Marius Dumitru

The study of the mind has to grapple with both the unconscious and the conscious. While the phenomenon of cognitive penetration has already been explored especially in connection to the modularity of perceptual and cognitive processes, the phenomenon of cognitive-phenomenological penetration, the penetration within the stream of consciousness of the phenomenological fabric of experiences by the phenomenology of thought, has not been given much attention thus far. In this paper, I focus with analytic-phenomenological methods on cognitive-phenomenological penetration as a phenomenon whereby the texture of non-cognitive phenomenologies gets modified by cognitive phenomenologies. I present a metaphysical model of cognitive-phenomenological penetration and argue that it can be used to support a non-modular view in the metaphysics of the conscious and unconscious mind, to confirm the hypothesis that there exists a sui generis phenomenology of thought, and to defend the view that cognitive-phenomenological penetration has a pivotal role to play in appraisals of rationality, irrationality, and cognitive distortions at the intrasubjective, intersubjective, and extra-mental levels.

The core insight of neutral monism is that there might be something underlying both mind and matter which is neither and of which mind and matter could be seen as particular manifestations. In this paper, I shall present some directions for developing neutral monism as a metaphysical position on the mind-brain problem and argue that its core insight may be applied to other debates in philosophy of mind, in particular debates about the metaphysics of phenomenologies, such as the phenomenology of thought and cognitive phenomenologies.

The Extended Mind Hypothesis (EMH) needs a defence of phenomenal externalism in order to be consistent with an indispensable condition for attributing extended beliefs, concerning the conscious past endorsement of information. However, it is difficult, if not impossible, to envisage such a defence. Proponents ofthe EMH are thus confronted with a difficult dilemma: they either accept absurd attributions of belief, and thus deflate EMH, or incorporate, for compatibility reasons, the conscious past endorsement condition for extended belief attribution, implying a seemingly unavailable defence of phenomenal externalism, and thus risk inconsistency within EMH. Either way, EMH is threatened.