-
77The Interpersonal and Emotional Beginnings of Understanding: A Review of Peter Hobson's The Cradle of Thought: Exploring the Origins of Thinking (review)Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 11 (3): 253-257. 2004.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Interpersonal and Emotional Beginnings of Understanding: A Review of Peter Hobson’sThe Cradle of Thought: Exploring the Origins of ThinkingShaun Gallagher (bio)Hobson's book (2002) is extremely accessible, interestingly interdisciplinary, and knowledgeable in all the right ways. He pulls together work in psychiatry, experimental psychology, and psychoanalysis in a framework that is relevant to issues in the philosophy of mind. We…Read more
-
38Shaun Gallagher, Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Excellence in Philosophy at the University of Memphis, discusses the results of a neurophenomenological study in which a research team used simulation to replicate experiences of astronauts during space travel. Many astronauts described deeply aesthetic, spiritual, or religious experiences of awe and wonder. Gallagher also discusses how using an approach that incorporated neuroscience, hermeneutics, phenomenology, psychology, heart rate, and …Read more
-
52The new hybrids: Continuing debates on social perceptionConsciousness and Cognition 36 452-465. 2015.
-
72What kind of movement or behavior is involved in neonate imitation? What exactly is the newborn infant doing when it responds to seeing gestures on another person's face? This question is closely related to some other questions, such as whether neonate imitation is possible, and whether it is truly imitation. Piaget, of course, thought that this sort of "invisible imitation" was not possible for infants less than 8-12 months of age.
-
305Can social interaction constitute social cognition?Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14 (10): 441-447. 2010.An important shift is taking place in social cognition research, away from a focus on the individual mind and toward embodied and participatory aspects of social understanding. Empirical results already imply that social cognition is not reducible to the workings of individual cognitive mechanisms. To galvanize this interactive turn, we provide an operational definition of social interaction and distinguish the different explanatory roles – contextual, enabling and constitutive – it can play in …Read more
-
44Representation and deliberate actionHouston Studies in Cognitive Science 1. 2000.Dreyfus enlists the aid of Merleau-Ponty in his critique of representationalist theories of cognition. Such theories posit a representational element at some level of cognitive activity. The nature of the representation and how we think of it will depend upon the level at which one claims to find it. If we consider the case of perception, at one extreme it might be claimed that the representation is a conscious one, that is, that the perceiving subject is conscious of a representation, a _Vorste…Read more
-
8The historikerstreit and the critique of nationalismHistory of European Ideas 16 (4-6): 921-926. 1993.
-
25Intentionalität und intentionales handelnSynthesis Philosophica 20 (2): 319-326. 2005.Diejenigen, die behaupten, der freie Wille sei Illusion, sind im Unrecht. Sie begründen ihre Behauptung auf einem wissenschaftlichen Beweis, der die falsche Ebene der Deskription des intentionalen Handelns testet. Der freie Wille bezieht sich nicht auf subpersonale neuronale Prozesse, Muskelaktivierung oder grundlegende Körperbewegungen, sondern auf kontextualisierte Handlungen in einem System, das größer ist als viele zeitgenössische Geistesphilosophen, Psychologen und Neurowissenschaftler anne…Read more
-
932Philosophical conceptions of the self: implications for cognitive scienceTrends in Cognitive Sciences 4 (1): 14-21. 2000.Although philosophical approaches to the self are diverse, several of them are relevant to cognitive science. First, the notion of a 'minimal self', a self devoid of temporal extension, is clarified by distinguishing between a sense of agency and a sense of ownership for action. To the extent that these senses are subject to failure in pathologies like schizophrenia, a neuropsychological model of schizophrenia may help to clarify the nature of the minimal self and its neurological underpinnings.…Read more
-
111Relations Between Agency and Ownership in the Case of Schizophrenic Thought Insertion and Delusions of ControlReview of Philosophy and Psychology 6 (4): 865-879. 2015.This article addresses questions about the sense of agency and its distinction from the sense of ownership in the context of understanding schizophrenic thought insertion. In contrast to “standard” approaches that identify problems with the sense of agency as central to thought insertion, two recent proposals argue that it is more correct to think that the problem concerns the subject’s sense of ownership. This view involves a “more demanding” concept of the sense of ownership that, I will argue…Read more
-
47Dissociation in self-narrativeConsciousness and Cognition 20 (1): 149-155. 2011.We review different analytic approaches to narratives by those with psychopathological conditions, and we suggest that the interpretation of such narratives are complicated by a variety of phenomenological and hermeneutical considerations. We summarize an empirical study of narrative distance in narratives by non-pathological subjects, and discuss how the results can be interpreted in two different ways with regard to the issue of dissociation
-
147Suggestions towards a revision of Husserl's phenomenology of time-consciousnessMan and World 12 (4): 445-464. 1979.In this paper I offer four distinct but related suggestions: (1) That Husserl's phenomenology of time-consciousness is an adequate account of the concept of the specious present; (2) That the Querschtfftt o5 momentary phase of consdousness is genuinely only a Querschnittanskht; (3) That retention, primal-impression, and protention are functions of consciousness rather than phases or types o.f coasdousness; (4) That further conceptual clarif…Read more
-
26Intersubiectivity and psychopathologyIn K. W. M. Fulford (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry, Oxford University Press. pp. 258. 2013.This chapter provides a review of theory of mind approaches to explaining certain dysfunctions of intersubjectivity in pathologies such as autism and schizophrenia. ToM approaches such as theory theory and simulation theory focus on mindreading but fail to explain important aspects of online intersubjective interaction. A phenomenological approach, focusing on embodied interaction, offers an alternative account of intersubjective processes and specific dysfunctions in pathology. Further research…Read more
-
171The neuronal platonistJournal of Consciousness Studies 5 (5-6): 706-717. 1998.Psychology is dead. The self is a fiction invented by the brain. Brain plasticity isn?t all it?s cracked up to be. Our conscious learning is an observation post factum, a recollection of something already accomplished by the brain. We don?t learn to speak; speech is generated when the brain is ready to say something. False memories are more prevalent than one might think, and they aren?t all that bad. We think we?re in charge of our lives, but actually we are not. On top of all this, the common …Read more
-
76Phenomenology and experimental design: Toward a phenomenologically enlightened experimental scienceJournal of Consciousness Studies 10 (9-10): 85-99. 2003.I review three answers to the question: How can phenomenology contribute to the experimental cognitive neurosciences? The first approach, neurophenomenology, employs phenomenological method and training, and uses first-person reports not just as more data for analysis, but to generate descriptive categories that are intersubjectively and scientifically validated, and are then used to interpret results that correlate with objective measurements of behaviour and brain activity. A second approach, …Read more
-
2Brainstorming: Views and Interviews on the MindImprint Academic. 2008.Shaun Gallagher is a philosopher of mind who has made it his business to study and meet with leading neuroscientists, including Michael Gazzaniga, Marc Jeannerod and Chris Frith. The result is this unique introduction to the study of the mind, with topics ranging over consciousness, emotion, language, movement, free will and moral responsibility. The discussion throughout is illustrated by lengthy extracts from the author’s many interviews with his scientist colleagues on the relation between th…Read more
-
116Self-reference and schizophrenia: A cognitive model of immunity to error through misidentificationIn Dan Zahavi (ed.), Exploring the Self: Philosophical and Psychopathological Perspectives on Self-experience, John Benjamins. pp. 203--239. 2000.
-
149Hyletic experience and the lived bodyHusserl Studies 3 (2): 131-166. 1986.The theory of hyletic data has been criticized and dismissed a number of times since Edmund Husserl proposed it early in this century. This rejection of Husserl's theory has been part of a larger, wholesale critique of the traditional notion of sensation in which theories of sensation have been displaced by theories of perception.
-
514Understanding Interpersonal Problems in AutismPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 11 (3): 199-217. 2004.A BSTRACT: I argue that theory theory approaches to autism offer a wholly inadequate explanation of autistic symptoms because they offer a wholly inadequate account of the non-autistic understanding of others. As an alternative I outline interaction theory, which incorporates evidence from both developmental and phenomenological studies to show that humans are endowed with important capacities for intersubjective understanding from birth or early infancy. As part of a neurophenomenological analy…Read more
-
153Experimenting with introspectionTrends in Cognitive Sciences 6 (9): 374-375. 2002.Psychologists’ relationship with introspection is much like that between men and women: it is on again, off again and psychologists often feel they can neither live with introspection nor without it. In their often compelling article, Jack and Roepstorff argue that the fertility of the field depends on psychologists reuniting with the practice of introspection [1]. They suggest that, although reluctant to admit it, psychologists have been carrying on a surreptitious relationship with introspecti…Read more
-
89Advancing the ‘We’ Through NarrativeTopoi 38 (1): 211-219. 2019.Narrative is rarely mentioned in philosophical discussions of collective intentionality and group identity despite the fact that narratives are often thought important for the formation of action intentions and self-identity in individuals. We argue that the concept of the ‘we-narrative’ can solve several problems in regard to defining the status of the we. It provides the typical format for the attribution of joint agency; it contributes to the formation of group identity; and it generates grou…Read more
-
82We-Narratives and the Stability and Depth of Shared AgencyPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 47 (2): 95-110. 2017.The basic approach to understanding shared agency has been to identify individual intentional states that are somehow “shared” by participants and that contribute to guiding and informing the actions of individual participants. But, as Michael Bratman suggests, there is a problem of stability and depth that any theory of shared agency needs to solve. Given that participants in a joint action might form shared intentions for different reasons, what binds them to one another such that they have so…Read more
-
15Fenomenologia da intersubjectividade: perspectivas transcendentais e empíricasRevista Filosófica de Coimbra 21 (42): 557-582. 2012.
-
630The practice of mind: Theory, simulation or primary interaction?Journal of Consciousness Studies 8 (5-7): 83-108. 2001.Theory of mind explanations of how we know other minds are limited in several ways. First, they construe intersubjective relations too narrowly in terms of the specialized cognitive abilities of explaining and predicting another person's mental states and behaviors. Second, they sometimes draw conclusions about secondperson interaction from experiments designed to test third-person observation of another's behavior. As a result, the larger claims that are sometimes made for theory of mind, namel…Read more
-
298Mental institutionsTopoi 28 (1): 45-51. 2009.We propose to extend Clark and Chalmer’s concept of the extended mind to consider the possibility that social institutions (e.g., legal systems, museums) may operate in ways similar to the hand-held conveniences (notebooks, calculators) that are often used as examples of extended mind. The inspiration for this suggestion can be found in the writings of Hegel on “objective spirit” which involves the mind in a constant process of externalizing and internalizing. For Hegel, social institutions are …Read more
-
105Models of the pathological mindJournal of Consciousness Studies 9 (4): 57-80. 2002.Christopher Frith is a research professor at the Functional Imaging Laboratory of the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience at University College, London. He explores, experimentally, using the techniques of functional brain imaging, the relationship between human consciousness and the brain. His research focuses on questions pertaining to perception, attention, control of action, free will, and awareness of our own mental states and those of others. As the following discussion makes clear…Read more
-
39Extension and critique: A response to Robert YoungStudies in Philosophy and Education 15 (4): 323-328. 1996.In response to Robert Young's critical comments concerning Hermeneutics and Education I clarify two issues. First, I suggest that a more detailed account of interpretation and learning could be developed in a hermeneutically informed cognitive psychology. This would be an account that escapes the textual model of silent reading construed as private mental experience, and that acknowledges the social and communicative dimensions of understanding. Second, in contrast to Young's view, I contend tha…Read more
-
17The Minds, Machines, and Brains of a Passionate Scientist: An interview with Michael ArbibJournal of Consciousness Studies 11 (12): 50-67. 2004.Michael Arbib was born in England, grew up in Australia, and studied at MIT where he received his PhD in Mathematics in 1963. He helped to found the Department of Computer and Information Science and the Center for Systems Neuroscience, the Cognitive Science Program, and the Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Today he is Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science, a Professor of Neuroscience and the Director of the USC Brain Project at the Univers…Read more
-
284Lived body and environmentResearch in Phenomenology 16 (1): 139-170. 1986.Merleau-Ponty developed a phenomenology of the body that promoted a non-dualistic account of human existence. In this paper I intend to develop Merleau-Ponty's analysis further by questioning his account of the body on the issues of body perception, and the body's relation to its environment. To clarify these issues I draw from both the phenomenological tradition and recent psychological investigations.
Memphis, Tennessee, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
1 more
Phenomenology |
Maurice Merleau-Ponty |
Hermeneutics |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Psychiatry |