Phenomenology and the metaphysics of mind

2005

, linguistics, neuroscience, and the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science. As the century progressed so the gulf between phenomenology and analytic philosophy of mind widened. This course surveys recent work that aims to bring together these two streams of thought by focusing, on the one hand, on work in phenomenology that is significant to current analytic research, and, on the other, on work that deploys the tools of analytic philosophy to address central phenomenological concerns. It also draws from recent philosophical contributions to the study of mind and cognition from a cross-cultural perspective. We will consider several of the most fundamental issues in the philosophical study of mind: (i) the nature, content, and character of consciousness; (ii) the problem of intentionality; (iii) approaches to perception, action, and emotion; and (iv) conceptions of self/no-self and subjectivity.

Psyche, 2010

One might interpret the locution “the phenomenological mind” as a declaration of a philosophical thesis that the mind is in some sense essentially phenomenological. Authors Gallagher & Zahavi appear to have intended it, however, to refer more to the phenomenological tradition and its methods of analysis. From the subheading of this book, one gains an impression that readers will see how the resources and perspectives from the phenomenological tradition illuminate various issues in philosophy of mind and cognitive science in particular. This impression is reinforced upon finding that many analytic philosophers’ names appear throughout the book. That appearance notwithstanding, as well as the distinctiveness of the book as an introduction, the authors do not sufficiently engage with analytic philosophy.

It ought to be obvious that phenomenology has a lot to say in the area called philosophy of mind. Yet the traditions of phenomenology and analytic philosophy of mind have not been closely joined, despite overlapping areas of interest. So it is appropriate to close this survey of phenomenology by addressing philosophy of mind, one of the most vigorously debated areas in recent philosophy. The tradition of analytic philosophy began, early in the 20th century, with analyses of language, notably in the works of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Then in The Concept of Mind (1949) Gilbert Ryle developed a series of analyses of language about different mental states, including sensation, belief, and will. Though Ryle is commonly deemed a philosopher of ordinary language, Ryle himself said The Concept of Mind could be called phenomenology. In effect, Ryle analyzed our phenomenological understanding of mental states as reflected in ordinary language about the mind. From this linguistic phenomenology Ryle argued that Cartesian mind-body dualism involves a category mistake (the logic or grammar of mental verbs— " believe " , " see " , etc.—does not mean that we ascribe belief, sensation, etc., to " the ghost in the machine "). With Ryle's rejection of mind-body dualism, the mind-body problem was re-awakened: what is the ontology of mind vis-à-vis body, and how are mind and body related? René Descartes, in his epoch-making Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), had argued that minds and bodies are two distinct kinds of being or substance with two distinct kinds of attributes or modes: bodies are characterized by spatiotemporal physical properties, while minds are characterized by properties of thinking (including seeing, feeling, etc.). Centuries later, phenomenology would find, with Brentano and Husserl, that mental acts are characterized by consciousness and intentionality, while natural science would find that physical systems are characterized by mass and force, ultimately by gravitational, electromagnetic, and quantum fields. Where do we find consciousness and intentionality in the quantum-electromagnetic-gravitational field that, by hypothesis, orders everything in the natural world in which we humans and our minds exist? That is the mind-body problem today. In short, phenomenology by any other name lies at the heart of the contemporary mind-body problem. After Ryle, philosophers sought a more explicit and generally naturalistic ontology of mind. In the 1950s materialism was argued anew, urging that mental states are identical with states of the central nervous system. The classical identity theory holds that each token mental state (in a particular person's mind at a particular time) is identical with a token brain state (in that person's brain at that time). A stronger materialism holds, instead, that each type of mental state is identical with a type of brain state. But materialism does not fit comfortably with phenomenology. For it is not obvious how conscious mental states as we experience them— sensations, thoughts, emotions—can simply be the complex neural states that somehow subserve or implement them. If mental states and neural states are simply identical, in token or in type, where in our scientific theory of mind does the phenomenology occur—is it not simply replaced by neuroscience? And yet experience is part of what is to be explained by neuroscience.

There is a growing tendency in contemporary research on the human mind to examine conscious experiences in light of their first-personal character or phenomenology. How things appear to us is not an epiphenomenal property, or a feature of experience explainable in reductionist or behavioural terms; rather, it is a fundamental, and so "ineliminable" (1), aspect of experience. The three coeditors of the volume Philosophy of Mind and Phenomenology: Conceptual and Empirical Approaches have gathered fifteen scholarly papers that explore the richness of conscious experience from the firstpersonal perspective, and together attest that "phenomenology plays an indispensable role in our attempt to understand the mind" (2). Admittedly, I was already convinced by this thesis even before opening the book, but reading this great collection made even clearer "the value, relevance, and, indeed, the indispensability of phenomenology for the study of the mind" (2). The book comprises essays by an impressive list of scholars and experts in phenomenology, both young and more established, male and female. The overall quality of the papers is very good, and the book offers a broad and rich portrait of some of the current research trends in the field. The essays are varied in style: some papers are more historical and exegetical (Moran), some are more

2008

New York: Routledge, 2008 244 pages, ISBN: 0415391229 (pbk); $29.95

The Phenomenological Mind is the first book to properly introduce fundamental questions about the mind from the perspective of phenomenology. Key questions and topics covered include: * What is phenomenology? * naturalizing phenomenology and the empirical cognitive sciences * phenomenology and consciousness * consciousness and self-consciousness, including perception and action * time and consciousness, including William James, Edmund Husserl and temporal disorders in psychopathology * intentionality * the embodied mind * action * knowledge of other minds * situated and extended minds * phenomenology and personal identity. Interesting and important examples are used throughout, including phantom limb syndrome, blindsight and self-disorders in schizophrenia, making the Phenomenological Mind an ideal introduction to key concepts in phenomenology, cognitive science and philosophy of mind.

2011

Phenomenology and Mind practices double blind refereeing and publishes in English.

Telos, 1971

First Paragraph: The Phenomenological Mind is part of a recent initiative to show that phenomenology contributes something important to cognitive science. (For other examples, see the References section.) Phenomenology, of course, has been a part of cognitive science for a long time. It implicitly informs the works of Andy Clark (e.g., 1997) and John Haugeland (e.g., 1998), and Hubert Dreyfus explicitly uses it (e.g., 1992). But where the former use phenomenology in the background as broad context and Dreyfus uses it primarily (though not exclusively) as a critique of conventional artificial intelligence, Gallagher and Zahavi indicate a positive and constructive place for it. They do not recommend that we simply accept pronouncements of thinkers like Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty and apply them to questions of cognition, but that we use revised forms of phenomenology to illuminate dimensions of cognitive experience that are missing in current research.