Shaun Gallagher

The authors examine several issues in teaching phenomenology (1) to advanced researchers who are doing qualitative research using phenomenological interview methods in disciplines such as psychology, nursing, or education, and (2) to advanced researchers in the cognitive neurosciences. In these contexts, the term “teaching” needs to be taken in a general and nondidactic way. In the case of the first group, it involves guiding doctoral students in their conception and design of a qualitative methodology that is properly phenomenological. In the case of the second, it is more concerned with explaining the relevance of phenomenology to an audience of experimental scientists via conference presentations or published papers. In both cases, however, the challenge is to make clear to the relevant audience what phenomenology is and how it can relate to what they are doing.

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 motor control processes.

Play is a frequent and relevant activity during childhood, and developmental psychologists agree that it offers a unique window on development. Play, however, remains a fuzzy concept, and difficulties persist in its definition, often leading to obstacles in building and comparing experimental studies. This may be due to widespread tendencies to define play by referring to non-observable inner states, to consider playing something that occurs in the head rather than in-the-world and to overreliance on developmental stages. Enactive approaches to child play have instead recently stressed the importance of play contexts, considering child play an activity in-the-world rather than a mental state, thereby de-intellectualizing play and pretense. Along these lines, in this paper the authors propose a novel approach to the definition of play types by considering the roles of organism, environment, and task constraints, within the framework of Material Engagement Theory. Focusing on the material world surrounding the child and the interactions which characterize play, we critically review the strategy of resorting to non-observable categories in the study of play, and we propose a new model (the Kaleidoscope Model) for play analysis.

'It nails the old lie that rigorous science and a humane attitude to illness do not go together.' From review of Pride and a Daily Marathon in the TLS Jonathan Cole is, amongst other things, a clinical neurophysiologist practising at Poole Hospital in Bournemouth, England, an author of extraordinarily interesting books, and an experimental neuroscientist who conducts his experiments in some of the major laboratories in Europe and North America, and at least once while floating weightless in mid-air some 30,000 feet above earth. In all of these endeavours, Cole is an explorer of human experience in its many variations, and most often at the frontiers or extremes of such experiences

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 University of Southern California. The title of his first book, Brains, Machines and Mathematics , gives a good indication of his scientific interests. For all his extensive research in these areas, however, Arbib has not ignored philosophical, social, and even theological topics . Central to his work in all of these areas is the concept of schema, and this is one of the topics that we discuss here

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 psychologues et de neuroscientifiques contemporains. Dan cet article, je décrit ce genre d’intentionnalité qui va avec l’exercice du libre arbitre

I review a variety of theories that attempt to explain how young infants are able to pass spontaneous false belief tests, and then ask whether any of these approaches can explain the 3-year-olds' failure on standard, elicited FB tests. I argue that some of these approaches fail to provide adequate explanations, and I defend an embodied enactive approach that I think does a better job. The primary reason 3-year-olds fail at the elicited FB tests is not due to language problems, the complexity of the situation, or the number of perspectives involved, but because the saliency of the second-person interaction with the experimenter takes precedence over the third-person task.

Oni koji tvrde da je slobodna volja iluzija, u krivu su. Oni temelje svoju tvrdnju na znanstvenom dokazu koji testira pogrešnu razinu deskripcije intencionalnog djelovanja. Kod slobodne volje ne radi se o podosobnim neuronskim procesima, mišićnoj aktivaciji, ili temeljnim tjelesnim pokretima, već o kontekstualiziranim djelovanjima u sistemu koji je veći negoli što to mnogi suvremeni filozofi uma, psiholozi i neuroznanstvenici smatraju. U ovome članku opisujem vrstu intencionalnosti koja ide s vježbom slobodne volje.Those who argue that free will is an illusion – are wrong. They base their argument on scientific evidencethat tests the wrong level of description for intentional action. Free will is not about subpersonalneuronal processes, muscular activation, or basic bodily movements, but about contextualizedactions 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 theexercise of free will

I argue that Axel Honneth, reappropriated Colwyn Trevarthen's distinction between primary and secondary intersubjectivity,into his critical social theory. How the concept of primary intersubjectivity gets re-incorporated, or indeed, re-cognized in Honneth’s conception of recognition, however, is a complex issue that Iexplore in this essay. It is linked to questions not only about child development, but also about whether one should understand recognition in terms of a summons, following Fichte, or in terms of a struggle, as Honneth, following Hegel, suggests, or in terms of a gift, as Ricoeur, following Hénaff suggests.

This chapter summarizes Husserl's phenomenology of time consciousness and situates it in the larger context of late nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century considerations about the psychology of temporal experience. Then, in an attempt to place it in a more contemporary context, it suggests an enactive interpretation of this phenomenology, first by extending Husserl's analysis of consciousness to bodily action, and, second, by considering the rethinking of the notion of primal impression suggested by Husserl himself. The intrinsic temporality, found in bodily movement and action, manifests itself at both the sub‐personal and the personal levels of analysis. For Husserl, only because there is a Präsenzzeit, a temporally extended conscious act, can there be something like a specious present, a temporally extended sensed content.

Categorization-based diagnosis, which endeavors to be consistent with the third-person, objective measures of science, is not always adequate with respect to problems concerning diagnostic accuracy, demarcation problems when there are comorbidities, well-documented problems of symptom amplification, and complications of stigmatization and looping effects. While psychiatric categories have proved useful and convenient for clinicians in identifying a recognizable constellation of symptoms typical for a particular disorder for the purposes of communication and eligibility for treatment regimes, the reification of these categories has without doubt had negative consequences for the patient and also for the general understanding of psychiatric disorders. We argue that a complementary, integrated framework that focuses on descriptive symptom-based classifications (drawing on phenomenological interview methods and narrative) combined with a more comprehensive conception of the human subject (found in the pattern theory of self), can not only offer a solution to some of the vexed issues of psychiatric diagnosis but also support more efficacious therapeutic interventions.

We argue that phenomenology can be of central and positive importance to the cognitive sciences, and that it can also learn from the empirical research conducted in those sciences. We discuss the project of naturalizing phenomenology and how this can be best accomplished. We provide several examples of how phenomenology and the cognitive sciences can integrate their research. Specifically, we consider issues related to embodied cognition and intersubjectivity. We provide a detailed analysis of issues related to time-consciousness, with reference to understanding schizophrenia and the loss of the sense of agency. We offer a positive proposal to address these issues based on a neurobiological dynamic-systems model.

Phenomenology involves a first‐person approach to consciousness. Husserl initiated phenomenology as a transcendental investigation in opposition to naturalism. It includes a methodologically guided analysis of intentionality as the primary characteristic of consciousness. Phenomenology also addresses the issue of the phenomenal character of consciousness tied to the notion of pre‐reflective self‐awareness, to embodiment, and to variations in intentional structures. It also offers a detailed analysis of the temporal nature of consciousness which helps to explain not only how one can have a coherent experience of an object, but also how the subject of experience – a pre‐reflective self – can maintain identity over time. Husserl and later phenomenologists, like Merleau‐Ponty, emphasized the embodied nature of consciousness in a way that foreshadowed recent enactivist accounts.