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Merleau-Ponty’s Immanent Critique of Gestalt TheoryHuman Studies 40 (2): 191-215. 2017.Merleau-Ponty’s appropriation of Gestalt theory in The Structure of Behavior is central to his entire corpus. Yet commentators exhibit little agreement about what lesson is to be learned from his critique, and provide little exegesis of how his argument proceeds. I fill this exegetical gap. I show that the Gestaltist’s fundamental error is to reify forms as transcendent realities, rather than treating them as phenomena of perceptual consciousness. From this, reductivist errors follow. The essay …Read more
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Act Psychology and Phenomenology: Husserl on Egoic ActsHusserl Studies 33 (3): 191-209. 2017.Husserl famously retracted his early portrayal, in Logische Untersuchungen, of phenomenology as empirical psychology. Previous scholarship has typically understood this transcendental turn in light of the Ideen’s revised conception of the ἐποχή, and its distinction between noesa and noemata. This essay thematizes the evolution of the concept of mental acts in Husserl’s work as a way of understanding the shift. I show how the recognition of the pure ego in Ideen I and II enabled Husserl to radica…Read more
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Phenomenology and naturalism in autopoietic and radical enactivism: exploring sense-making and continuity from the top downSynthese 198 (Suppl 9): 2323-2343. 2018.Radical and autopoietic enactivists disagree concerning how to understand the concept of sense-making in enactivist discourse and the extent of its distribution within the organic domain. I situate this debate within a broader conflict of commitments to naturalism on the part of radical enactivists, and to phenomenology on the part of autopoietic enactivists. I argue that autopoietic enactivists are in part responsible for the obscurity of the notion of sense-making by attributing it univocally …Read more
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Analysis of faithPhilosophy Compass 13 (9). 2018.In recent years, many philosophers of religion have turned their attention to the topic of faith. Given the ubiquity of the word “faith” both in and out of religious contexts, many of them have chosen to begin their forays by offering an analysis of faith. But it seems that there are many kinds of faith: religious faith, non‐religious faith, interpersonal faith, and propositional faith, to name a few. In this article, I discuss analyses of faith that have been offered and point out the dimension…Read more
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How Low Can You Go? BioEnactivism, Cognitive Biology and Umwelt OntologyHumana Mente 9 (31). 2016.The viability of enactivist philosophy in providing descriptions of biological phenomena across the phylogenetic spectrum relies in large part on the scalability of its central concepts, i.e. whether they remain operative at varying levels of biological complexity. In this paper, I will examine the possibility of scaling two deeply intertwined concepts: cognition and surrounding world. Contra some indications from Varela and others, I will argue that the concept of embodied cognition can be scal…Read more
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Emotions, Motivation, and Character: A Phenomenological PerspectiveHusserl Studies 34 (3): 229-245. 2018.
Philip Walsh
Gartner (Research and Advisory Consulting Firm)
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Gartner (Research and Advisory Consulting Firm)Other
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
20th Century Philosophy |
European Philosophy |