Shaun Gallagher

'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

Muselmannwas a term used in German concentration camps to describe prisoners near death due to exhaustion, starvation, and helplessness. This paper suggests that the inhuman conditions in the concentration camps resulted in the development of a defensive sense of disownership toward the entire body. The body, in such cases, is reduced to a pure object. However, in the case of theMuselmannthis body-as-object is felt to belong to the captors, and as such is therefore identified as a tool to inflict suffering and pain on theMuselmannhimself. In this situation, lacking cognitive resources, theMuselmannmay have no other alternative than to treat his body as an enemy, and then to retreat or disinvest from the body. This response is a form of somatic apathy, an indifference that is tied to a loss of the self/non-self distinction. This may, in turn, lead to suicidal inclinations, even after liberation from the camp.

An action-oriented perspective changes the role of an individual from a passive observer to an actively engaged agent interacting in a closed loop with the world as well as with others. Cognition exists to serve action within a landscape that contains both. This chapter surveys this landscape and addresses the status of the pragmatic turn. Its potential influence on science and the study of cognition are considered (including perception, social cognition, social interaction, sensorimotor entrainment, and language acquisition) and its impact on how neuroscience is studied is also investigated (with the notion that brains do not passively build models, but instead support the guidance of action). A review of its implications in robotics and engineering includes a discussion of the application of enactive control principles to couple action and perception in robotics as well as the conceptualization of system design in a more holistic, less modular manner. Practical applications that can impact the human condition are reviewed (e.g., educational applications, treatment possibilities for developmental and psychopathological disorders, the development of neural prostheses). All of this foreshadows the potential societal implications of the pragmatic turn. The chapter concludes that an action-oriented approach emphasizes a continuum of interaction between technical aspects of cognitive systems and robotics, biology, psychology, the social sciences, and the humanities, where the individual is part of a grounded cultural system.

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 that phronesis is not reducible to a set of inner thought processes and that it has a role to play even in a critical social theory of education.

Que signifie le fait d’avoir le statut de personne morale, c’est-à-dire d’avoir la capacité de responsabilité morale? Dans un important essai sur la question, Dennett a proposé six conditions qui définissent ce concept. Premièrement, l’entité à laquelle nous attribuerions le statut de personne morale doit être douée de rationalité. Deuxièmement, elle doit être capable d’adopter la position intentionnelle — c’est-à-dire qu’elle doit être capable d’attribuer des intentions aux autres. Troisièmement, elle doit pouvoir être l’objet d’une certaine attitude. Quatrièmement, elle doit être capable de réciprocité de manière à pouvoir répondre à cette attitude. Cinquièmement, elle doit être capable de communiquer avec les autres. Les troisième, quatrième et cinquième conditions, de façon explicite et significative, impliquent des dimensions sociales, bien que, pour Dennett, la nature précise de ces dimensions sociales demeure une question encore ouverte. Enfin, ces cinq premières conditions sont nécessaires pour la sixième : l’entité doit être capable de conscience de soi. La conscience de soi est comprise ici comme étant un processus mental d’un ordre supérieur, dont, ainsi que le suggèrent Dennett et d’autres, les jeunes enfants sont incapables. Bien plus, dans une variété d’autres contextes, Dennett.

Neurophenomenological (NP) methods integrate objective and subjective data in ways that retain the statistical power of established disciplines (like cognitive science) while embracing the value of first-person reports of experience. The present paper positions neurophenomenology as an approach that pulls from traditions of cognitive science but includes techniques that are challenging for cognitive science in some ways. A baseline study is reviewed for “lessons learned,” that is, the potential methodological improvements that will support advancements in understanding consciousness and cognition using neurophenomenology. These improvements, we suggest, include (1) addressing issues of interdisciplinarity by purposefully and systematically creating and maintaining shared mental models among research team members; (2) making sure that NP experiments include high standards of experimental design and execution to achieve variable control, reliability, generalizability, and replication of results; and (3) conceiving of phenomenological interview techniques as placing the impetus on the interviewer in interaction with the experimental subject.

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 _Vorstellung_ in the Kantian sense. In this case, it would clearly come between the perceiving subject and the world and in that sense interfere with a direct perception of the world. This sort of representational theory would be equivalent to idealism, and for good phenomenological reasons it is rejected by Merleau-Ponty and Dreyfus. At the other extreme, it is possible to find cognitive scientists talking about representations at the level of brain activity. Neural representations, either firing patterns or the actual "hard wiring" of neuronal connections (as, for example, neural maps in the somatosensory and motor areas responsible for the experience of the subject's own body), in some way enable perception. At this level of description there are various debates about how these mechanisms can be called representational. If the concept of representation involves reference to the perceptual field, in what sense does a neuronal pattern refer? There are also the familiar debates about how such mechanisms actually function, as well as the difficult problem of how such functions actually translate into personal level experience. Before these debates get off the ground, however, Dreyfus wants to steal the ammunition. He denies that there are representations at the level of brain processes.