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61Towards a phenomenology of grief: Insights from Merleau‐PontyEuropean Journal of Philosophy 28 (3): 657-669. 2020.This paper shows how phenomenological research can enhance our understanding of what it is to experience grief. I focus specifically on themes in the work of Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, in order to develop an account that emphasizes two importantly different ways of experiencing indeterminacy. This casts light on features of grief that are disorienting and difficult to describe, while also making explicit an aspect of experience upon which the possibility of phenomenological inquiry itself depends.
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74Emotional IntentionalityRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 85 251-269. 2019.This paper sketches an account of what distinguishes emotional intentionality from other forms of intentionality. I focus on the ‘two-sided’ structure of emotional experience. Emotions such as being afraid of something and being angry about something involve intentional states with specific contents. However, experiencing an entity, event, or situation in a distinctively emotional way also includes a wider-ranging disturbance of the experiential world within which the object of emotion is encoun…Read more
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25Thought Insertion ClarifiedJournal of Consciousness Studies 22 (11-12): 246-269. 2015.'Thought insertion' in schizophrenia involves somehow experiencing one's own thoughts as someone else's. Some philosophers try to make sense of this by distinguishing between ownership and agency: one still experiences oneself as the owner of an inserted thought but attributes it to another agency. In this paper, we propose that thought insertion involves experiencing thought contents as alien, rather than episodes of thinking. To make our case, we compare thought insertion to certain experience…Read more
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405The World of Chronic PainIn Kevin Aho (ed.), Existential Medicine: Essays on Health and Illness, Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 61-80. 2018.
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39In Real Hallucinations, Matthew Ratcliffe offers a philosophical examination of the structure of human experience, its vulnerability to disruption, and how it is shaped by relations with other people. He focuses on the seemingly simple question of how we manage to distinguish among our experiences of perceiving, remembering, imagining, and thinking. To answer this question, he first develops a detailed analysis of auditory verbal hallucinations (usually defined as hearing a voice in the absence …Read more
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226What is Touch?Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (3). 2012.This paper addresses the nature of touch or ?tactual perception?. I argue that touch encompasses a wide range of perceptual achievements, that treating it as a number of separate senses will not work, and that the permissive conception we are left with is so permissive that it is unclear how touch might be distinguished from the other senses. I conclude that no criteria will succeed in individuating touch. Although I do not rule out the possibility that this also applies to other senses, I sugge…Read more
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267William James on emotion and intentionalityInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 13 (2): 179-202. 2005.William James's theory of emotion is often criticized for placing too much emphasis on bodily feelings and neglecting the cognitive aspects of emotion. This paper suggests that such criticisms are misplaced. Interpreting James's account of emotion in the light of his later philosophical writings, I argue that James does not emphasize bodily feelings at the expense of cognition. Rather, his view is that bodily feelings are part of the structure of intentionality. In reconceptualizing the relation…Read more
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142Varieties of Temporal Experience in DepressionJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 37 (2): 114-138. 2012.People with depression often report alterations in their experience of time, a common complaint being that time has slowed down or stopped. In this paper, I argue that depression can involve a range of qualitatively different changes in the structure of temporal experience, some of which I proceed to describe. In addition, I suggest that current diagnostic categories such as "major depression" are insensitive to the differences between these changes. I conclude by briefly considering whether the…Read more
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233The phenomenology of depression and the nature of empathyMedicine, Health Care and Philosophy 17 (2): 269-280. 2014.This paper seeks to illuminate the nature of empathy by reflecting upon the phenomenology of depression. I propose that depression involves alteration of an aspect of experience that is seldom reflected upon or discussed, thus making it hard to understand. This alteration involves impairment or loss of a capacity for interpersonal relatedness that mutual empathy depends upon. The sufferer thus feels cut off from other people, and may remark on their indifference, hostility or inability to unders…Read more
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383What is it to lose hope?Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 12 (4): 597-614. 2013.This paper addresses the phenomenology of hopelessness. I distinguish two broad kinds of predicament that are easily confused: ‘loss of hopes’ and ‘loss of hope’. I argue that not all hope can be characterised as an intentional state of the form ‘I hope that p’. It is possible to lose all hopes of that kind and yet retain another kind of hope. The hope that remains is not an intentional state or a non-intentional bodily feeling. Rather, it is a ‘pre-intentional’ orientation or ‘existential feeli…Read more
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66The Problem with the Problem of ConsciousnessSynthesis Philosophica 22 (2): 483-494. 2007.This paper proposes that the ‘problem of consciousness’, in its most popular formulation, is based upon a misinterpretation of the structure of experience. A contrast between my subjective perspective and the shared world in which I take up that perspective is part of my experience. However, descriptions of experience upon which the problem of consciousness is founded tend to emphasise only the former, remaining strangely oblivious to the fact that experience involves a sense of belonging to a w…Read more
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4Understanding existential changes in psychiatric illness: the indispensability of phenomenologyIn Matthew Broome & Lisa Bortolotti (eds.), Psychiatry as Cognitive Neuroscience: Philosophical Perspectives, Oxford University Press. 2009.
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111The phenomenological role of affect in the capgras delusionContinental Philosophy Review 41 (2): 195-216. 2008.This paper draws on studies of the Capgras delusion in order to illuminate the phenomenological role of affect in interpersonal recognition. People with this delusion maintain that familiars, such as spouses, have been replaced by impostors. It is generally agreed that the delusion involves an anomalous experience, arising due to loss of affect. However, quite what this experience consists of remains unclear. I argue that recent accounts of the Capgras delusion incorporate an impoverished concep…Read more
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100The function of functionStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 31 (1): 113-133. 2000.Contemporary analyses of biological function almost invariably advocate a naturalistic analysis, grounding biological functions in some feature of the mind-independent world. Many recent accounts suggest that no single analysis will be appropriate for all cases of use and that biological teleology should be split into several distinct categories. This paper argues that such accounts have paid too little attention to the way in which functional language is used, concentrating instead on the types…Read more
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39There are no folk psychological narrativesJournal of Consciousness Studies 16 (6-8): 6-8. 2009.I argue that the task of describing our so-called 'folk psychology' requires difficult philosophical work. Consequently, any statement of the folk view is actually a debatable philosophical posi-tion, rather than an uncontroversial description of pre-philosophical commonsense. The problem with the current folk psychology debate, I suggest, is that the relevant philosophical work has not been done. Consequently, the orthodox account of folk psychology is an uninfor-mative caricature of an underst…Read more
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302The feeling of beingJournal of Consciousness Studies 12 (8-10): 43-60. 2005.There has been much recent philosophical discussion concerning the relationship between emotion and feeling. However, everyday talk of 'feeling' is not restricted to emotional feeling and the current emphasis on emotions has led to a neglect of other kinds of feeling. These include feelings of homeliness, belonging, separation, unfamiliarity, power, control, being part of something, being at one with nature and 'being there'. Such feelings are perhaps not 'emotional'. However, I suggest here tha…Read more
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136Touch and situatednessInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 16 (3). 2008.This paper explores the phenomenology of touch and proposes that the structure of touch serves to cast light on the more general way in which we 'find ourselves in a world'. Recent philosophical work on perception tends to emphasize vision. This, I suggest, motivates the imposition of a distinction between externally directed perception of objects and internally directed perception of one's own body. In contrast, the phenomenology of touch involves neither firm boundaries between body and world …Read more
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90Scientific naturalism and the neurology of religious experienceReligious Studies 39 (3): 323-345. 2003.In this paper, I consider V. S. Ramachandran's in-principle agnosticism concerning whether neurological studies of religious experience can be taken as support for the claim that God really does communicate with people during religious experiences. Contra Ramachandran, I argue that it is by no means obvious that agnosticism is the proper scientific attitude to adopt in relation to this claim. I go on to show how the questions of whether it is (1) a scientifically testable claim and (2) a plausib…Read more
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33Review of Robert Solomon, Not Passion's Slave: Emotions and Choice (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2003 (7). 2003.
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8Reconstructing the Cognitive World by Michael Wheeler Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2005. pp. xi + 340. £22.95 (review)Philosophy 82 (1): 190-195. 2007.
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59Phenomenology Is Not a Servant of SciencePhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 18 (1): 33-36. 2011.According to Louis Sass, Josef Parnas, and Dan Zahavi (2011), the account of current developments in "phenomenological clinical neuroscience" offered by Aaron Mishara (2007) is "not only confusing but highly inaccurate." Their critique is harsh, but I can find nothing to disagree with. Mishara's distinction between "neo-phenomenology" and "existential phenomenology" does not apply to current work in the field; I do not recognize the two camps he describes. Neither do I find it helpful to disting…Read more
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18Rethinking commonsense psychology: a critique of folk psychology, theory of mind and simulationPalgrave-Macmillan. 2007.This book proposes a series of interconnected arguments against the view that interpersonal understanding involves the use of a 'folk' or 'commonsense' psychology. Ratcliffe suggests that folk psychology, construed as the attribution of internal mental states in order to predict and explain behaviour, is a theoretically motivated and misleading abstraction from social life. He draws on phenomenology, neuroscience and developmental psychology to offer an alternative account that emphasizes patter…Read more
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196Phenomenology, Naturalism and the Sense of RealityRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 72 67-88. 2013.Phenomenologists such as Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty reject the kind of scientific naturalism or that takes empirical science to be epistemologically and metaphysically privileged over all other forms of enquiry. In this paper, I will consider one of their principal complaints against naturalism, that scientific accounts of things are oblivious to a that is presupposed by the intelligibility of science. Focusing mostly upon Husserl's work, I attempt to clarify the nature of this complai…Read more
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43Review of mark Okrent, Rational Animals: The Teleological Roots of Intentionality (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (7). 2008.
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28La Question du Problème du Problème de la ConscienceSynthesis Philosophica 22 (2): 483-494. 2007.L’article affirme que le « problème de la conscience », dans sa formulation la plus répandue, est fondé sur une interprétation erronée de la structure de l’expérience. Le contraste entre « ma perspective subjective » et « le monde partagé dans lequel j’adopte cette perspective » fait partie de mon expérience. Néanmoins, les descriptions de l’expérience sur lesquelles est fondé le problème de la conscience n’ont tendance qu’à l’accentuer, négligeant étrangement le fait que l’expérience implique l…Read more
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55Realism, biologism and 'the background'Philosophical Explorations 7 (2). 2004.John Searle claims that intentional states require a set of non-intentional background capacities in order to function. He insists that this 'Background' should be construed naturalistically, in terms of the causal properties of biological brains. This paper examines the relationship between Searle's conception of the Background and his commitment to biological naturalism. It is first observed that the arguments Searle ventures in support of the Background's existence do not entail a naturalisti…Read more
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191Phenomenology as a Form of EmpathyInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 55 (5): 473-495. 2012.Abstract This paper proposes that adopting a ?phenomenological stance? enables a distinctive kind of empathy, which is required in order to understand forms of experience that occur in psychiatric illness and elsewhere. For the most part, we interpret other people's experiences against the backdrop of a shared world. Hence our attempts to appreciate interpersonal differences do not call into question a deeper level of commonality. A phenomenological stance involves suspending our habitual accept…Read more
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101Heidegger, analytic metaphysics, and the being of beingsInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 45 (1). 2002.This essay begins with an outline of the early Heidegger's distinction between beings and the Being1 of those beings, followed by a discussion of Heideggerian teleology. It then turns to contemporary analytic metaphysics to suggest that analytic metaphysics concerns itself wholly with beings and does not recognize distinct forms of questioning concerning what Heidegger calls Being . This difference having been clarified, studies of identity and individuation in the analytic tradition are examine…Read more
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Areas of Interest
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