Dan Zahavi

On the phenomenological view, a minimal form of self-consciousness is a constant structural feature of conscious experience. Experience happens for the experiencing subject in an immediate way and as part of this immediacy, it is implicitly marked as my experience. For the phenomenologists, this immediate and first-personal givenness of experiential phenomena must be accounted for in terms of a pre-reflective self-consciousness. In the most basic sense of the term, selfconsciousness is not something that comes about the moment one attentively inspects or reflectively introspects one's experiences, or in the instant of self-recognition of one's image in the mirror, or in the proper use of the first-person pronoun, or in the construction of a self-narrative. Rather, these different kinds of self-consciousness are to be distinguished from the pre-reflective self-consciousness which is present whenever I am living through or undergoing an experience, i.e., whenever I am consciously perceiving the world, whenever I am thinking an occurrent thought, whenever I am feeling sad or happy, thirsty or in pain, and so forth

This was originally written and presented at the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College Teachers on Folk Psychology vs. Mental Simulation: How Minds Understand Minds, run by Robert Gordon at the University of Missouri - St. Louis, June-July 1999. It has been only lightly revised since, and should be considered a rough draft. Needless to say, the ideas herein owe a lot to what I learned at the seminar from Robert Gordon and the other participants, particularly Jim Garson. However, any errors are my responsibility alone

In recent publications, Jay Garfield and Anil Seth have both written about the you. Whereas Garfield is a Buddhist scholar who advocates a no-self view, Seth is a neuroscientist who defends a radical form of representationalism. But is it really possible to speak meaningfully of a you (and of a we) if one denies the existence of the self, and if one declares the world of experience a neuronal fantasy? In the following, I will criticize both accounts. I will argue that they both, in different ways, are unable to deal with a real other, and, drawing on the work of Husserl, I will argue that a proper understanding of the you doesn't merely require accepting the reality of the self, but also the existence of a shared lifeworld.

Whereas 20 or 30 years ago one might have been inclined to characterize the development of 20th century philosophy in terms of a linguistic turn, a turn from a philosophy of subjectivity to a philosophy of language, it might today be more apt to describe the development in terms of a turn from anti-naturalism to naturalism. But insofar as naturalists consider the scientific account of reality authoritative, a commitment to naturalism is bound to put pressure on the idea that philosophy can make a distinct and autonomous contribution to the study of reality. In the following, I will discuss the question of how phenomenology ought to respond to this challenge. What sense can we make of recent proposals to naturalize phenomenology?

The contemporary debate on collective intentionality in analytic philosophy has lasted several decades, but questions concerning the nature of ‘we’ and the relation between the individual and the community are obviously far older. We can find a particularly rich discussion in early phenomenology. Indeed, while starting out with an interest in the individual mind, phenomenologists began their exploration of dyadic forms of interpersonal relations shortly before the start of World War I and were already deeply engaged in extensive analyses of collective forms of intentionality a few years later. A distinctive feature of the phenomenological contribution was its exploration of the relation between the first- and second-person singular and the first-person plural perspectives. How are I, you, and we intertwined? The aim of this paper is to present some core insights from this early debate.

Many accounts of collective intentionality target rather sophisticated types of cooperative activities, i.e., activities with complex goals that require prior planning and various coordinating and organizing roles. But although joint action is of obvious importance, an investigation of collective intentionality should not merely focus on the question of how we can share agentive intentions. We can act and do things together, but it is not obvious that the awe felt and shared by a group of Egyptologists when they gain entry to a newly discovered pharaonic tomb can or should be analyzed in the same way as, say, a heist that a group of criminals carefully plan and execute together. The aim of the article is to better understand the kind of emotional sharing that can occur between two individuals who are perceptually co-present. Does the sharing involve a kind of phenomenal fusion? Is it a matter of sharing one and the same token experience? It will be argued that both of these recent suggestions must be rejected as misleading in favor of an account that sees emotional sharing as a form of emotional integration that involves constitutively interdependent processes of empathy, second-personal address, and identification.

One of the aims of the 40th Annual Spindel Conference was to discuss whether the ongoing, but relatively distinct, investigations of relational autonomy and collective intentionality could crossfertilize. Whereas the concept of relational autonomy was developed to do justice to the relational character of selfhood, and as an alternative to traditional conceptions of autonomy, which were accused of exaggerating the self‐reliance and social independence of the self, recent discussions of collective intentionality have often centered on the question of whether and how collective intentions differ from aggregations of individual intentions. As different as they might otherwise be, theoretical explorations of autonomy and collective intentionality intersect at a crucial point: both require an understanding of the relationship between the self and the group, between individual subjectivity and social life. The aim of the following paper is to argue that the collective intentionality literature contains insights that cannot merely contribute to our understanding of autonomy, but also prevent us from taking our relationism too far.

Recent years have seen an upsurge of interest in the second-person perspective, not only in philosophy of mind, language, law and ethics, but also in various empirical disciplines such as cognitive neuroscience and developmental psychology. A distinctive and perhaps also slightly puzzling feature of this ongoing discussion is that whereas many contributors insist that a proper consideration of the second-person perspective will have an impact on our understanding of social cognition, joint action, communication, self-consciousness, morality, and so on, there remains considerable disagreement about what exactly a second-person perspective amounts to (see Eilan 2014; Conant and Rödl 2014). What is the difference between adopting a second-person and a third-person perspective on another? How does one relate to another as a you and how does that differ from relating to another as a he, she or they? In the following, I will consider three different proposals and argue that a promising but somewhat overlooked account can be found in the work of Husserl.

During the Covid-19 pandemic we increasingly turned to technology to stay in touch with our family, friends, and colleagues. Even as lockdowns and restrictions ease many are encouraging us to embrace the replacement of face-to-face encounters with technologically mediated ones. Yet, as philosophers of technology have highlighted, technology can transform the situations we find ourselves in. Drawing insights from the phenomenology of sociality, we consider how digitally-enabled forms of communication and sociality impact our experience of one another. In particular, we draw attention to the way in which our embodied experience of one another is altered when we meet in digital spaces, taking as our focus the themes of perceptual access, intercorporeality, shared space, transitional spaces, and self-presentation. In light of the way in which technological mediation alters various dimensions of our social encounters, we argue that digital encounters constitute their own forms of sociality requiring their own phenomenological analysis. We conclude our paper by raising some broader concerns about the very framework of thinking about digitally and non-digitally mediated social encounters simply in terms of replacement.

The article takes issue with the proposal that dominant accounts of collective intentionality suffer from an individualist bias and that one should instead reverse the order of explanation and give primacy to the we and the community. It discusses different versions of the community first view and argues that they fail because they operate with too simplistic a conception of what it means to be a self and misunderstand what it means to be (part of) a we. In presenting this argument, the article seeks to demonstrate that a thorough investigation of collective intentionality has to address the status and nature of the we, and that doing so will require an analysis of the relation between the we and the I, which in turn will call for a more explicit engagement with the question of selfhood than is customary in contemporary discussions of collective intentionality.

Phenomenology: The Basics is a concise and engaging introduction to one of the dominant philosophical movements of the 20th century. This lively and lucid book provides an introduction to the essential phenomenological concepts that are crucial for understanding great thinkers such as Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Written by a leading expert in the field, Dan Zahavi examines and explains key questions such as: - What is a phenomenological analysis? - What are the methodological foundations of phenomenology? - What does phenomenology have to say about embodiment and intersubjectivity? - How is phenomenology distinguished from, and related to, other fields in philosophy? - How do ideas from classic phenomenology relate to ongoing debates in psychology and qualitative research? With a glossary of key terms and suggestions for further reading, the book considers key philosophical arguments around phenomenology, making this an ideal starting point for anyone seeking a concise and accessible introduction to the rich and complex study of phenomenology.

The notion of pre-reflective self-awareness is much more accepted today than 20 years ago and has become part of the standard repertoire in philosophy of mind. The notion’s increasing popularity has not surprisingly also led to an increasing amount of criticism. My focus in the present contribution will be on a particular radical objection that can be found in Jay Garfield’s book Engaging Buddhism. It seeks to undercut the appeal to pre-reflective self-awareness by arguing that there ultimately is no such thing as phenomenal consciousness.

Phenomenology shares the conviction that the critical stance proper to philosophy requires a move away from a straightforward metaphysical or empirical investigation of objects to an investigation of the very framework of meaning and intelligibility that makes any such straightforward investigation possible in the first place. It precisely asks how something like objectivity is possible in the first place. Phenomenology has also made important contributions to most areas of philosophy. Contemporary phenomenology is a somewhat heterogeneous field. In general, this Handbook as a whole might function as a representative sample of what is currently happening in phenomenology, and make it clear to philosophers from other traditions that phenomenology, far from being a tradition of the past, is quite alive and in a position to make valuable contributions to contemporary thought.