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72Two problems of intersubjectivityJournal of Consciousness Studies 16 (6-8): 6-8. 2009.I propose a distinction between two closely related problems: the problem of social cognition and the problem of participatory sense-making. One problem focuses on how we understand others; the other problem focuses on how, with others, we make sense out of the world. Both understanding others and making sense out of the world involve social interaction. The importance of participatory sense-making is highlighted by reviewing some recent accounts of perception that are philosophically autistic -…Read more
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15L'intentionnalité et l'activité intentionnelleSynthesis Philosophica 20 (2): 319-326. 2005.Ceux qui affirment que le libre arbitre est une illusion n’ont pas raison. Ils fondent leur affirmation sur une preuve scientifique établie à un niveau impropre de description de l’activité intentionnelle. Le libre arbitre ne s’exerce pas sur les processus neuronaux sub-personnels, l’activation musculaire ou les mouvements élémentaires du corps, mais sur des activités contextualisées au sein d’un système qui est nettement plus grand que ne le pensent bon nombre de philosophes de l’esprit, de psy…Read more
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42Deep and dynamic interaction: Response to Hanne De Jaegher☆Consciousness and Cognition 18 (2): 547-548. 2009.
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43Embodied simulation, an unproductive explanation: comment on Gallese and SinigagliaTrends in Cognitive Sciences 16 (2): 98-99. 2012.
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32Is it possible to develop a discourse that describes human experience but avoids theoretical concepts such as consciousness and qualia, and do so in such a way that the difficult problems are resolved? It strikes me that Gordon Globus is attempting to do something like this. It seems an honorable project from the perspectives of both the analytic philosophy of mind and the postmodern celebration of multiple discourses. I want to suggest, however, that in his account the problems of qualia and co…Read more
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22A cognitive way to the transcendental reductionJournal of Consciousness Studies 6 (2-3): 230-232. 1999.[opening paragraph]: Natalie Depraz builds on Iso Kern's distinctions to outline three different motivational pathways to the phenomenological reduction -- the Cartesian way, the psychological way, and the way of the life-world. I would like to suggest a fourth one that may appeal to cognitive neuroscientists and neuropsychologists, theorists who, for the most part, are not ordinarily motivated to pursue phenomenological methodologies
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18Defining consciousnessPragmatics and Cognition 18 (3): 561-569. 2010.I review the problem of how to define consciousness. I suggest that rather than continuing that debate, we should turn to phenomenological description of experience to discover the common aspects of consciousness. In this way we can say that consciousness is characterized by intentionality, phenomenality, and non-reflective self-awareness. I explore this last characteristic in detail and I argue against higher-order representational theories of consciousness, with reference to blindsight and mot…Read more
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227The earliest sense of self and others: Merleau‐Ponty and recent developmental studiesPhilosophical Psychology 9 (2): 211-33. 1996.Recent studies in developmental psychology have found evidence to suggest that there exists an innate system that accounts for the possibilities of early infant imitation and the existence of phantom limbs in cases of congenital absence of limbs. These results challenge traditional assumptions about the status and development of the body schema and body image, and about the nature of the translation process between perceptual experience and motor ability.
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40Introduction: The Arts and Sciences of the Situated BodyJanus Head 9 (2): 1-. 2006.This special issue of Janus Head explores a number of disciplinary and interdisciplinary dimensions of the theme, the situated body. The body, of course, is always situated in so far as it is a living and experiencing body. Being situated in this sense is different from simply being located someplace in the way a non-living, non-experiencing object is located. That the body is always situated involves certain kinds of physical and social interactions, and it means that experience is always both …Read more
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72Growth points from the very beginningIn M. Arbib D. Bickerton (ed.), The Emergence of Protolanguage: Holophrasis Vs Compositionality, John Benjamins. pp. 117-132. 2010.Did protolanguage users use discrete words that referred to objects, actions, locations, etc., and then, at some point, combine them; or on the contrary did they have words that globally indexed whole semantic complexes, and then come to divide them? Our answer is: early humans were forming language units consisting of global and discrete dimensions of semiosis in dynamic opposition. These units of thinking-for-speaking, or ‘growth points’ (GPs) were, jointly, analog imagery (visuo-spatio-motori…Read more
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96You and I, robotAI and Society 28 (4): 455-460. 2013.I address a number of issues related to building an autonomous social robot. I review different approaches to social cognition and ask how these different approaches may inform the design of social robots. I argue that regardless of which theoretical approach to social cognition one favors, instantiating that approach in a workable robot will involve designing that robot on enactive principles
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32PhenomenologyPalgrave-Macmillan. 2012.This new introduction by Shaun Gallagher gives students and philosophers not only an excellent concise overview of the state of the field and contemporary debates, but a novel way of addressing the subject by looking at the ways in which phenomenology is useful to the disciplines it applies to. Gallagher retrieves the central insights made by the classic phenomenological philosophers (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and others), updates some of these insights in innovative ways, and s…Read more
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140Body schema and intentionalityIn Jose Luis Bermudez, Anthony J. Marcel & Naomi M. Eilan (eds.), The Body and the Self, Mit Press. pp. 225--244. 1995.
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130Simulation troubleSocial Neuroscience 2 (3-4). 2007.I present arguments against both explicit and implicit versions of the simulation theory for intersubjective understanding. Logical, developmental, and phenomenological evidence counts against the concept of explicit simulation if this is to be understood as the pervasive or default way that we understand others. The concept of implicit (subpersonal) simulation, identified with neural resonance systems (mirror systems or shared representations), fails to be the kind of simulation required by sim…Read more
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249Intentionality and Intentional ActionSynthesis Philosophica 20 (2): 319-326. 2005.Those who argue that free will is an illusion are wrong. They base their argument on scientific evidence that tests the wrong level of description for intentional action. Free will is not about subpersonal neuronal processes, muscular activation, or basic bodily movements, but about contextualized actions in a system that is larger than many contemporary philosophers of mind, psychologists, and neuroscientists consider. In this paper, I describe the kind of intentionality that goes with the exer…Read more
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647Neurophilosophy and neurophenomenologyPhenomenology 2005. 2007.I consider two specific issues to show the difference between a neurophilosophical approach and a neurophenomenlogical approach, namely, the issues of self and intersubjectivity. Neurophilosophy (which starts with theory that is continuous with common sense) and neurophenomenology (which generates theory in methodically controlled practices) lead to very different philosophical views on these issues.
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2Agency, ownership, and alien control in schizophreniaIn Dan Zahavi, T. Grunbaum & Josef Parnas (eds.), The Structure and Development of Self-Consciousness: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, John Benjamins. 2004.
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95Self-agency and mental causalityIn Kenneth S. Kendler & Josef Parnas (eds.), Philosophical Issues in Psychiatry: Explanation, Phenomenology, and Nosology, Johns Hopkins University Press. 2008.I want to explore one small corner of the concept of mental causality. It’s the corner where discussions about mind-body interactions and epiphenomenalism take place. My basic contention is that these discussions are framed in the wrong terms because they are infected by a mind-body dualism which defines the question of mental causality in a classic or standard way: How does a mental event cause my body to do what it does? Setting the question in this way has consequences for ongoing interdiscip…Read more
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860Hermeneutics and the cognitive sciencesJournal of Consciousness Studies 11 (10-11): 162-174. 2004.Hermeneutics is usually defined as the theory and practice of interpretation. As a discipline it involves a long and complex history, starting with concerns about the proper interpretation of literary, sacred, and legal texts. In the twentieth century, hermeneutics broadens to include the idea that humans are, in Charles Taylor’s phrase, ‘self-interpreting animals’ (Taylor, 1985). In contrast to the narrowly prescriptive questions of textual interpretation, philosophical hermeneutics, as develop…Read more
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92Taking stock of phenomenology futuresSouthern Journal of Philosophy 50 (2): 304-318. 2012.In this paper, I review recent contributions of phenomenology to a variety of disciplines, including the cognitive sciences and psychiatry, and explore (1) controversies about phenomenological methods and naturalization; (2) relations between phenomenology and the enactive and extended mind approaches; and (3) the promise of phenomenology for addressing a number of controversial philosophical issues
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208Mutual enlightenment: Recent phenomenology in cognitive scienceJournal of Consciousness Studies 4 (3): 195-214. 1997.The term phenomenology can be used in a generic sense to cover a variety of areas related to the problem of consciousness. In this sense it is a title that ranges over issues pertaining to first-person or subjective experience, qualia, and what has become known as "the hard problem" (Chalmers 1995). The term is sometimes used even more generally to signify a variety of approaches to studying such issues, including contemplative, meditative, and mystical studies, and transpersonal psychology.(1) …Read more
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51Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism (edited book)State University of New York Press. 1992.Opens up new dimensions in the philosophical thought of Merleau-Ponty and addresses contemporary issues concerning interpretation theory and postmodernity.
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1811Joint attention in joint actionPhilosophical Psychology 26 (4): 571-87. 2013.In this paper, we investigate the role of intention and joint attention in joint actions. Depending on the shared intentions the agents have, we distinguish between joint path-goal actions and joint final-goal actions. We propose an instrumental account of basic joint action analogous to a concept of basic action and argue that intentional joint attention is a basic joint action. Furthermore, we discuss the functional role of intentional joint attention for successful cooperation in complex join…Read more
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23Review of mark Rowlands, Body Language: Representation in Action (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2007 (9). 2007.
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50From action to interactionJournal of Consciousness Studies 9 (1): 3-26. 2002.Marc Jeannerod is director of the Institut des Sciences Cognitives in Lyon. His work in neuropsychology focuses on motor action. The idea that there is an essential relationship between bodily movement, consciousness, and cognition is not a new one, but recent advances in the technologies of brain imaging have provided new and detailed support for understanding this relationship. Experimental studies conducted by Jeannerod and his colleagues at Lyon have explored the details of brain activity, n…Read more
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644The overextended mindVersus 113 57-68. 2012.Clark and Chalmers [1998] introduced the concept of the extended mind, in part to move beyond the standard Cartesian idea that cognition is something that happens in a private mental space, "in the head." In this paper I want to pursue a liberal interpretation of this idea, extending the mind to include processes that occur within social and cultural institutions. At the same time I want to address some concerns that have been raised about whether such..
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50Q. Smith, "The felt meanings of the world: A metaphysics of feeling" (review)Husserl Studies 9 (2): 134. 1992.
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25Pragmatic Interventions into Enactive and Extended Conceptions of CognitionIn Matthias Jung & Roman Madzia (eds.), Pragmatism and Embodied Cognitive Science: From Bodily Intersubjectivity to Symbolic Articulation, De Gruyter. pp. 17-34. 2016.
Memphis, Tennessee, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
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Phenomenology |
Maurice Merleau-Ponty |
Hermeneutics |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Psychiatry |