison of Greyson's (1983) 16-item Near-Death Experience Scale (NDE Scale) and Martial et al.'s (2020) 20-item Near-Death Experience Content Scale (NDE-C) using Rasch modeling and differential item functioning (or response bias) analyses. A total of 705 self-identified "near-death experiencers" (64% women) completed both measures,...
There is a strange mercy in the way the mind forgets a mercy that medicine has rarely understood. In our age of biomedical triumphalism, where pharmaceutical companies spend billions on Alzheimer's therapies promising to rewind the unrewindable, we speak of memory loss exclusively as catastrophe, as the progressive erasure of selfhood requiring aggressive intervention. This article proposes a...
Abstract Consciousness studies have relied on the subject’s remembering capacity as the primary tool for identifying and measuring selfless states, i.e., conscious states without self-consciousness. This paper critically examines whether memory can serve such a role. After outlining the requirements that remembering must meet when deployed in studies of selfless consciousness, I evaluate its...
In this interview, Françoise Dastur discusses her formation as a phenomenologist, her scholarly work on the history of phenomenology, and her phenomenology of human finitude and mortality.
In this interview, Emmanuel Falque measures the distance that separates his generation from that of his teachers and argues that the problem of circumscribing the “history of metaphysics” no longer interests most phenomenologists. He also discusses the relation between phenomenology and theology and his work on the theology of human finitude.
In this interview, Jean-Yves Lacoste disputes the existence of a “theological turn” in contemporary French phenomenology and offers a sketch of his own phenomenology of liturgy.
In this interview, Jean-Luc Marion discusses his intellectual upbringing at the École Normale Supérieure and answers a number of questions about his interpretation of the history of metaphysics, his books on Descartes, the development of the “phenomenology of givenness,” and the relation between phenomenology and theology.
In this interview, Renaud Barbaras discusses his intellectual itinerary toward Merleau-Ponty, the history of phenomenological anthropology, and his distinctive approach to the phenomenology of life.
In this interview, Claude Romano discusses his magnum opus, Au coeur de la raison: la phénoménologie (At the Heart of Reason) and defends the “phenomenological thesis” that there is a pre-lingusitic order of experience distinct from the forms of conceptual thought and the linguistic schemes that underlie them.
In this interview, compiled by Jean Leclecq and Grégori Jean, Michel Henry discusses his education, his place in the history of phenomenology, his phenomenology of life and the body, and his books on Marx and the philosophy of Christianity.
This article synthesises recent advances in consciousness studies by integrating contemporary philosophical debates, neuroscientific findings, and emerging discourse on artificial intelligence. It critically addresses philosophical issues, including qualia, the Hard problem, panpsychism, and illusionism, in juxtaposition with empirical neuroscientific theories such as Global Workspace Theory...
January 8, 2026Raphaël Julliard, Damien Roy, Marion Botella
preprint
Investigating phenomena that practitioners experience as continuous, without clear beginning or end, poses a challenge for standard micro-phenomenology, which reconstructs short, bounded episodes retrospectively. This article introduces the Researcher-as-Obstacle (RAO) framework and protocol as a structural adaptation for such cases. RAO organizes a pretext experience that genuinely mobilizes...