This short essay attempts to flesh out the extended mind thesis by showing the nontrivial role of the body in skilled epistemic action. This is attempted by bringing Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the body schema together with Clark and Chalmers account of the extended mind. What the author hopes to show is that the incorporation of new habits into one’s body schema can make a meaningful difference...
The paper’s main target is strong and reductive “representationalism”. What we claim is that even though this position looks very appealing in so far as it does not postulate intrinsic and irreducible experiential properties, the attempt it pursues of accounting for the phenomenology of experience in terms of representational content runs the risk of providing either an inadequate...
A previous study (Gauntlett-Gilbert and Kuipers, 2005) has suggested that distress associated with complex visual hallucinations (CVHs) in younger adults with psychosis may more strongly relate to appraisals of meaning than to the content of the hallucination. However, visual hallucinations are most commonly seen in the disorders of later life, where this relationship has not been investigated....
Andrei Tarkovsky's film Solaris (1972) is studied through the lens of philosophy of mind. The question of memory and personhood, as developed by John Locke and then expanded by Derek Parfit, is applied to the status of Hari – the copy of the protagonist's deceased wife. The key question addressed by this paper is on what basis Hari can (or should?) be considered human. Hari's personhood is...
Phenomenology is a methodological approach to research that has been broadly influential on established qualitative and interpretative perspectives. Founded in the work of German philosophers, it offers challenges in both understanding and practice. These stem, in part, from the requirement of the researcher to actively seek personal and deep meaning from those who are studied; and from the...
ABSTRACT: In this paper, I argue that Hegel’s critique of Kant’s theory of experience aims at defending a thick (or robust) account of experience: whilst both Kant and Hegel oppose the Myth of the Given and a non-conceptualist understanding of the content of experience, Hegel’s disagreement with Kant is centred on the fact that Kant only provides this conceptualist account of experience on the...
Reber’s Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC) has much to recommend it. However, while the CBC effectively renders null any ontological gap between mind and body, it leaves two important remaining gaps unaddressed: the epistemologic and the causal gap. Brakel’s (2013) Diachronic Conjunctive Token Physicalism (DiCoToP) is briefly introduced as a beginning remedy for the epistemologic, but...
A solution to the Hard Problem formulated by Chalmers should include a biophysical nonreductive explanation of the qualities of conscious experience ( subjective qualia). This task is nearly impossible to be performed in the context of Modern Physics, since most influential scientists and philosophers conceived such qualities as being mental phenomena without a physical counterpart. We propose...
Abstract : The central aim of this paper is to offer a historical reconstruction of phenomenological studies on dreaming and to put forward a draft for a phenomenological theory of the dream state. Prominent phenomenologists have offered an extremely valuable interpretation of the dream as an intentional process, stressing its relevance in understanding the complexity of the mental life of...