Federico Carlassara

The contribution approaches dementia from a phenomenological perspective, namely the analysis of one’s lived experience. In the first part, the essential coordinates of the phenomenological methodology to psychopathologies are outlined. Using two paradigmatic figures (Auguste and Marta), the second part gives a phenomenological interpretation of the loss of the self in neurocognitive disorders and also the persistence of a type of implicit, pre-reflective memory. The third part of the paper is devoted to the definition of what a philosophical practice is and how it can be applied to subjects with neurodegenerative or psychiatric illnesses. Finally, in the last part, a practice for subjects with dementia is described and proposed, based on empirical evidences and experiments by the two authors.

This contribution aims to be a concrete proof of how fertile, rich and innovative dialogue and confrontation between transcendental phenomenology and naturalising sciences can be. Through the phenomenological-transcendental analysis of the neurodegenerative pathology of dementia, an attempt will be made to propose, within the debate on the possible naturalisation of phenomenology, the perspective of an actual mutual enlightenment, as proposed by Gallagher. Not a naturalisation of consciousness in the sense of a reduction to neural process, but a pluralisation of the valid and rigorous perspectives through which it can be investigated. The phenomenological-transcendental eidetic study of dementia thus becomes complementary to the neurobiological one, revealing what the subject feels ‘from within’, his losses, but also what persists in the patient until the most advanced stages. Such a study, in synergy with the biological one, would greatly help in the holistic understanding of dementia in this particular case and, in general, of consciousness phenomena.