-
51Framing the Predictive Mind: Why We Should Think Again About DreyfusPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. 2024.In this paper I return to Hubert Dreyfus’ old but influential critique of artificial intelligence, redirecting it towards contemporary predictive processing models of the mind (PP). I focus on Dreyfus’ arguments about the “frame problem” for artificial cognitive systems, and his contrasting account of embodied human skills and expertise. The frame problem presents as a prima facie problem for practical work in AI and robotics, but also for computational views of the mind in general, including fo…Read more
-
113Embodiment and Emergence: Navigating an Epistemic and Metaphysical DilemmaJournal of Transcendental Philosophy 1 (1): 1-25. 2020.In this paper, I consider a challenge that naturalism poses for embodied cognition and enactivism, as well as for work on phenomenology of the body that has an argumentative or explanatory dimension. It concerns the connection between embodiment and emergence. In the commitment to explanatory holism, and the irreducibility of embodiment to any mechanistic and/or neurocentric construal of the interactions of the component parts, I argue there is (often, if not always) an unavowed dependence on an…Read more
-
10Phenomenological Interviews and Tourette'sPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 31 (1): 49-53. 2024.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Phenomenological Interviews and Tourette'sThe authors report no conflicts of interest.We appreciate the responses from the two clinicians, Efron and Mathieson. We agree with their reminder about the holistic nature of clinician's engagement (mood, sociality, and work life) and with their emphasis on patient-reported outcome measures, although this is not quite what we did in our interviews. As has recently been recognized in section …Read more
-
19Dimensions not types: On the phenomenology of premonitory urges in Tourette SyndromePhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 35 (1): 25-42. 2024.The use of philosophical phenomenology for conceptual debates in psychiatric nosology and psychopathology is beginning to be recognized. In this paper, we extend this trajectory to include Tourette Syndrome, focusing on so-called premonitory urges (PU) preceding Tourettic tics. We clarify some inconsistencies around typology in both phenomenological description and medical classification (i.e., in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition, Text Revision, Internationa…Read more
-
16The Bloomsbury Handbook of Existentialism (edited book)Bloomsbury. 2023.This fully revised and updated 2nd edition provides a comprehensive reference guide to existentialism, featuring key chapters on key existentialist thinkers, as well as chapters applying existentialism to subject areas ranging across politics, literature, feminism, religion, the emotions, cognitive science, and poststructuralism. Contemporary developments in the field of existentialism that speak to issues of identity and exclusion are explored in 4 new chapters on race, gender, disability, and …Read more
-
1Peculiar access : Sartre, self-knowledge, and the question of the irreducibility of the first-person perspectiveIn Talia Morag (ed.), Sartre and Analytic Philosophy, Routledge. 2023.In the debates on phenomenal consciousness that occurred over the last 20 years, Sartre’s analysis of pre-reflective consciousness has often been quoted in defence of a distinction between first- and third-personal modes of givenness that naturalists reject. This distinction aims both at determining the specificity of the access one has to their own thoughts, beliefs, intentions, or desires, and at justifying the particular privilege that one enjoys while making epistemic claims about their own …Read more
-
14Jean-Paul Sartre: Key Concepts (edited book)Routledge. 2013.Most readers of Sartre focus only on the works written at the peak of his influence as a public intellectual in the 1940s, notably "Being and Nothingness". "Jean-Paul Sartre: Key Concepts" aims to reassess Sartre and to introduce readers to the full breadth of his philosophy. Bringing together leading international scholars, the book examines concepts from across Sartre's career, from his initial views on the "inner life" of conscious experience, to his later conceptions of hope as the binding a…Read more
-
33Grace de Laguna, Joel Katzav, and the Conservatism of Analytic PhilosophyAsian Journal of Philosophy (2): 1-13. 2023.In this paper, we consider the implications of Grace de Laguna and Joel Katzav's work for the charge of conservatism against the analytic tradition. We differentiate that conservatism into three kinds: starting place; path dependency; and modesty. We also think again about gender in philosophy, consider the positive account of speculative philosophy presented by de Laguna and Katzav in comparison to some other naturalist trajectories, and conclude with a brief Australian addendum that reflects o…Read more
-
237Merleau-Ponty and “Dirty Hands”: Political phronesis and virtù between Marxism and MachiavelliCritical Horizons (3): 231-248. 2023.Despite rarely explicitly thematizing the problem of dirty hands, this essay argues that Merleau-Ponty’s political work can nonetheless make some important contributions to the issue, both descriptively and normatively. Although his political writings have been neglected in recent times, his interpretations of Marxism and Machiavelli enabled him to develop an account of political phronesis and virtù that sought to retain the strengths of their respective positions without succumbing to their pro…Read more
-
40Peculiar Access: Sartre, Self-knowledge, and the Question of the Irreducibility of the First-Person PerspectiveIn Talia Morag (ed.), Sartre and Analytic Philosophy, Routledge. pp. 84-100. 2023.In the debates on phenomenal consciousness that occurred over the last 20 years, Sartre’s analysis of pre-reflective consciousness has often been quoted in defence of a distinction between first- and third-personal modes of givenness that naturalists reject. This distinction aims both at determining the specificity of the access one has to their own thoughts, beliefs, intentions, or desires, and at justifying the particular privilege that one enjoys while making epistemic claims about their own …Read more
-
'Captivated by life': The life sciences in the heretical tradition of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and RuyerNew Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 425-446. 2023.Although their work in the philosophy of biology is not well known, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Ruyer all offer interesting and heterodox accounts of the life and environmental sciences and the organism in particular. In this chapter, we discuss their respective views, with a focus on their shared criticisms of Neo- Darwinism and the way this tradition grasped the structural coupling between organism and environment. We also outline some significant differences between each of them concerning …Read more
-
32Phenomenology, abduction, and argument: avoiding an ostrich epistemologyPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 22 (3): 557-574. 2022.Phenomenology has been described as a “non-argumentocentric” way of doing philosophy, reflecting that the philosophical focus is on generating adequate descriptions of experience. But it should not be described as an argument-free zone, regardless of whether this is intended as a descriptive claim about the work of the “usual suspects” or a normative claim about how phenomenology ought to be properly practiced. If phenomenology is always at least partly in the business of arguments, then it is w…Read more
-
42Habits of Mind: New Insights for Embodied Cognition from Classical Pragmatism and PhenomenologyEuropean Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy (2). 2022.Although pragmatism and phenomenology have both contributed significantly to the genealogy of so-called “4E” – embodied, embedded, enactive and extended – cognition, there is benefit to be had from a systematic comparative study of these roots. As existing 4E cognition literature has tended to emphasise one or the other tradition, issues remain to be addressed concerning their commonalities – and possible incompatibilities. We begin by exploring pragmatism and phenomenology’s shared focus on con…Read more
-
1Phenomenology and the multi-dimensionality of the bodyIn Francois-Xavier de Vaujany, Jeremy Aroles & Mar Perezts (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Phenomenologies and Organisation Studies. pp. 123-145. 2022.The modern era has witnessed an extraordinary and unprecedented growth in our empirical knowledge regarding the human body. This raises the question: what, if anything, can phenomenology teach us about the body that the empirical sciences cannot? Whereas common sense and empirical sciences begin from the body as straightforwardly and obviously given and go on from there to think about what this thing is, what it is made up of, and how it originated, phenomenology steps back from the straightforw…Read more
-
340Phenomenology, Abduction, and Argument: Avoiding an Ostrich EpistemologyPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (3): 1-18. 2022.Phenomenology has been described as a “non-argumentocentric” way of doing philosophy, reflecting that the philosophical focus is on generating adequate descriptions of experience. But it should not be described as an argument-free zone, regardless of whether this is intended as a descriptive claim about the work of the “usual suspects” or a normative claim about how phenomenology ought to be properly practiced. If phenomenology is always at least partly in the business of arguments, then it is w…Read more
-
331Merleau-Ponty and Liberal NaturalismIn Mario De Caro & David Macarthur (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Liberal Naturalism, Routledge. 2022.As neither a classical naturalist nor a non-naturalist, Merleau-Ponty appears to be a moderate or liberal naturalist. But can a phenomenologist really be a naturalist, even a liberal one? A lot hinges on how we tease this out, both as to whether it is plausible to claim Merleau-Ponty as a liberal naturalist (I argue it is), and as to whether it is an attractive and coherent position. Indeed, despite its important challenges to orthodox naturalism, there are arguably two traps to avoid. If it bec…Read more
-
9Correction to: Thinking embodiment with genetics: epigenetics and postgenomic biology in embodied cognition and enactivismSynthese 199 (1): 5415-5416. 2021.The article Thinking embodiment with genetics: epigenetics and postgenomic biology in embodied cognition and enactivism, written by Maurizio Meloni and Jack Reynolds, was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal on 18 June 2020 without open access. With the author’ decision to opt for Open Choice the copyright of the article changed on 6 November 2020 to ©The Author 2020 and the article is forthwith distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution.
-
467Thinking embodiment with genetics: epigenetics and postgenomic biology in embodied cognition and enactivismSynthese 198 (11): 10685-10708. 2020.The role of the body in cognition is acknowledged across a variety of disciplines, even if the precise nature and scope of that contribution remain contentious. As a result, most philosophers working on embodiment—e.g. those in embodied cognition, enactivism, and ‘4e’ cognition—interact with the life sciences as part of their interdisciplinary agenda. Despite this, a detailed engagement with emerging findings in epigenetics and post-genomic biology has been missing from proponents of this embodi…Read more
-
4Philosophy and/or Politics? Two Trajectories of Philosophy After the Great War and Their ContaminationIn Matthew Sharpe, Rory Jeffs & Jack Reynolds (eds.), 100 years of European philosophy since the Great War: crisis and reconfigurations, Springer. 2017.In this chapter, I revisit the question of the philosophical significance of the Great War upon the trajectory of philosophy in the twentieth century. While accounts of this are very rare in philosophy, and this is itself symptomatic, those that are given are also strangely implausible. They usually assert one of two things: that the War had little or no philosophical significance because most of the major developments had already begun, or—at the opposite extreme—they maintain that nothing was …Read more
-
56Why Tourette syndrome research needs philosophical phenomenologyPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 20 (4): 573-600. 2020.Despite a recent surge in publications on Tourette Syndrome, we still lack substantial insight into first-personal aspects of “what it is like” to live with this condition. This is despite the fact that developments in phenomenological psychiatry have demonstrated the scientific and clinical importance of understanding subjective experience in a range of other neuropsychiatric conditions. We argue that it is time for Tourette Syndrome research to tap into the sophisticated frameworks developed i…Read more
-
1499Revaluing the behaviorist ghost in enactivism and embodied cognitionSynthese 198 (6): 5785-5807. 2019.Despite its short historical moment in the sun, behaviorism has become something akin to a theoria non grata, a position that dare not be explicitly endorsed. The reasons for this are complex, of course, and they include sociological factors which we cannot consider here, but to put it briefly: many have doubted the ambition to establish law-like relationships between mental states and behavior that dispense with any sort of mentalistic or intentional idiom, judging that explanations of intellig…Read more
-
61Phenomenology, Naturalism and Non-reductive Cognitive ScienceAustralasian Philosophical Review 2 (2): 119-124. 2018.Volume 2, Issue 2, June 2018, Page 119-124.
-
313Mark Eli Kalderon, "Sympathy in Perception" (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2018 (0809). 2018.Mark Eli Kalderon's book boldly positions itself as a work in speculative metaphysics. Its point of departure is the familiar distinction between presentational and representational philosophies of perception. Kalderon notes that the latter has been more popular of late, as it is more amenable to "an account" explicating causal or counterfactual conditions on perception; but he wishes to rehabilitate the former, at least in part. One widely perceived disadvantage of presentationalism has been th…Read more
-
71Temporal naturalism: reconciling the “4Ms” and points of view within a robust liberal naturalismPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 19 (1): 1-21. 2020.In the past generation, various philosophers have been concerned with the so-called “placement problem” for naturalism. The problem has taken on the shorthand alliteration of the 4Ms, since Mind/Mentality, Meaning, Morality, and Modality/Mathematics are four important phenomena that are difficult to place within orthodox construals of naturalism, typified by physicalism and a methodological preference for ways of knowing associated with the natural sciences. In this paper I highlight the importa…Read more
-
11The other of Derridean deconstruction: Levinas, Phenomenology, and the question of responsibilityMinerva - An Internet Journal of Philosophy 5 (1). 2001.Derrida has been rather frequently acclaimed for his conception of alterity, which we are told is irrecuperable and beyond the dialectic. However, this essay will argue that his attempts to instantiate an ethics of responsibility to the "otherness of the other" are more problematic than is commonly assumed. Much of Derrida’s work on alterity palpably bears a tension between his emphasis upon an absolute and irrecuperable notion of alterity that is always deferred and always ‘to come’, and his si…Read more
-
99Merleau-Ponty’s Gordian knot: Transcendental phenomenology, science, and naturalismContinental Philosophy Review 50 (1): 81-104. 2016.In this paper I explore a series of fertile ambiguities that Merleau-Ponty’s work is premised upon. These ambiguities concern some of the central methodological commitments of his work, in particular his commitment to transcendental phenomenology and how he transforms that tradition, and his relationship to science and philosophical naturalism and what they suggest about his philosophical methodology. Many engagements with Merleau-Ponty’s work that are more ‘analytic’ in orientation either defla…Read more
-
39100 years of European philosophy since the Great War: crisis and reconfigurations (edited book)Springer. 2017.This book is a collection of specifically commissioned articles on the key continental European philosophical movements since 1914. It shows how each of these bodies of thought has been shaped by their responses to the horrors set in train by World War I, and considers whether we are yet ‘post-post-war’. The outbreak of World War I in August 1914,set in chain a series of crises and re-configurations, which have continued to shape the world for a century: industrialized slaughter, the end of colo…Read more
-
10Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts (edited book)Acumen Publishing. 2008.Presents a guide to the core ideas which structure Merleau-Ponty's thinking as well as to his influences and the value of his ideas to a range of disciplines. This book presents the context of Merleau-Ponty's thinking, the major debates of his time, particularly existentialism, the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history and society.
Geelong, Victoria, Australia
Areas of Specialization
Metaphilosophy |
Continental Philosophy |
Perception |
Philosophy of Science, Miscellaneous |
Perception and Phenomenology |
PhilPapers Editorships
20th Century Philosophy |