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Rorty and metaphilosophy: Richard Rorty: On philosophy and philosophers: unpublished papers, 1960-2000, edited by W. P. Malecki and Chris Voparil. But what the essays in I On Philosophy and Philosophers i help to draw out is more of the background for Rorty's programmatic work - namely, very careful readings of first-order philosophical disputes that inform Rorty's broader metaphilosophical orientation. The papers by Richard Rorty collected in I On Philosophy and Philosophers i I : i I Unpublished Papers, 1960-2000 i and edited by W.P. Malecki and Chris Voparil represent a very welcome addition to Rorty's corpus. [Extracted from the article]

Water diffusion in cellulose was studied via two-phase Kärger model and the propagator method. In addition to ruling out anomalous diffusion, the mean squared displacements obtained at different diffusion times from the Kärger model allowed to characterize the system's phases by their average confining sizes, average connectivity and average apparent diffusion coefficients. The two-phase scheme was confirmed by the propagator method, which has given insights into the confining phase-geometry, found consistent with a parallel-plane arrangement. Final results indicate that water in cellulose is confined in two different types of amorphous domains, one placed at fiber surfaces, the other at fiber cores. This picture fully corresponds to the phenomenological categories so far used to identify water in cellulose fibers, namely, free and bound water, or freezing and non-freezing water. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will explore the key findings identified in the five arts discipline-specific papers which comprise this special theme issue. Each of the participant researchers have situated Dance, Drama, Media Arts, Music and Visual Arts within the context of the Australian Curriculum: The Arts and what they characterise as its social justice imperatives. A narrative phenomenological approach has been adopted to enable the participant researchers to socially co-construct an analysis of their experiences working with the Australian Curriculum: The Arts including challenges, implications and the future for their respective discipline areas and the Arts overall. The three key themes from these collective voices revealed a quality arts education is an entitlement for every child and young person; the Arts provide important opportunities for children and young people from diverse backgrounds and cultures to demonstrate their learning, express themselves and participate; and arts educators and the Arts industry need to work together to strengthen community understanding about the value of the Arts in education. This process provided important insights into how exposure and engagement with the Arts shape the ways in which children and young people make meaning in their lives, enhance their overall wellbeing, increase their sense of social responsibility and contribute to a socially-just society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Well-being depends not only on what happens but also on when it happens. There are temporal aspects of well-being, and to a large extent those aspects are about relative timing—about being "in-tact." On the one hand, there is a perspectival aspect about being in-tact with one's past, present, and future or, in a less involved sense, with one's life as a whole. On the other hand, there is a synchronization aspect of being in-tact; and this aspect occurs on different levels: It might be about the alignment between different temporal domains—such as time as individually perceived and physical or intersubjective time. Or it might be about a single domain, especially the inner dynamics of individual time. The danger of not experiencing and acknowledging the relational character of these different timings likely leads to a substantial loss in the variety of human experience. Important aspects of subjective and intersubjective experience might fade away. The present paper discusses these aspects of well-being along the lines of distinctions and concepts prominently used in the metaphysics and the phenomenology of time. Thus, the paper also aims to complement the existing literature by bringing together important strands of current philosophical research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early childhood teaching is complex, caring, relational work. In enacting an ethic of care, early childhood teachers often focus on extending care to others, and overlook including themselves in a circle of care. This can negatively impact on teacher well-being and ultimately lead to teacher burnout. This paper draws on a project that explored twelve teachers' experiences of the practice of mindful self-compassion using a methodology of mindful inquiry, a qualitative approach that includes elements of mindfulness, care, and hermeneutic phenomenology. Findings of the study identified that the practice of mindful self-compassion supported teachers to enact an ethic of care, which includes extending care, receiving care, and engaging in self-care. Being mindfully self-compassionate supported the teachers to engage in intentional caring practices that fostered relationships and supported the well-being of children and their colleagues, and empowered the teachers to advocate for themselves, their colleagues, and children. The paper argues that mindful self-compassion practice supports and sustains early childhood teachers in their caring role. When carers are included in a circle of care, then the reciprocal and inclusive nature of an ethic of care can be more fully realised. Implications are discussed for initial teacher education, teaching practice, early childhood leaders and policy makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents responses of the author on his books published in the 1985 issue of the journal "Human Studies." He holds that both scholarly and biographically significant point behind his work A Bergsonian Bridge to Phenomenological Psychology is the following, in 1924, before starting this endeavor, sociologist Alfred Schutz had looked at sociologist Edmund Husserl's early phenomenological writings but found that they had nothing to contribute to what he had planned to do namely, to give Max Weber's sociology of understanding a pheno-psychological underpinning which, in his opinion, they needed in order not only to be made consistent but also in order to provide them with a justification deeper than that which could be provided by sociological reasoning. The author confesses that his book Phenomenology of Consciousness and Sociology of the Life-World is his favorite. He agrees with his critics who have pointed out the book does not cover, or at least does not emphasize evenly all topics which should be treated in an advanced and reasonably sophisticated introduction to the areas of its thematic concerns.

Ambiguity in our experience of embodiment online has prevented us from confidently extending existing scholarship to the domain of online sociality. In recent decades, research across the disciplines has been undergirded by themes related to embodiment, restoring to prominence a theme previously neglected in part thanks to the rise of feminist scholars within the academy. We have not, however, adequately appealed to this corpus when theorizing forms of life happening online. In this paper I hope to bridge this gap by bringing forward phenomenological evidence about the nature of online embodiment. This paper presents the findings from a research project that used phenomenological interviews to elicit descriptions of lived embodiment from participants singing in online choirs during the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that these descriptions reveal anchoring and discounting as central features of their experience, two dynamics of the body schema as described by Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception that underpin participant experiences of sensory disjunction. I furthermore take pains to show how the form of embodiment operative in the online choirs has the characteristics of intercorporeality, a reciprocal two-sided form of embodied subjectivity. After explaining how Husserl and Merleau-Ponty each define intercorporeality, I suggest that what I am calling an auditory intercorporeality underlies reported features of participant experience in the choirs, such as we-experience and coordination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For as long as philosophers ignore mind-wandering, they will disregard from one-third to one-half of conscious thoughts. Regrettably, mind-wandering is only seldom addressed in phenomenology. The fundamental ambition of this paper is to offer the first systematic phenomenological investigation of mind-wandering that relies on the classical principles of Husserlian phenomenology. The paper begins with a critique of the dominant conceptions of mind-wandering in contemporary psychology and philosophy. Against such a background, the paper develops a new, phenomenologically-grounded conception of mind-wandering. The paper further focuses on the central resources in Husserlian phenomenology, which can be fruitfully employed in the future interdisciplinary research on mind-wandering. Phenomenological reflections on background consciousness, on pre-predicative experience, on passivity and on self-awareness lie at the center of this analysis. The paper concludes with some reflections on the relation between mind-wandering and daydreaming and on the function of mind-wandering in conscious life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the idea of objective phenomenology, or a way of understanding the phenomenal character of conscious experiences that doesn't require one to have had the kinds of experiences under consideration. My central thesis is that structural facts about experience—facts that characterize purely how conscious experiences are structured—are objective phenomenal facts. I begin by precisifying the idea of objective phenomenology and diagnosing what makes any given phenomenal fact subjective. Then I defend the view that structural facts about experience are objective. I also argue that structural facts about experience, despite being objective, nevertheless still give rise to an explanatory gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In developing a theory of consciousness, one of the main problems has to do with determining what distinguishes conscious states from non-conscious ones—the delimitation problem. This paper explores the possibility of solving this problem in terms of self-awareness. That self-awareness is essential to understanding the nature of our conscious experience is perhaps the most widely discussed hypothesis in the study of consciousness throughout the history of philosophy. Its plausibility hinges on how the notion of self-awareness is unpacked. The idea that consciousness involves self-awareness has been understood in two different ways: either as awareness of oneself—the subject of experience—or as awareness of the conscious episode itself. In this paper I argue (i) that every experience concerns the subject in a very specific way, involving what I will call 'perspectival de se representation', and (ii) that there is no need to appeal to the experience itself in order to characterize the awareness within that experience. The view I articulate explains the subjective nature of experience without over-intellectualizing it, accommodates the phenomenology of experience, and dispels any doubt about the need to find the self in introspection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to highlight the life of computer technologies to understand what kind of 'technological intentionality' is present in computers based upon the phenomenological elements constituting the objects in general. Such a study can better explain the effects of new digital technologies on our society and highlight the role of digital technologies by focusing on their activities. Even if Husserlian phenomenology rarely talks about technologies, some of its aspects can be used to address the actions performed by the digital technologies by focusing on the objects' inner 'life' thanks to the analysis of passive synthesis and phenomenological horizons in the objects. These elements can be used in computer technologies to show how digital objects are 'alive.' This paper focuses on programs developed through high-order languages like C++ and unsupervised learning techniques like 'Generative Adversarial Model.' The phenomenological analysis reveals the computer's autonomy within the programming stages. At the same time, the conceptual inquiry into the digital system's learning ability shows the alive and changeable nature of the technological object itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to show a possible path to address the introduction of intimate digital technologies through a phenomenological and postphenomenological perspective in relation to Japanese and Chinese contexts. Digital technologies are becoming intimate, and, in Japan and China, there are already many advanced digital technologies that provide digital companions for love relationships. Phenomenology has extensive research on how love relationships and intimacy shape the subjects. At the same time, postphenomenology provides a sound framework on how technologies shape the values and meanings we have. Thus, this paper introduces two digital technologies in Japan and China (Love Plus and XiaoIce chatbot), and it analyses according to the elements proposed by phenomenology and postphenomenology. In conclusion, this paper shows how digital companions like Love Plus and XiaoIce chatbot change who we are and the values and meanings we have according to the phenomenological and postphenomenological framework. These entities might not be human, but they shape who we are as human beings and the meanings and value we give to love. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the implications of conceptualising phenomenology as explanatory for the ongoing dialogue between the phenomenological tradition and cognitive science, especially enactive approaches to cognition. The first half of the paper offers three interlinked arguments: Firstly, that differentiating between phenomenology and the natural sciences by designating one as descriptive and the other as explanatory undermines opportunities for the kind of productive friction that is required for genuine 'mutual enlightenment'. Secondly, that conceiving of phenomenology as descriptive rather than explanatory risks committing us to what Zahavi (2019) identifies as the error of equating the phenomenological with the phenomenal. Finally, that the erroneous reduction to the descriptive occludes the rich resources that the phenomenological tradition can contribute to investigations of non-human cognition. The second half of the paper then turns to focus specifically on the promising relationship between phenomenology and enactive approaches to cognition. It will suggest that phenomenology must be seen as having explanatory capacities if it is to shed light on the structures of "mind in life" (Thompson, 2007), before drawing on the model of explanation put forward by Louis Sass to explore what this might look like. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I begin this paper by demonstrating that there is a perceived overlap between phenomenology and the personal level. This perception has recently played a decisive role in evaluating phenomenological contributions to discussions within cognitive science, for example, on topics of social cognition. In this paper, I aim not only to understand what might be meant by associating phenomenology with the personal level, but to cast this association in a critical light. I show that the personal level is essentially an explanatory level, whereby perceptions and mental state terms (paradigmatically, belief and desire) explain purposive action. I then separate the notion of consciousness from the notion of the personal level. To do so, I advance Wittgenstein's private language argument in conjunction with Sellars' account of how the meaning of mental state terms derives from their explanatory function. Using the Wittgenstinian/Sellarsian picture as guide, I show that characterising personal level explanations by reference to conscious experiences imputes excess baggage over and above the commitment to a unique explanatory level. Yet, for many, 'phenomenology' is the level of conscious experience. I argue that it is when the extra baggage of assuming that we are aware of our explanatory, personal level mental states is coupled with the controversial claim that phenomenology is tantamount to the verbalisation of conscious states that the ill begotten association between them is arises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores brain-to-brain interfaces (B2BI) as innovative human-technology interactions from a philosophical perspective to show how the implementation of this technology raises new philosophical questions about who we are and how we live in the world. More specifically, this text introduces the emergence of a collective living body through digital technologies from a phenomenological perspective to open the path to analyzing its effects on society. Few studies in the humanities have been focusing on how new human-technology interactions can connect several subjects into one living body by enabling subjects to literally "walk in the shoes of others". This novel ability radically reframes some philosophical assumptions about what individual subjects are and how to think of them since the boundaries dividing them seem to blur. The constitution of a new type of human-technology interaction changes who we are and how we live, and we need to focus on such a change to tackle the challenges we will have to face in how we think of ourselves and live with others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exposure and experience with ethical dilemmas and controversial socioscientific issues provide a link to students' lives or a pathway for sympathy/empathy and care, where youth use emotion to engage with the scenario and develop critical thinking skills to respond to ethical issues. For this theoretical paper, I focus on how informal science can be used in science classes to provide such exposure and experience, creating spaces for students to foster erotic relationships with the nature-Other and their local environment. More specifically, this paper aims to discuss how educators can use these informal science experiences, and in this case—those involving marine mammals, to find value for natural phenomena through erotic generosity and phenomenological experiences within the environment and use their knowledge and power to act responsibly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In quantum foundations, there is growing interest in the program of reconstructing the quantum formalism from clear physical principles. These reconstructions are formulated in an operational framework, deriving the formalism from information-theoretic principles. It has been recognized that this project is in tension with standard ψ-ontic interpretations. This paper presupposes that the quantum reconstruction program (QRP) (i) is a worthwhile project and (ii) puts pressure on ψ-ontic interpretations. Where does this leave us? Prima facie, it seems that ψ-epistemic interpretations perfectly fit the spirit of information-based reconstructions. However, ψ-epistemic interpretations, understood as saying that the wave functions represents one's knowledge about a physical system, recently have been challenged on technical and conceptual grounds. More importantly, for some researchers working on reconstructions, the lesson of successful reconstructions is that the wave function does not represent objective facts about the world. Since knowledge is a factive concept, this speaks against epistemic interpretations. In this paper, I discuss whether ψ-doxastic interpretations constitute a reasonable alternative. My thesis is that if we want to engage QRP with ψ-doxastic interpretations, then we should aim at a reconstruction that is spelled out in non-factive experiential terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ+) people are experiencing increasingly varied visibility on social media due to ongoing digitalization. In this paper, I draw on social epistemology and phenomenological accounts of the digital (Frost-Arnold in: Lackey (ed) The epistemic dangers of context collapse online, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2021; Krueger and Osler in Philos Topics 47(2):205–231, 2019; Hine in: Ethnography for the internet: embedded, embodied and everyday, Bloomsbury, London, 2015), and argue that, for LGBTQ+ individuals, social media provides a space for connecting with people with shared lived experiences. This, in turn, makes it possible for social media to enable feelings of belonging. By interacting with other LGBTQ+ people online, LGBTQ+ individuals are enabled to imagine their own being in the world and to feel like they belong. This is especially important when we consider that, for LGBTQ+ identities, it may be more complicated to feel connected due to marginalization and (fear of) discrimination. This paper not only draws on literature from phenomenology and social epistemology on the digital, but also presents and analyzes interviews that were conducted in order to explore the social media experiences of LGBTQ+ people through a phenomenology and social epistemology informed framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is part of a special section devoted to an interdisciplinary exploration of vulnerability, assessing the theoretical elaborations of the concept, its uses, its political significance, and methodological issues in studying it. By foregrounding feminist and phenomenological philosophical methods that center on lived experience, the paper elaborates a multidimensional theoretical framework for understanding vulnerability as a complex experience and concept. It advances a pluralist understanding of vulnerability, seeking to connect dimensions of the concept that may be fragmented and focusing on its relational nature. Such a non-dualist approach entails that the political and ethical conclusions that can be drawn about vulnerability are complex and thus require critical analysis, especially of how vulnerability becomes a matter of political rhetoric, rather than straightforward prescription. Finally, in light of its complexity and ambiguity, adequate and socially just theorizing about and application of the concept of vulnerability requires more thoroughgoing interdisciplinary collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay about philosopher John Wild is presented. It outlines the author's experience of a graduate work with Wild at Northwestern University. It highlights the book "The Promise of Phenomenology," edited by Richard Sugarman and Roger Duncan which examines the posthumous papers of Wild about existentialism and phenomenology.

This work begins with a brief review – from the physical education movement that began in ancient Greece and is deeply rooted in 19th century Europe, to the somatics movement alive today. The review captures primary historical and conceptual references, relevant to the therapeutic-embodied exploratory work. Then, G. Stanghellini's mental health care model [2] is reviewed. This model is considered within reflexive self-awareness and spoken dialogue: the main vehicles in relation with alterity and its consequences in the realm of psychotherapeutic encounter and intervention. This will highlight the individual's bodily movement and inter-corporeal 'proto-dialogue' as a prior realm of therapeutic intervention. Next, a brief consideration of E. Strauss work [31] is presented. This paper's hypothesis is that bodily qualitative dynamics highlighted by phenomenology are essential for an effective mental health therapeutic intervention. A 'seed' of a framework is proposed in this paper; this seed assesses some phenomenological assets of a positive conception of mental health, for which self-awareness education is key to develop skills such as kinaesthetic intelligence and attunement and to educate healthy persons who can promote edifying social relations and environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Bodily autonomy" has received significant attention in bioethics, medical ethics, and medical law in terms of the general inviolability of a patient's bodily sovereignty and the rights of patients to make choices (e.g., reproductive choices) that concern their own body. However, the role of the body in terms of how it can or does contribute to a patient's capacity for, or exercises of their autonomy in clinical decision-making situations has not been explicitly addressed. The approach to autonomy in this paper is aligned with traditional theories that conceive autonomy in terms of an individual's capacities for, and exercises of rational reflection. However, at the same time, this paper extends these accounts by arguing that autonomy is, in part, embodied. Specifically, by drawing on phenomenological conceptions of the experience of autonomy, we argue that, in principle, the body is a necessary component of the capacity for autonomy. Secondly, through the presentation of two different cases, we highlight ways in which a patient's body can contribute to the autonomy of treatment choices. Ultimately, we hope to encourage others to explore additional conditions under which a concept of embodied autonomy should be employed in medical decision making, how its underlying principles might be operationalised in clinical situations, and its consequences for approaches to patient autonomy in healthcare practice, policy, and law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins with a sketch of a few themes in the philosophy of property insofar as they relate to the concept of cultural appropriation. It then offers a survey of Edmund Husserl's account of culture. These reflections put us in a better position to ask whether property ownership provides a suitable interpretative framework for acts of intercultural copying and influence. On the contrary, Husserl's account of culture leads us away from the claim that members of a cultural group should be understood to have property in cultural formations arising within their group. By putting meaning, rather than ownership, at the center of our understanding of culture, the paper offers an alternative account of what might be wrong, when there is something wrong, with events typically labeled culturally appropriative. The paper concludes by connecting concerns for cultural appropriation with conceptions of cultural authenticity, distinguishing between an autochthonal sense of authenticity, focused on internal origins and protection from outside forces, and a Husserlian sense of authenticity, connected to reason, responsibility, and truth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper offers a systematic reconstruction of the relations that, in Husserl's work, bind together our shared social world ("the spiritual world") with shared intentionality. It is claimed that, by sharing experiences, persons create social reasons and that these reasons impose a normative structure on the social world. Because there are two ways in which persons can share experiences (depending on whether these experiences rest on mutual communication or on group's identity), social normativity comes in two kinds. It is either directed (it has an addressee) or it is collective or absolute (it applies to all group members). Social normativity should be distinguished from axiological normativity: The first is grounded in shared intentionality, the second in values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In India, secrecy and stigma are associated with infertility and adoption choice. This paper presents the findings of a phenomenological study which examined psychological (emotional) and socio-cultural experiences of seven Indian adoptive parents through the retrospective accounts of their pre-adoption phase. This phase analyzed the coping of childless couples with a diagnosis of primary/secondary infertility while undergoing various assisted reproductive techniques for several years and then opting for adoption. Amidst the deep-seated socio-cultural belief in pronatalism, a non-kinship domestic adoption process was followed as an alternative to biological parenthood. An interpretative phenomenological analysis highlighted the pertinent themes related to gender differences in grief resolution, surrogacy vs. adoption option, belief in theory of 'karma' (destiny), perception of body image and role of women in adoption initiation. The themes are further supported by the views of Indian adoption social workers and the medical professionals, to have the holistic framework of the psychological journey of pre-adoptive couples. These findings would be particularly relevant not only for researchers in South Asian/Southeast Asian countries where the area of infertility and adoption is under-researched but also for those studying the emotional voyage of childless couples to attain adoptive parenthood in other cultural contexts. The paper recommends the interventions required at the level of government, community, adoption agencies and therapeutic services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In later Edith Stein and Hedwig Conrad-Martius, finite existence appears to be necessarily intertwined with infinite being. In response to this observation, this paper puts particular focus on the experience of finite being in order to address the specifically phenomenological (i.e., experiential) aspects of Stein's and Conrad-Martius' metaphysics. As a consequence, instead of pointing to eternal or infinite being, finite experience is understood to – less specifically – transcend itself. Using the notion of actus essendi (priority of existence over essence), I identify two ideas as specifically characterizing this transcendence: non-ownership of time (in Conrad-Martius), by which is questioned the coherence of inner time consciousness, as well as non-ownership of sense (in Stein), stipulating that the sense one intuitively and intellectively experiences in reference to objects is discovered, rather than made. Subsequently, the paper discusses how Stein's and Conrad-Martius' metaphysics of finite existence is reflected in their critical assessments of Heidegger's existential finitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper looks at how Marxist humanists around the Yugoslav philosophical journal Praxis engaged with existentialist and phenomenological categories. After presenting the early 1950s critiques of existentialism in Yugoslavia, the paper considers how the categories used by the representatives of existentialism (and phenomenology) were interpreted and incorporated by Yugoslav Marxist humanists in the 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper shows how to use the Husserlian phenomenological method in contemporary philosophical approaches to mathematical practice and mathematical ontology. First, the paper develops the phenomenological approach based on Husserl's writings to obtain a method for understanding mathematical practice. Then, to put forward a full-fledged ontology of mathematics, the phenomenological approach is complemented with social ontological considerations. The proposed ontological account sees mathematical objects as social constructions in the sense that they are products of culturally shared and historically developed practices. At the same time the view endorses the sense that mathematical reality is given to mathematicians with a sense of independence. As mathematical social constructions are products of highly constrained, intersubjective practices and accord with the phenomenologically clarified experience of mathematicians, positing them is phenomenologically justified. The social ontological approach offers a way to build mathematical ontology out of the practice with no metaphysical magic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial Intelligence (AI) must be directed at humane ends. The development of AI has produced great uncertainties of ensuring AI alignment with human values (AI value alignment) through AI operations from design to use. For the purposes of addressing this problem, we adopt the phenomenological theories of material values and technological mediation to be that beginning step. In this paper, we first discuss the AI value alignment from the relevant AI studies. Second, we briefly present what are material values and technological mediation and reflect on the AI value alignment through the lenses of these theories. We conclude that a set of finite human values can be defined and adapted to the stable life tasks that AI systems will be called upon to accomplish. The AI value alignment can also be fostered between designers and users through technological mediation. Upon that foundation, we propose a set of common principles to understand the AI value alignment through phenomenological theories. This paper contributes the unique knowledge of phenomenological theories to the discourse on AI alignment with human values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a methodological concept of phenomenological elucidation to promote the development of phenomenology as psychology. After offering a minimal review of the historical relationship between phenomenology and psychology, the first section gives a brief overview of the descriptive phenomenological approach developed by A. Giorgi and other psychologists. However, for phenomenology to evolve as a human science, the method should not remain descriptive. One needs to be able to answer the question of "why". The second section outlines the process of phenomenological elucidation on the topic of dream analysis. This process answers the question of "why" based on identifying differences between the fundamental phenomenological structure of the dream experience and that of the real experience. Husserl's classification of intentionalities is used as a heuristic for this identification. In the final section, phenomenological elucidation is defined as a way to answer the "why" question by treating the differences between the experiences in question as specific cases of more fundamental differences in phenomenological structure. This method is expected to be effective in the development of phenomenology as psychology, that is, as an empirical human science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been argued that affordances are not meaningful and are thus not useful to be applied in contexts where specifically meaningfulness of experience is at stake (e.g. clinical contexts or discussions of autonomous agency). This paper aims to reconceptualize affordances such as to make them relevant and applicable in such contexts. It starts by investigating the 'ambiguity' of (possibilities for) action. In both philosophy of action and affordance research, this ambiguity is typically resolved by adhering to the agents intentions and concerns. I discuss some recent accounts of affordances that highlight these concerns but argue that they tend to adopt an 'atomistic' approach where there is no acknowledgement of how these concerns are embedded in the agents wider concerns, values, projects and commitments. An holistic approach that does acknowledge this can be found in psychological research on agents having a sense of what they're doing. I will discuss this research in the second part of the paper and argue that agents can analogously have a sense of what is afforded. This is deemed the entry point for understanding the meaningfulness of affordances. In the final part of the paper I apply this analysis to recent attempts which seek to make sense of authentic and autonomous agency in terms of affordances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a novel interpretation of Hans Jonas' analysis of metabolism, the centrepiece of Jonas' philosophy of organism, in relation to recent controversies regarding the phenomenological dimension of life-mind continuity as understood within 'autopoietic' enactivism (AE). Jonas' philosophy of organism chiefly inspired AE's development of what we might call 'the phenomenological life-mind continuity thesis' (PLMCT), the claim that certain phenomenological features of human experience are central to a proper scientific understanding of both life and mind, and as such central features of all living organisms. After discussing the understanding of PLMCT within AE, and recent criticisms thereof, I develop a reading of Jonas' analysis of metabolism, in light of previous commentators, which emphasizes its systematicity and transcendental flavour. The central thought is that, for Jonas, the attribution of certain phenomenological features is a necessary precondition for our understanding of the possibility of metabolism, rather than being derivable from metabolism itself. I argue that my interpretation strengthens Jonas' contribution to AE's justification for ascribing certain phenomenological features to life across the board. However, it also emphasises the need to complement Jonas' analysis with an explanatory account of organic identity in order to vindicate these phenomenological ascriptions in a scientific context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perception is, at least sometimes, something we do. This paper is concerned with how to account for perceptual agency (i.e., the active aspect of perception). Eilan divides accounts of perceptual agency up into two camps: enactivist theories hold that perceptual agency is accounted for by the involvement of bodily action, while mental theories hold that perceptual agency is accounted for by the involvement of mental action in perception. In Structuring Mind (2017), Sebastian Watzl aligns his 'activity view' with the mental action route and develops the view that the mental activity of attending infuses perceptual experience with agency. Moreover, Watzl claims that his view can accommodate enactivist intuitions, while rejecting their claims about embodiment. In this paper, we scrutinize the relevant notion of mental action involved in the mental action route. We analyze the involvement of the body in overt acts of attention (like sniffing and smelling) and argue that a constitutively embodied account of mental action provides a better analysis of overt attention than a conjunctive account in which overt attention involves a bodily and a (separate) mental action. Furthermore, we argue that the standard cases of covert attention (such as the Posner paradigm) involve the body in multiple ways. In closing, we discuss the relevance of our analysis for the debate on perceptual agency and the embodied mind thesis. We conclude that the embodied mental action route to theorizing perceptual agency provides the best analysis of perceptual agency but comes with significant commitments about the embodiment of attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of traumatic experiences led Freud to investigate what he termed a compulsion to repeat. The present paper takes up the idea of a tendency to repeat something that reinforces psychic pain and asks which kind of agency is possible in the light of traumatic repetitions. First, the experiential roots of repetitive doings induced by trauma are investigated. Might a compulsion to repeat belong to the sphere of the kind of tendencies which Husserl terms "generally unconscious"? And if so, does this sphere bring us to the limit of phenomenology where we might need to cooperate with psychoanalysis to make sense of the manifestations of such an unconscious sphere? This is proposed in section two. In section three, Freud's notion of the compulsion to repeat is discussed. At this point, the repetitive activity of the mind is investigated as the traumatized person's ongoing struggle to survive with the trauma and as a struggle to understand what survival in this case even means. In section four, an attempt is made to describe the kind of agency involved in the repetitive activity of the mind. The paper concludes that weak agency is possible in traumatic repetition when understood as the person's ongoing attempt to compose a future for what has been lost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, my aim is to develop a phenomenological understanding of discrimination from the perspective of the discriminator. Since early existential phenomenology, the phenomenon of discrimination has received a great deal of attention. While much of this work has focused on the experience of the discriminatee, recent scholarship has begun to reflect on the intentional structures on the side of the discriminator. In a contribution to this trend, I argue that our sense of what is (ab)normal plays a constitutively significant role in the reiteration and reinforcement of harmful discriminatory practices. More specifically, I argue that Husserl's distinction between two forms of normality, namely, concordance-normality [Einstimmigkeit] and optimal-normality [Optimalität], is an important tool for illuminating otherwise overlooked aspects of the discriminator's experience. I achieve this by demonstrating how these two notions of normality play distinct constitutive roles when comparing deliberate acts of discrimination committed with malintent, compared with more habitual and prereflective expectations which are already discriminatory in nucleo. I argue that at the heart of discriminatory practices there is a naïve, normalizing attempt to stabilize concordance at the expense of critical self-reflection, normative revisions, and enriched horizons of expectation. In doing so, this paper provides a novel and important contribution to philosophical discussions surrounding discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper is concerned with theories of direct perception in ecological psychology that first emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. Ecological psychology continues to be influential among philosophers and cognitive scientists today who defend a 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) approach to the scientific study of cognition. Ecological psychologists have experimentally investigated how animals are able to directly perceive their surrounding environment and what it affords to them. We pursue questions about direct perception through a discussion of the ecological psychologist's concept of affordances. In recent years, psychologists and philosophers have begun to mark out two explanatory roles for the affordance concept. In one role, affordances are cast as belonging to a shared, publicly available environment, and existing independent of the experience of any perceiving and acting animal. In a second role, affordances are described in phenomenological terms, in relation to an experiencing animal that has its own peculiar needs, interests and personal history. Our aim in this paper is to argue for a single phenomenological or experiential understanding of the affordance concept. We make our argument, first of all, based on William James' concept of pure experience developed in his later, radical empiricist writings. James thought of pure experience as having a field structure that is organized by the selective interest and needs of the perceiver. We will argue however that James did not emphasize sufficiently the social and intersubjective character of the field of experience. Drawing on the phenomenologist Aron Gurwitsch, we will argue that psychological factors like individual needs and attention must be thought of as already confronted with a social reality. On the phenomenological reading of affordances we develop, direct perception of affordances is understood as taking place within an intersubjective world structured by human social and cultural life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural Psychology (CP) is a relatively young perspective, growing in the field of social sciences, nevertheless, its ideas are found throughout the fields and its ancestors' -Naturwissenschaften and Philosophy- history. CP has several central notions which are introduced in the following paper. Thru their introduction, the central goal of the revelation of the essence of the idea of CP is proffered. The core idea of CP is a general psychological concept that should be considered as a starting point from where new ideas, innovations and challenging theories can emerge. In other words, a new general psychological perspective we can use as a starting point. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes Russian-French philosopher Alexandre Kojève's dialogue with proponents of Hegelianism and phenomenology in Soviet Russia of the 1920–30s. Considering works by Dmytro Chyzhevsky, Ivan Ilyin, Gustav Shpet, and Alexandre Koyré, I retrace Hegelian themes in Kojève, focusing on the relation between method and time. I argue that original reflections on method played a key role in both Russian Hegelianism and Kojève's work, from his famous Hegel lectures to the late fragments of a system. As I demonstrate, Kojève's Hegelianism was significantly shaped by his encounter with Ilyin's 1918 commentary on Hegel, a detailed study of the relation between method and the experience of time. However, in Kojève's hands, Ilyin's ideas were transformed, some radicalized, others abandoned. Comparatively reading texts by these thinkers in their respective contexts, I resituate and evaluate claims that Hegel's method was less dialectical than phenomenological. I finally argue that early Soviet Hegelian discourses not only shaped the trajectory of Kojève's Hegelianism but also radically anticipated concepts of time in French post-structuralism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dennett (Synthese,53(2), 159–180, 1982, 1991, Journal of Consciousness Studies,10(9–10), 19–30, 2003, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences,6, 247–270, 2007) proposes and defends a method called heterophenomenology. Heterophenomenology is a method to study consciousness from a third-person objective point of view as opposed to a first-person subjective point of view or (auto)-phenomenology. The method of heterophenomenology serves a necessary role in Dennett's schema of bridging the gap between the manifest and the scientific image of the world. In this paper, I attempt to present a limited critique of the method of heterophenomenology. The objection raised in this paper is limited to one of the steps involved in the method, i.e., the interpretation of the heterophenomenological text as analogous to novelist fiction. I attempt to show that the assumptions made by Dennett about the interpretation of fiction are contradictory in nature and therefore the same cannot be applied to the interpretation of a heterophenomenological text. The assumptions fail in justifying the interpretation of fiction itself and hence exporting them by analogy to interpret a heterophenomenological text is a mistake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether, and in what sense, research in phenomenology and phenomenological psychopathology has—in addition to its descriptive and hermeneutic value—explanatory power is somewhat controversial. This paper shows why it is legitimate to recognize such explanatory power. To this end, the paper analyzes two central concerns underlying the debate about explanation in phenomenology: (a) the warning against reductionism, which is implicit in a conception of causal explanation exclusively based on models of natural/physical causation; and (b) the warning against top-down generalizations, which neglect the specificity of the individual. While acknowledging that these two caveats express serious concerns regarding the debate on explanatory models, I show that phenomenology has the resources to respond to them. These can be found in analyses of different types of causation relating to different regions of reality and in the structure of explanatory models based on exemplarity. On the basis of these analyses, I defend a pluralist account vis-à-vis explanatory models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows how self-inflicted pain enabled the expression of love for God among Christian monastic flagellant ascetics in medieval central Europe. As scholars have shown, being in a state of pain leads to a change in or a destruction of language, an essential attribute of the self. I argue that this transformation allows the self to transcend its boundaries as a conscious object, even if only in part, in a limited manner and temporarily, thereby enabling the expression of love for God, a non-object. To substantiate my argument, I show that the self's transcendence of its boundaries as a conscious object and its consequent experience of being a non-object enable the imitation of God: not solely in the sense of imitatio Christi, of the physical and visual representations of God incarnate in the flesh of His son Christ, but also in the sense of the self's experience of being a non-object, just like God, the telos of the self's love. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Annual Biosemiotic Achievement Award was established at the annual meeting of the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies (ISBS) in 2014, in conjunction with Springer and Biosemiotics. It seeks to recognize papers published in the journal that present novel and potentially important contributions to biosemiotic research, its scientific impact and its future prospects. Here the winner of the Biosemiotic Achievement Award for 2020 is announced: The award goes to Filip Jaroš and Matěj Pudil for the article "Cognitive systems of human and non-human animals: At the crossroads of phenomenology, ethology and biosemiotics". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last three decades, a cultural perspective has been used to understand scientific knowledge and technology. This relatively new perspective has introduced literature on the ethical dimension to the development of technology, which are embedded in techniques, tools and artifacts. Today, more than ever, there is an urgent need to comprehend the global ramifications of modernization. In this paper, we make an attempt to look at science and technology based on culture, wisdom, ecology and ethical values. We move towards reviewing and consolidating significant literature on philosophy of technology and culture within contemporary times. Furthermore, this article touches upon the transformative power of technologies in relation to modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, we find ourselves in a paradigm in which we believe that accepting climate change data will lead to a kind of automatic action toward the preservation of our environment. I have argued elsewhere (Fried 2020) that this lack of civic action on climate data is significant when placed in the historical, military context of the technologies that collect this data––Earth remote sensing technologies. However, I have not yet discussed the phenomenological or moral implications of this context, which are deeply interconnected. In this paper, I assert that Earth remote sensing technologies can, if we are not careful, lead us to a kind of environmental deskilling. This assertion comes in four parts. First, the military context of Earth remote sensing technologies––which collect important data on climate change––acts as a kind of stability, as defined by Don Ihde and others. Second, I invoke Sir Patrick Heelan to argue that the theoretical underpinnings of Earth systems science do not translate from military to environmental praxes as we imagine they do. Third, Hannah Arendt makes the case that a state's trust in simplifying narratives like that of climate data, meant to create "islands" of certainty in an uncertain world, can be self-defeating. That is to say, they can silence public action. I extend these arguments through Vallor's analysis of moral deskilling, in which she points out that an overemphasis on autonomous data collection––and trust in a kind of automated decision-making on that data––can deskill us from important questions relevant to our collective flourishing. In all of these examples, the lines between environmental and military research are blurry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within contemporary philosophy of perception, it is commonly claimed that flavour experiences are paradigmatic examples of multimodal perceptual experiences. In fact, virtually any sensory system, including vision and audition, is believed to influence how we experience flavours. However, there is a strong intuition, often expressed in these works, that not all of these sensory systems make an equal contribution to the phenomenology of flavour experiences. More specifically, it seems that the activities of some sensory systems are constitutive for flavour perception while others merely influence how we experience flavours. This paper aims to answer the question regarding the constitutive factors of flavour perception in a twofold way. First, a theoretical framework is developed, relying on debates regarding constitutivity in analytic metaphysics and philosophy of science, which defines the stronger and weaker senses in which the activities of sensory systems may be constitutive for flavour perception. Second, relying on empirical results in flavour science, the constitutive status of activities related to distinct sensory systems in the context of flavour perception is investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Husserl envisages transcendental phenomenology as a radically founding science that lays bare the higher-order experiences whereby logic and a theory of science become constituted. On the other hand, according to a usual presentation of Hegel's philosophy, phenomenology is "logic's precondition," and science presents itself as its "result." This alleged precedence of Hegel's phenomenology (with its experiential and historical horizons) regarding logic may be a motif behind the current affinities recently traced between Hegelian and Husserlian notions of phenomenology that highlight their views on experience, history, and the lifeworld. This paper offers instead a reconsideration of aspects of their philosophies mostly challenged or dismissed since the rise of positivism: a reappraisal of their views on the relationship between phenomenology, logic, and philosophy as an "absolute" system of sciences. The argument is made that the irreconcilable difference between their projects ultimately stands on the radical contrast between Hegel's speculative-conceptual method and system of sciences and Husserl's foundational science and method as experiential-phenomenological all the way through. Despite this methodological abyss, this paper vindicates their affinities in their refusal to segregate science from life, and their attempts to overcome modernity's inherited fragmentation of culture by providing an all-unifying approach to philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper explores anew the question of Husserl's metaphysics by contrasting H. Philipse and D. Zahavi's respective position on the matter. I argue that these positions fall victim to opposing exegetical pitfalls. On the one hand, while I concur with Philipse's general characterisation of Husserl as an ontological phenomenalist, I disagree that this implies Husserl was a subjective idealist similar to Berkeley. On the other hand, while Zahavi's correlationist interpretation of Husserl avoids this subjective idealist interpretation, I argue that it inadvertently succumbs to the realist alternative that construes the world as existing independently from subjectivity. The way out of this dilemma is to interpret Husserl as an experiential monist, where the phenomenal stream (Erlebnisstrom) is taken to be ontologically primary, by virtue of its antecedence over the subject-object or mind-world dichotomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My aim in this paper is to reconstruct Edmund Husserl's views on the differences between human and animal consciousness, with particular attention to the experience of temporality. In the first section, I situate the topic of animal consciousness in the broader context of Husserl's philosophy. Whereas this connection has been often neglected, I argue that a phenomenological analysis of non-human subjectivities is not only justified, but also essential to the Husserlian project as a whole. In the second section, I introduce two notions Husserl resorts to when describing the essential difference between human and animal subjectivities, namely "strata of consciousness" and "person." Drawing on textual evidence, I argue that Husserl does not simply see animals as excluded from the sphere of personhood. Rather, he draws a distinction between two modes of personal life, one of which is said to be unique to human adults. What holds these two modes apart, according to Husserl, is a subject's relation to time. In the third section, I delve deeper into this topic, asking how we should understand Husserl's claim that animals live in a "restricted temporality." I argue that this has less to do with an inability to remember, imagine, or anticipate future events, and more with an inability to explore temporal horizons stretching before one's birth or after one's death. By contrast, humans gradually overcome these limitations during ontogeny, thanks to the practice of linguistic communication. This also has consequences for our capacity to engage in genuinely theoretical thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I draw on Heidegger's phenomenology of "moods" (Stimmungen) to interpret loneliness as a diffused and atmospheric feeling-state that often undergirds the lives of older adults, shaping the ways in which they are attuned to and make sense of the world. I focus specifically on residents in long-term care facilities to show how the social isolation and lockdown measures of the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically intensified the mood. The aim is to shed light on how profound and totalizing the experience has been for residents. Making use of Heidegger's account of the affective "collapse" or "breakdown" (Zusammenbruch) of meaning, I argue that when older adults are functionally locked in their rooms for months at a time and cut off from the orienting routines and rhythms of the relational world, the result is a crumbling of the fundamental meaning-structures that constitute subjectivity. The global sense of abandonment and disconnection strips away the possibility for self-understanding, and residents are often left confused and abandoned to an existence that has been drained of meaning and significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]