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1199Loneliness and the Emotional Experience of AbsenceSouthern Journal of Philosophy 59 (2): 185-204. 2020.In this paper, we develop an analysis of the structure and content of loneliness. We argue that this is an emotion of absence-an affective state in which certain social goods are regarded as out of reach for the subject of experience. By surveying the range of social goods that appear to be missing from the lonely person's perspective, we see what it is that can make this emotional condition so subjectively awful for those who undergo it, including the profound sense of being unable to realise o…Read more
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834Watsuji, Intentionality, and PsychopathologyPhilosophy East and West 70 (3): 757-780. 2020.Despite increasing interest in the work of Tetsuro Watsuji, his discussion of intentionality remains underexplored. I here develop an interpretation and application of his view. First, I unpack Watsuji’s arguments for the inherently social character of intentionality, consider how they connect with his more general discussion of embodiment and betweenness, and then situate his view alongside phenomenologists like Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Next, I argue that Watsuji’s characterizatio…Read more
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590Mental institutions, habits of mind, and an extended approach to autismThaumàzein 6 10-41. 2018.We argue that the notion of "mental institutions"-discussed in recent debates about extended cognition-can help better understand the origin and character of social impairments in autism, and also help illuminate the extent to which some mechanisms of autistic dysfunction extend across both internal and external factors (i.e., they do not just reside within an individual's head). After providing some conceptual background, we discuss the connection between mental institutions and embodied habits…Read more
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916Enactivism, other minds, and mental disordersSynthese 198 (Suppl 1): 365-389. 2019.Although enactive approaches to cognition vary in terms of their character and scope, all endorse several core claims. The first is that cognition is tied to action. The second is that cognition is composed of more than just in-the-head processes; cognitive activities are externalized via features of our embodiment and in our ecological dealings with the people and things around us. I appeal to these two enactive claims to consider a view called “direct social perception” : the idea that we can …Read more
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1123Psychiatry beyond the brain: externalism, mental health, and autistic spectrum disorderPhilosophy Psychiatry and Psychology 26 (3). 2019.Externalist theories hold that a comprehensive understanding of mental disorder cannot be achieved unless we attend to factors that lie outside of the head: neural explanations alone will not fully capture the complex dependencies that exist between an individual’s psychiatric condition and her social, cultural, and material environment. Here, we firstly offer a taxonomy of ways in which the externalist viewpoint can be understood, and unpack its commitments concerning the nature and physical re…Read more
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545From Wide Cognition to Mechanisms: A Silent RevolutionFrontiers in Psychology 9. 2018.In this paper, we argue that several recent ‘wide’ perspectives on cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, and distributed) are only partially relevant to the study of cognition. While these wide accounts override traditional methodological individualism, the study of cognition has already progressed beyond these proposed perspectives towards building integrated explanations of the mechanisms involved, including not only internal submechanisms but also interactions with others, groups…Read more
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2067Affective affordances and psychopathologyDiscipline Filosofiche 2 (18): 221-247. 2018.Self-disorders in depression and schizophrenia have been the focus of much recent work in phenomenological psychopathology. But little has been said about the role the material environment plays in shaping the affective character of these disorders. In this paper, we argue that enjoying reliable (i.e., trustworthy) access to the things and spaces around us — the constituents of our material environment — is crucial for our ability to stabilize and regulate our affective life on a day-today basis…Read more
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44Music-animated body. Interview with Joel KruegerAvant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies 2 (1): 211-216. 2011.
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1506Watsuji's phenomenology of aidagara: An interpretation and application to psychopathologyIn Krueger Joel (ed.), Tetsugaku Companion to Phenomenology and Japanese Philosophy, Springer. pp. 165-181. forthcoming.I discuss Watsuji’s characterization of aidagara or “betweenness”. First, I develop a phenomenological reading of aidagara. I argue that the notion can help illuminate aspects of our embodied subjectivity and its interrelation with the world and others. Along the way, I also indicate how the notion can be fruitfully supplemented by different sources of empirical research. Second, I put aidagara to work in the context of psychopathology. I show how disruptions of aidagara in schizophrenia not onl…Read more
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1220Merleau-PontyIn Thomas Szanto & Hilge Landweer (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotions, Routledge. pp. 197-206. 2020.
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494Musical Worlds and the Extended MindProceedings of A Body of Knowledge - Embodied Cognition and the Arts Conference CTSA UCI, 8-10 Dec 2016. 2018.“4E” approaches in cognitive science see mind as embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. They observe that we routinely “offload” part of our thinking onto body and world. Recently, 4E theorists have turned to music cognition: from work on music perception and musical emotions, to improvisation and music education. I continue this trend. I argue that music — like other tools and technologies — is a beyond-the-head resource that affords offloading. And via this offloading, music can (at least …Read more
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396Musical scaffolding and the pleasure of sad music: Comment on “An Integrative Review of the Enjoyment of Sadness Associated with Music"Physics of Life Reviews. forthcoming.Why is listening to sad music pleasurable? Eerola et al. convincingly argue that we should adopt an integrative framework — encompassing biological, psycho-social, and cultural levels of explanation — to answer this question. I agree. The authors have done a great service in providing the outline of such an integrative account. But in their otherwise rich discussion of the psycho-social level of engagements with sad music, they say little about the phenomenology of such experiences — including f…Read more
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1148Schizophrenia and the Scaffolded SelfTopoi 39 (3): 597-609. 2020.A family of recent externalist approaches in philosophy of mind argues that our psychological capacities are synchronically and diachronically “scaffolded” by external resources. I consider how these “scaffolded” approaches might inform debates in phenomenological psychopathology. I first introduce the idea of “affective scaffolding” and make some taxonomic distinctions. Next, I use schizophrenia as a case study to argue—along with others in phenomenological psychopathology—that schizophrenia is…Read more
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1121Music as Affective ScaffoldingIn David Clarke, Ruth Herbert & Eric Clarke (eds.), Music and Consciousness II, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.For 4E cognitive science, minds are embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. Proponents observe that we regularly ‘offload’ our thinking onto body and world: we use gestures and calculators to augment mathematical reasoning, and smartphones and search engines as memory aids. I argue that music is a beyond-the-head resource that affords offloading. Via this offloading, music scaffolds access to new forms of thought, experience, and behaviour. I focus on music’s capacity to scaffold emotional co…Read more
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639The Open BodyIn Antonella Carassa, Francesca Morganti & Guiseppa Riva (eds.), Enacting Intersubjectivity: Paving the Way for a Dialogue Between Cognitive Science, Social Cognition, and Neuroscience, Universita Della Svizzera Italiana. pp. 109-128. 2009.In this paper we characterize the body as constitutively open. We fi rst consider the notion of bodily openness at the basic level of its organic constitution. This will provide us a framework relevant for the understanding of the body open to its intersubjective world. We argue that the notion of “bodily openness” captures a constitutive dimension of intersubjectivity. Generally speaking, there are two families of theories intending to characterize the constitutive relation between subjectivity…Read more
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636Musicing, Materiality, and the Emotional NicheAction, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 14 (3): 43-62. 2015.Building on Elliot and SilvermanÕs (2015) embodied and enactive approach to musicing, I argue for an extended approach: namely, the idea that music can function as an environmental scaffolding supporting the development of various experiences and embodied practices that would otherwise remain inaccessible. I focus especially on the materiality of music. I argue that one of the central ways we use music, as a material resource, is to manipulate social spaceÑand in so doing, manipulate our emoti…Read more
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1828Extended emotionsPhilosophy Compass 11 (12): 863-878. 2016.Until recently, philosophers and psychologists conceived of emotions as brain- and body-bound affairs. But researchers have started to challenge this internalist and individualist orthodoxy. A rapidly growing body of work suggests that some emotions incorporate external resources and thus extend beyond the neurophysiological confines of organisms; some even argue that emotions can be socially extended and shared by multiple agents. Call this the extended emotions thesis. In this article, we cons…Read more
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933Stream of ConsciousnessIn John Lachs & Robert Talisse (eds.), Encyclopedia of American Philosophy, Routledge. 2007.
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1876At home in and beyond our skin: Posthuman embodiment in film and televisionIn Hauskeller Michael, Carbonell Curtis D. & Philbeck Thomas D. (eds.), Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 172-181. 2015.Film and television portrayals of posthuman cyborgs melding biology and technology, simultaneously “animal and machine” abound. Most of us immediately think of iconic characters like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s relentless cyborg assassin in the Terminator series or Peter Weller’s crime-fighting cyborg police officer in Robocop (1987). Or perhaps we recall the many cyborgs populating the Dr. Who, Star Trek, and Star Wars television series and films—including Darth Vader, surely the most famous cinema…Read more
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701James on Experience and the Extended MindContemporary Pragmatism 3 (1): 165-176. 2006.William James’s characterization of consciousness as a selecting agency can be used to develop and defend an externalist view of mind. The mind – including the content of phenomenal consciousness – is in an important sense distributed beyond the skin and skull of the subject, out into the world of people and things. Moreover, conscious experience is an action, and not simply something that happens to us. Consciousness, perception, and experience are activities – in other words, things that we do…Read more
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268ConsciousnessIn John Lachs & Robert Talisse (eds.), Encyclopedia of American Philosophy, Routledge. 2007.
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664The affective 'we': Self-regulation and shared emotionsIn Thomas Szanto & Dermot Moran (eds.), Phenomenology of Sociality: Discovering the ‘We’, Routledge. pp. 263-277. 2015.What does it mean to say that an emotion can be shared? I consider this question, focusing on the relation between the phenomenology of emotion experience and self-regulation. I explore the idea that a numerically single emotion can be given to more than one subject. I term this a “collective emotion”. First, I consider different forms of emotion regulation. I distinguish between embodied forms of self-regulation, which use subject-centered features of our embodiment, and distributed forms of se…Read more
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836IntentionalityIn Giovanni Stanghellini, Matthew Broome, Anthony Vincent Fernandez, Paolo Fusar-Poli, Andrea Raballo & René Rosfort (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology, Oxford University Press. 2018.
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139Varieties of extended emotionsPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 13 (4): 533-555. 2014.I offer a preliminary defense of the hypothesis of extended emotions (HEE). After discussing some taxonomic considerations, I specify two ways of parsing HEE: the hypothesis of bodily extended emotions (HEBE), and the hypothesis of environmentally extended emotions (HEEE). I argue that, while both HEBE and HEEE are empirically plausible, only HEEE covers instances of genuinely extended emotions. After introducing some further distinctions, I support one form of HEEE by appealing to different str…Read more
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700Embodiment and affectivity in Moebius Syndrome and Schizophrenia: A phenomenological analysisIn J. Aaron Simmons & James Hackett (eds.), Phenomenology for the 21st Century, Palgrave-macmillan. forthcoming.In this comparative study, we examine experiential disruptions of embodiment and affectivity in Moebius Syndrome and schizophrenia. We suggest that using phenomenological resources to explore these experiences may help us better understand what it’s like to live with these conditions, and that such an understanding may have significant therapeutic value. Additionally, we suggest that this sort of phenomenologically-informed comparative analysis can shed light on the importance of embodiment and …Read more
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486Nishida, agency, and the 'self-contradictory' bodyAsian Philosophy 18 (3). 2008.In this essay, I investigate Kitarō Nishida's characterization of what he refers to as the 'self-contradictory' body. First, I clarify the conceptual relation between the self-contradictory body and Nishida's notion of 'acting-intuition'. I next look at Nishida's analysis of acting-intuition and the self-contradictory body as it pertains to our personal, sensorimotor engagement with the world and things in it, as well as to our bodily immersion within the intersubjective and social world. Along …Read more
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326The First Person Perspective and Beyond: Commentary on AlmaasJournal of Consciousness Studies 23 (1-2): 158-178. 2016.In this commentary, we engage with Almaas’s contribution from the perspective of phenomenology and its idea of a ‘minimal self’. We attempt to clarify Almaas’s claims about ‘phenomenological givens’ and ‘non-dual’, ‘pure consciousness’, and then show how they might be reconciled with phenomenological approaches to consciousness and self. We conclude by briefly indicating some of the ways a comparative analysis of this sort is mutually beneficial.
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2589Extended cognition and the space of social interactionConsciousness and Cognition 20 (3): 643-657. 2011.The extended mind thesis (EM) asserts that some cognitive processes are (partially) composed of actions consisting of the manipulation and exploitation of environmental structures. Might some processes at the root of social cognition have a similarly extended structure? In this paper, I argue that social cognition is fundamentally an interactive form of space management—the negotiation and management of ‘‘we-space”—and that some of the expressive actions involved in the negotiation and managemen…Read more
Exeter, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Interest
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Japanese Philosophy |
William James |
John Dewey |
Asian Philosophy |
American Pragmatism, Misc |
Musical Experience |