From a classical phenomenological point of view, to reason is to have a conscious intentional experience. A conscious experience can be described as a predicative reconstruction of whatever reason might be concerned with while the intentional aspect can be deduced from the effort of disclosing specialized propositional insights into whatever reasoning is concerned with. Husserl argued that the task of phenomenology is to pave the way toward a science of consciousness in which reason as key feature (...) of conscious life will be properly treated. However, contemporary phenomenology adopted an entirely different perspective on this matter. Conscious experiences are now described from a perspective reminiscent to traditional empiricism while the search for universal objectivity is abandoned in favor of contextual truths. The current situation raises several questions how did we get here, does making sense entail emotions, does the emotivist reconsideration of consciousness solve the problem of objectivity, should a future science of consciousness stress the role of emotions as a solution to subjectivism and yet to be considered a phenomenological science of consciousness. In this paper, I only begin to tackle these problems. (shrink)

Ontology, the ideas we have about the nature of reality, and epistemology, our concepts about how to gain knowledge about the world, are interdependent. Currently, the dominant ontology in science is a materialist model, and associated with it an empiricist epistemology. Historically speaking, there was a more comprehensive notion at the cradle of modern science in the middle ages. Then “experience” meant both inner, or first person, and outer, or third person, experience. With the historical development, experience has come to (...) mean only sense experience of outer reality. This has become associated with the ontology that matter is the most important substance in the universe, everything else—consciousness, mind, values, etc., —being derived thereof or reducible to it. This ontology is insufficient to explain the phenomena we are living with—consciousness, as a precondition of this idea, or anomalous cognitions. These have a robust empirical grounding, although we do not understand them sufficiently. The phenomenology, though, demands some sort of non-local model of the world and one in which consciousness is not derivative of, but coprimary with matter. I propose such a complementarist dual aspect model of consciousness and brain, or mind and matter. This then also entails a different epistemology. For if consciousness is coprimary with matter, then we can also use a deeper exploration of consciousness as happens in contemplative practice to reach an understanding of the deep structure of the world, for instance in mathematical or theoretical intuition, and perhaps also in other areas such as in ethics. This would entail a kind of contemplative science that would also complement our current experiential mode that is exclusively directed to the outside aspect of our world. Such an epistemology might help us with various issues, such as good theoretical and other intuitions. (shrink)

Before engaging with intentionality, the philosopher of mind must consider the intrinsic nature of psychological elements. Conscious states, contrary to ordinary and scientific objects, seem to penetrate each another in such a way that it becomes impossible to enumerate, class or organize through laws the various experiences at stake. In this context, how is a science of consciousness conceivable? How is it possible to apply the epistemological requirements of any science to a domain whose ontological nature contradicts such demands? (...) The paper reconstructs Husserl’s solution to this issue in the Fifth Logical Investigation. I show how his appeal to the mereological framework of the Third Investigation gives him the tools to rationalize the domain of the mind and to establish phenomenology as an authentic science of consciousness. I first demonstrate that the very task of phenomenological investigations is defined in mereological terms. I then reconstruct the issue regarding the inclusion of the intentional object within the act, by exposing the nuances of the Husserlian position in this famous controversy. In a last part, I show how mereological concepts are at the core of the Husserlian reinterpretation of the Brentanian thesis according to which all acts are presentations or based on presentations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Experience, Institutions, and EpistemologyRiley Paterson, MA (bio)I am grateful for these comments on my paper, “The Dilemma of Compliance,” because they illuminate the limitations of the paper’s emphasis. The paper is, above all, meant to caution or warn providers of subtle but serious harm that can occur in institutional settings. I want to attune providers to the ways in which institutional coercion and violence occur in the ordinary process (...) of following rules and filling of roles. Thus I write that the goal is “to become self-conscious observers of systems of compliance, rather than unconscious conformers.” Institutional coercion is a social process like any other and thus involves intersubjective dynamics. These dynamics do not appear as measurable, physical structures, but rather as invisible patterns in time, made visible only by being named and grasped experientially. I am offering language that can help make these invisible dynamics visible, so that providers can navigate institutions differently.My desire to caution and attune other providers can be explained partly by the conditions in which I wrote the paper: making sense of my time in forensic mental health, where I worked with clients who were mandated mental health treatment upon avoiding or exiting incarceration. I was processing my own experience of submitting monthly “compliance reports” to various agencies. I was concerned with the experiential process of navigating coercive environments. Thus my commenter is correct to try and widen our consideration, as my paper is indeed limited by its focus on the lived experience of censorship, oppression, and institutional coercion.This emphasis means that I am neglecting other dimensions, such as the positive role of rules in organizing communities, and the way in which some mental health institutions are working on creating safe and healing formal environments. I also believe, however, that the fields of psychology, psychiatry, and mental health broadly need to be careful about institutions, rules, and roles. We are not, in my estimation, in danger of providing too many safe spaces in which healing can occur. Quite the opposite, psychiatry and psychotherapy have, since their outset, been intertwined with troubling political motivations, and we continue to struggle with the manipulative tendencies of the field (Carr, 2018; Cabanas & Illouz, 2021).I, therefore, would like to take this opportunity to restate the core argument of my paper, and to situate this argument within the context of my other publications and the overall project they belong to. There is likely some ambiguity about [End Page 385] the central thrust of my paper. When commenting on my discussion of schizophrenia, my commenter refers to it as “the seeming central topic of the paper.” This is understandable. Schizophrenia is the topic I discuss that has the most obvious clinical implications. Indeed, I am making an argument about the phenomenological intelligibility of schizophrenia. With both my discussions of schizophrenia and censorship, however, I am making both immanent arguments and transcendent arguments. In other words, although I am making arguments about both schizophrenia and censorship, those arguments need to be understood as an example of a broader problem of coercion within human relationships. My intent is to highlight general dynamics present within human relationships and communities that contribute to institutional violence and the excessive regulation of individuals. My concern is with rules, roles, and coercion in general; schizophrenia and censorship provide exaggerated examples of what is fundamentally an ordinary, daily experience. Mental health institutions are uniquely involved in coercive institutional processes, but almost all human environments carry some danger of coercion and oppression in terms of fitting, belonging, or conforming with rules and roles. My exploration of schizophrenia and censorship is certainly meant to illuminate those particular topics, but the broader point concerns all human experience.The phenomenological or experiential thrust of the paper must be situated within my broader analysis that also includes institutional and epistemological dimensions. My reviewer is correct to point out that with schizophrenia, censorship, or trauma, the crucial dimension is communities in which people feel safe enough to learn, grow, and develop their capacities. In this vein, my reviewer points to Geel as an admirable model of communally driven care. I am largely in agreement with this line of thinking. In... (shrink)

Objectivity is one of the oldest of problems in philosophy. Plato, Aristotle and others strived to provide a definitive solution. One of Husserl’s strategies was to introduce a distinction between “sciences of matters of fact” and “eidetic sciences” where the transition from the first science to the second science is possible via intentional sifting which is not to say that something becomes objective because one intends it. For Husserl intentional sifting is cognitive, hence phenomenology should begin by describing (...) “the essence of thinking” in order to later become a genuine science of consciousness. But inside the phenomenological movement there are profound disagreements with respect to the ontology of cognition and intentionality. Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty opted for emotional descriptions of thinking. With few exceptions, contemporary phenomenology has become the praise of emotional experience. In this paper I take the opposite path and make the case for cognitive-intentional character of consciousness I consider one of the most important problems of contemporary philosophy and psychology. I follow the assumption that the only way to generate objective propositions is to assume, against current views, that Husserl was not an idealist and that we can speak about cognition without reducing to emotion and yet without committing to dualism. (shrink)

The grammatical manipulation and production of language is a great deceiver. We have become habituated to accept the use of well-constructed language to indicate intelligence, understanding and, consequently, intention, whether conscious or unconscious. But we are not always right to do so, and certainly not in the case of large language models (LLMs) like ChapGPT, GPT-4, LLaMA, and Google Bard. This is a perennial problem, but when one understands why it occurs, it ceases to be surprising that it so (...) stubbornly persists. This paper will have three main sections. In the Introduction I will say a little about language, its aetiology, and useful sub-divisions into natural and cultural. In the second section I will explain the current situation with regard to large language models and fill in the background debates which set the problem up as one of increased complexity rather than one of a qualitatively different kind from narrow or specific AI. In the third section I will present the case for the missing phenomenological background and why it is necessary for the co-creation of shared meaning in both natural and cultural language, and I will conclude this section by presenting a rationale for why this situation arises and will continue to arise. Before we do any of this, I need to clarify one point: I do not wish to challenge the ascription of artificial general intelligence (AGI) to LLMs, indeed I think agnosticism is best in this respect, but I do challenge the more serious, and erroneous, ascription of understanding, intention, reason, and consciousness to them. And so, I am making two points: an epistemological one about why we fall into error in our ascription of a mental life to LLMs, and an ontological one about the impossibility of LLMs being or becoming conscious. (shrink)

The question asked in this paper is: How can we investigate our phenomenal experience in ways that are accurate, in principle repeatable, and produce experiences that help clarify what we understand about the processes of sensing, perceiving, moving, and being in the world? This sounds like an impossible task, given that introspection has so often in scientific circles been considered to be unreliable, and that first-person accounts are often coloured by mistaken ideas about what and how we are experiencing. The (...) first-person experiments I suggest are different from experiments done in the psychology laboratory in that there is no narrowing down of the experiments to looking at a singular aspect of a question, and that they are to be carried out in most instances in a natural or specially structured environment without strict task controls or statistical experimental design. There is no intent to replace formal second- and third-person investigation, but to use a phenomenological approach to conjoin with hard research, and to suggest ways of awareness training that can enhance the skills of researchers. I take as a model an informal phenomenological approach for experimentation. I also suggest that it is possible through directing and broadening the attention process to turn consciousness towards what is non-conscious or unattended to in order to develop an improved sensory awareness and an ability to be open to experiencing without prejudging and without expectations. The idea is to go back to experience without first creating a theoretical stance from which to interpret what happens. I conclude with some other examples of this approach. (shrink)

This paper explores the phenomenon of near-death experiences (NDEs) from a phenomenological viewpoint, contesting the objectification of an NDE's intentional content while acknowledging two of its characteristics: the exclusivity of the experience and the subject's self-transformation. Through these two features, a discussion follows on the epistemological and ontological arguments advanced by those endorsing an objectivist interpretation of the phenomenon, whether materialist or spiritualist. The last part of the essay lays the groundwork for developing an ontology designed to provide an (...) appropriate philosophical signification for NDEs. (shrink)

This is a prepublication version of the final chapter from the Blackwell Companion to Consciousness. In it I re-examine the basic conditions required for a study of conscious experiences in the light of progress made in recent years in the field of consciousness studies. I argue that neither dualist nor reductionist assumptions about subjectivity versus objectivity and the privacy of experience versus the public nature of scientific observations allow an adequate understanding of how studies of consciousness actually proceed. The (...) chapter examines the sense in which the experimenter is also a subject, the sense in which all experienced phenomena are private and subjective, the different senses in which a phenomenon can nevertheless be public and observations of it objective, and the conditions for intra-subjective and intersubjective repeatability. The chapter goes on to re-examine the empirical method and how methods used in psychology differ from those used in physics. I argue that a reflexive understanding of these relationships supports a form of “critical phenomenology” that fits consciousness studies smoothly into science. (shrink)

For enactivists and pragmatists alike, sense-making is a systemic process of bringing the organism and environment into reciprocity. Steiner (2023) distinguishes enactivism from pragmatism by arguing that intention is compatible with enactivism but not pragmatism. After reviewing Steiner’s analysis, I consider its ontological consequences and phenomenological implications which I suggest cause problems for both enactivism and pragmatism, but in two different ways. Intention is consistent with the idea of an autonomy of sense-making but reveals its latent subjectivity – which sits (...) uncomfortably with an enactivist account. The absence of intention implies the existence of states of supra-subjective consciousness but lack of such accounts is troublesome for pragmatism. Next, I introduce Material Engagement Theory. I emphasise its affinity to pragmatism and describe its role in developing clayful phenomenology, an experiential way of investigating creative practice from the perspective of the process. A case-study of a sculptural project illustrates how action, creating a construction-site atmosphere as it goes, gathers diverse materials and elements to itself: wood, clay, plaster, steel, a sculpted skull, a painting, a wall, tree trunks, scaffolding, neolithic sculptures etc. These elements draw themselves into rhythmical associations that resonate with others that are formed through and by sculptural gestures and these go onto form further gestural patterns. The project shows how a creative situation creates a sense of affective purpose by and through the act of creating itself. (shrink)

These supporting concepts enable us to much more adequately understand the meaning of apoha. First, a sharp distinction is drawn between the real and the conceptual; the real is particular, unique, momentary and the basis of perception, while the conceptual is universal, general, only supposedly objective and the basis of language. Second, the complex nature of negation discloses the kind of negation meant by apoha. Negation by implication is seen as disclosing the necessary relation between simple affirmations and simple negations. (...) It is in this sense that Dignaga asserts that the meaning of words lies in the negation of the opposite. Third, the idea of apoha as the differentiation of concepts is to be distinguished from the Nyāya-Vaiśe $$\underset{\raise0.3em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\cdot}$}}{s}$$ ika notion of exclusion as a materially present quality in objects.Ratnakirti, and Mok $$\underset{\raise0.3em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\cdot}$}}{s}$$ ākaragupta following him, use the idea of negation by implication to explain apoha as the simultaneity of and logical relation between a positive assertion concerning an epistemological object and a negative assertion concerning all things which are not that epistemological object. For example, Ratnakirti in accordance with the theory of apoha explains that the term cow “harbors” the negation of non-cow in the same way that blue is harbored in the term blue lotus. The exclusion of the other, i.e., the negation of the non-cow, is held by Ratnakirti to be an actually apprehended attribute of the cow cognized (as distinct from the cow in itself). He says “... discrimination of non-cow inevitably arises simultaneously with the perception of the cow, for (the negation of non-cow) is the qualifier (of the individual).” This interaction between the positive and the negation of the other, i.e., the relation of negation by implication, as a simultaneous interaction is necessary lest when, e.g., asked to tie up a cow one ties up a horse instead.Mok $$\underset{\raise0.3em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\cdot}$}}{s}$$ ākaragupta denies three possible interpretations of apoha before putting forth his own definition. The first is that when an external object is conceptualized this is done as “the other (the dissimilar) is discriminated from this.”The second is much the same, only it is in terms of the mental image, i.e., the epistemological object rather than the ontological object as in the first. The third is that apoha means the negation of an assertion, i.e., the simple absence of the other. All three of these interpretations are unacceptable to Mok $$\underset{\raise0.3em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\cdot}$}}{s}$$ ākaragupta. He defines apoha as “the affirmation (of a positive entity) qualified by discrimination (of it from all other entities).”Mok $$\underset{\raise0.3em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\cdot}$}}{s}$$ ākaragupta goes on to explain this simultaneity more fully: ... those who stress affirmation think that after we have known the cow, we consequently determine the discrimination of the essence of the cow from that of the non-cow; those who stress the negative function of apoha are of the opinion that we first know the discrimination of the dissimilar thing and then consequently confirm the thing which is discriminated from others, viz., the cow. Thus (both interpretations) are wrong. For at the time of judgment we do not experience an order of comprehension in which (negation or affirmation) occurs first. In fact, it is not the case that one, having understood the affirmation, later confirms the negation by implication, or that one having understood the negation later confirms what is discriminated (from the dissimilar). Therefore, we say that the very understanding of the cow is the same as the understanding of what is discriminated from the dissimilar.We can see from this that for Ratnakirti and Mok $$\underset{\raise0.3em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\cdot}$}}{s}$$ ākaragupta apoha meant the simultaneous affirmation of and negation of the dissimilar from the (epistemological) object. Mok $$\underset{\raise0.3em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\cdot}$}}{s}$$ ākaragupta's concern with the “time of judgment” also shows that the idea of apoha was understood by them as being psychologically descriptive. In the process of identifying an epistemological object as some particular thing, neither the negative nor the positive function have priority but are, rather, complementary one to the other. This simultaneity and complementarity are supported by the examination of mind “at the time of judgment,” i.e., it is a psychological description of the process of identification of an epistemological object as some particular thing.It is this fact of apoha describing the process of identification which, as described above, places apoha in the inference category of sources of truth. Apoha is clearly, therefore, involved with words and concepts rather than being on the perception side where it would have to be a metaphysical concept describing the real or absolute.Putting the idea of apoha into contemporary terms we can say that it is a psychological descriptor for the bipolar relation of concepts. Dignaga and the other Buddhist logicians are then to be understood here as being involved in producing a phenomenological description of linguistic thought processes. More broadly, as in the discussion of perception, they are involved in the phenomenological description of consciousness, a favorite Buddhist undertaking. As such, the work of the Buddhist logicians fits into the larger soteriological intention of all Buddhist thinkers, since enlightenment is understood to follow from insight into the nature of consciousness as productive of suffering.Some authors have criticized the logicians as being overly concerned with the un-Buddhist occupation of arguing. However, when their work is seen as expanding our understanding of the nature and working of consciousness, the logicians are certainly worthy of our respect. (shrink)

In 1979, neuroscientists Libet, Wright, Feinstein and Pearl introduced the “delay-and-antedating” hypothesis/paradox based on the results of an on-going series of experiments dating back to 1964 that measured the neural adequacy [brain wave activity] of “conscious sensory experience”. What is fascinating about the results of this experiment is the implication, especially when considered in the light of Merleau-Ponty’s notions of “intentionality” and the “pre-reflective life of human motility”, that the body, and hence not solely the mind, is a thinking (...) thing. The experiments and conclusions of Libet et al. have attracted considerable academic attention and have been used in the development of psychological theories on automotivism and the adaptive unconscious. Moreover, they have engendered a series of important considerations in respect of the question of free will. This paper outlines the connections between the findings of Libet et al. and Merleau-Ponty’s ontology as presented in the Phenomenology of Perception. It is not our intention to argue that the former amounts to new wine in old bottles, but rather to show counterfactually that Merleau-Ponty’s ontology provides a theoretical framework which explains the experimental data obtained by Libet et al., and provides further speculative confirmation of the work stemming from neuro-physical research and emerging theories on the adaptive unconscious. (shrink)

The point of departure for Perceiving Reality is the idea that per- ception is an embodied structural feature of consciousness whose function is determined by phenomenal experiences in a corresponding domain (of visible, tangibles, etc.). In Perceiving Reality, I try to develop a way of conceiving of our most basic mode of being in the world that resists attempts to cleave reality into an inner and outer, a mental and a physical domain. The central argument of the book is that (...) what we apprehend in perception are not, to paraphrase J.L. Austin, the external, mind-independent, medium-sized dry goods that populate the realist’s ontology. Rather, to paraphrase Husserl and a group of Buddhist philosophers in league with Dignāga and Dharmakīrti, the objects apprehended in perception are the intentional or aspectual object. (shrink)

The "hard problem" of today's consciousness studies is subjective experience: understanding why some brain processing is accompanied by an experienced inner life. Recent scientific advances offer insights for understanding the physiological and chemical phenomenology of consciousness. But by leaving aside the internal experiential nature of consciousness in favor of mapping neural activity, such science leaves many questions unanswered. In Ontology of Consciousness, scholars from a range of disciplines -- from neurophysiology to parapsychology, from mathematics to anthropology and indigenous non-Western modes (...) of thought -- go beyond these limits of current neuroscience research to explore insights offered by other intellectual approaches to consciousness. These scholars focus their attention on such philosophical approaches to consciousness as Tibetan Tantric Buddhism, North American Indian insights, pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilization, and the Byzantine Empire. Some draw on artifacts and ethnographic data to make their point. Others translate cultural concepts of consciousness into modern scientific language using models and mathematical mappings. Many consider individual experiences of sentience and existence, as seen in African communalism, Hindi psychology, Zen Buddhism, Indian vibhuti phenomena, existentialism, philosophical realism, and modern psychiatry. Some reveal current views and conundrums in neurobiology to comprehend sentient intellection. Contributors: Karim Akerma, Matthijs Cornelissen, Antoine Courban, Mario Crocco, Christian de Quincey, Thomas B. Fowler, Erlendur Haraldsson, David. J. Hufford, Pavel B. Ivanov, Heinz Kimmerle, Stanley Krippner, Armand J. Labbé, James Maffie, Hubert Markl, Graham Parkes, Michael Polemis, E Richard Sorenson, Mircea Steriade, Thomas Szasz, Mariela Szirko, Robert A.F. Thurman, Edith L.B. Turner, Julia Watkin, Helmut Wautischer. (shrink)

At the intersections of social anthropology, philosophy, and Asian studies, my paper explores the body ecologic through a phenomenological frame in the context of Chinese culture engaging both theory and method. How can qì cultivation experiences transporting bodies and persons in movement, within the world and their “life‐world,” be interpreted through a phenomenology of perception? Based on ethnographic study data collected mainly in South China (Guangzhou) and in Taiwan (1990s–2000s), this exploration is situated within qìgōng experiences (training, cultivating and mastering (...) the qì). Anchored in martial, religious, and healing arts and their meanings, qìgōng’s myriad of forms and infinite variations invite journeys into religious Daoist and Buddhist practice, Chinese thought, and politico‐religious issues of past and present Chinese society. The qìgōng world, paths of knowledge transmission, healing horizons, claimed affiliations, and views of practitioners unveil an ontology and a cosmology grounded in religious (Daoist and Buddhist) lore. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Authenticity in Robert Musil’s Man Without QualitiesKelly CobleIHow is a man without qualities even possible? The question, also a translation of the title of a recent essay mining the philosophical sources of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, has been a perennial one. The Austrian novelist's portrayal of an existence without the density of particularity has been an object of interminable conjecture.1 In the search for an interpretive foothold, (...) the bulk of Musil's commentators has identified Ernst Mach's "doctrine of elements," with its implication of the anonymity of perception, as the chief inspiration of Musil's portrait of a dispossessed inner life.2 Against this view Cambridge philosopher G. H. von Wright has asserted that Mach's influence was "incidental and without deeper significance to the content of Musil's later thoughts."3 Von Wright notes that Musil rejected Mach's skeptical and phenomenalist theses in his 1908 dissertation on Mach's theories, defending instead a realist position in the philosophy of physics. Yet another commentator has adduced evidence of Musil's persistent engagement in the sort of act-object analysis of states of consciousness that one would expect from a follower of Franz Brentano.4In the following pages I will show that Musil's literary masterpiece rests on a synthesis of Machian and Brentanist motifs. But the main impetus of Musil's presentation of an interior with substitutable qualities was not one or another claim in the domain of modern epistemology, "realism" versus "idealism," "phenomenology" versus "phenomenalism," but a crisis in moral reflection ensuing from a commitment to the standpoint of value-neutral objectivity. This standpoint gains its [End Page 337] appeal when both of the known pathways to moral certainty—both the conservative-traditional one of allegiance to enduring practices and institutions and the liberal-enlightenment one of deference to the universal requirements of reason—appear as blind alleys, as they did to inhabitants of Central Europe after the turn of the century and especially in the aftermath of the Great War. To exist without qualities is to abandon oneself to the purely theoretical outlook, and so to be unable to construct a narrative rendering the episodes of one's life as parts of a process with cumulativeness and direction. To live "without qualities" is to live the loss of moral narrative. Accordingly, the intent of Musil's literary investigations is both to illuminate the conditions of this loss and to assay the conditions of ethical life regained.IIAccording to Mach's doctrine of elements, the isolable sensations that constitute the ultimate points of psychological analysis are the very elements with which the physical sciences also have to deal, albeit the physical sciences deal with these elements in abstraction from their relations to our sense physiology. The core thesis of the doctrine is thus that the "sensations" isolated in psychological analysis are not mental events, ontologically speaking, but rather points of perfect convergence of the domains of psychology and physics. What psychologists call "sensations," namely "colors, tones, warmths, pressures, spaces, times, and so on," constitute "the actually real elements of the world"—albeit before the world has been banished to a shadowy realm of pure substances beyond the limits of perception.5 The ultimate, irreducible constituents of reality are not unanalyzable substances and subjects but associations and complexes of elements that compose the luminous fabric of experience.Mach's doctrine of elements replaces substance dualism with a brand of monism that analytical philosophers have tagged "ontological phenomenalism." Mach believed that widespread subscription to phenomenalism would have a liberating effect on the sciences, enabling empirical researchers to get on with the business of subjecting relatively permanent, relatively stable complexes of perceptual elements to the mathematical formalism that is the goal of the exact natural sciences.There is a widespread assumption that Mach was a sense-datist—an epistemological "pointillist" who replaced substances with dots of pure sensation that, in their aggregation, compose our perceptions. The [End Page 338] assumption is false. In Mach's view the sensations of which we can possibly be conscious are irreducibly features of wholes: "The single sensation is neither conscious nor unconscious. It... (shrink)

Illusionism is a prominent hypothesis about action control, according to which acts that we consider voluntary are nevertheless caused by unconscious brain events, and thus our subjective experience of consciously willing them is ultimately illusory. Illusionism can be understood as either an ontological thesis or a phenomenological claim, but both versions are vulnerable to a line of attack based on the role of long-term planning in action control. According to this objection, the evidence upon which illusionism rests is confined to (...) short-term intentions, so it is not sufficient to justify broader conclusions on the causal inefficacy of conscious will. In this essay we reconstruct the logic of this objection against illusionism, clarify why surveying folk intuitions on conscious distal intentions is essential to the debate, and present a study in which the role of conscious planning in intentionality judgment is clearly revealed. We also present other relevant findi... (shrink)

Bayne and McClelland (2016) raise the matching content challenge for proponents of cognitive phenomenology: if the phenomenal character of thought is determined by its intentional content, why is it that my conscious thought that there is a blue wall before me and my visual perception of a blue wall before me don’t share any phenomenology, despite their matching content? In this paper, I first show that the matching content challenge is not limited to proponents of cognitive phenomenology but (...) extends to cases of cross-modal perception, threatening representationalism about consciousness in general. I then give two responses to the challenge, both of which appeal to intentional modes. The difference in intentional mode between a thought and a visual perception can either explain why we should not expect any phenomenal overlap between the two experiences, or it can make it clear why the phenomenal overlap is easy to overlook. I show that these responses are available to the representationalist about perceptual consciousness, as well as the proponent of cognitive phenomenology. The upshot is that, when it comes to the matching content challenge, both perceptual representationalism and cognitive representationalism stand on equal dialectical footing. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 78-91. This article consists of three parts. First, I will review the major themes of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude . Since some of my readers will have read this book and others not, I will try to strike a balance between clear summary and fresh critique. Second, I discuss an unpublished book by Meillassoux unfamiliar to all readers of this article, except those scant few that may have gone digging in the microfilm archives of the École normale (...) supérieure. The book in question is Meillassoux’s revised doctoral dissertation L’Inexistence divine (or The Divine Inexistence ), with its seemingly bizarre vision of a God who does not yet exist but might exist in the future. Without literally accepting this view, I will claim that it is philosophically interesting in ways that even a hardened sceptic might be able to appreciate. Third and finally, I will speculate on the possible future of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism itself. And here I mean its future development not by Meillassoux, but by those readers who might be inspired by his book. Plato could never have predicted the emergence of Aristotle’s philosophy, despite the obvious debt of the latter to the former. Nor could Descartes have predicted Spinoza and Leibniz, nor Kant the German Idealists, and neither could Husserl in 1901 have foreseen the later emergence of Heidegger. How are the works of interesting philosophers transformed by later thinkers of comparable importance? While it may seem that there are countless ways to do this, I think there are only two basic ways in which this happens: you can radicalize your predecessors, or you can reverse them. I will close this article with a few words about these two methods, and try to imagine how Meillassoux might be radicalized or reversed by some future admirer. My view is that the more important thinkers are, the easier they are to radicalize or reverse. This helps explain why the great philosophers of the West have so often appeared in clusters, succeeding one another at relatively brief intervals during periods of especial ferment. 1. After Finitude After Finitude is unusually short for such an influential book of philosophy: running to just 178 pages in the original French, and an even more compact 128 pages in the English version, despite the introduction of roughly eight pages of new material for the English edition. Rather than summarizing Meillassoux’s book in the order he intended, I will focus on six points that strike me as the pillars of his debut book. Along the way, I will offer a few criticisms as well. The first pillar of the book is Meillassoux’s own term “correlationism.”1 Although he introduces this term as the name for an enemy, it is striking that Meillassoux remains impressed by correlationism much more than his fellow speculative realists are. This continued appreciation for his great enemy influences the shape of his own ontology. Is there a world outside our thinking of it, or does the world consist entirely in being thought? Traditionally, this dispute between realism and idealism has been dismissed in continental philosophy as a “pseudo-problem,” in a strategy pioneered by Husserl and extended by Heidegger. We cannot be realists, since following Kant we have no direct access to things-in-themselves. But neither are we idealists, since the human being is always already outside itself, aiming at objects in intentional experience, deeply engaged with practical implements, or stationed in some particular world-disclosing mood. The centuries-old dispute between realism and idealism is dissolved by saying that we cannot think either real or ideal in isolation from the other. There is neither human without world nor world without human, but only a primordial correlation or rapport between the two. This is what “correlationism” means: philosophy trapped in a permanent meditation on the human-world correlate, trying to find the best model of the correlate: is it language, intentionality, embodiment, or some other form of correlation between human and world? Among other problems, this generates some friction between philosophy and the literal meaning of science. When cosmologists say that the universe originated 13.5 billion years ago, they do not mean “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” but literally 13.5 billion years ago, well before conscious life existed, and thus at a time when there was no such thing as a correlate. Meillassoux also coins the term “ancestrality” (10) for the reality that predated the correlate, and later expands this term to “dia-chronicity,” (112) to refer to events occurring after the extinction of human beings no less than to those occurring before we existed. Up to this point, Meillassoux’s focus on ancestral entities existing prior to consciousness might seem like a straightforward realist who wants to unmask correlationism as just another form of idealism. Yet Meillassoux also admires the correlationist maneuver, which can obviously be traced back to Kant. Unlike a thinker such as Whitehead, Meillassoux feels no nostalgia for the pre-critical realism that came before Kant: “we cannot but be heirs of Kantianism,” he says (29). What impresses Meillassoux about correlationism is something both simple and familiar. If we attempt to think a tree outside thought, this is itself a thought . Any form of realism which thinks it can simply and directly address the world the way it is fails to escape the correlational circle, since the attempt to think something outside of thought is itself nothing other than a thought, and thereby collapses back into the very human-world correlate that it pretends to escape. For Meillassoux this step, suggested by Kant but first refined by the ensuing figures of German Idealism, marks decisive forward progress in the history of philosophy that must not be abolished. Any attempt to break free from the correlate must first acknowledge its mighty intellectual power. Realist though he may seem, Meillassoux’s works are filled with praise of such figures as Fichte and Hegel, not of so-called “naïve realists.” It is also the case that for Meillassoux, not all correlationisms are the same. The second pillar of his book is a distinction between various positions that I have termed “Meillassoux’s Spectrum,” though of course he is never so immodest as to name it after himself. He distinguishes between at least six different possible positions, and perhaps we could add even subtler variations if we wished. But in its simplest form, Meillassoux’s Spectrum allows for just four basic outlooks on the question of realism vs. anti-realism. Three of these are easy to understand, since we have already been discussing them. At one extreme is so-called “naïve realism,” which holds that a world exists outside the mind, and that we can know this world. Meillassoux rejects this naïve realism as having been overthrown by Kant’s critical philosophy. At the other extreme is subjective idealism, in which nothing exists outside the mind. For to think a dog outside thought immediately turns it into a thought, and therefore there cannot be anything outside; the very notion is meaningless. In between these two is what we have called correlationism. And here comes a crucial moment for Meillassoux, since he distinguishes between the two forms of “weak” and “strong” correlationism, and chooses the strong form as the launching pad for his own philosophy. Weak correlationism is easy to explain, since we all know it from the philosophy of Kant. The things-in-themselves can be thought but not known. They certainly must exist, since there cannot be appearances without something that appears. And we can think about them, which idealism holds to be impossible. They are simply unknowable due to the finitude of human thought. Strong correlationism is the new position introduced by Meillassoux (though he sees it at work in numerous twentieth century thinkers), midway between weak correlationism and subjective idealism. The major difference between the three positions is as follows. Weak correlationism says: “The things-in-themselves exist, but we cannot know them.” The subjective idealist says: “This is a contradiction in terms, since when we think the things-in-themselves, we already turn them into thoughts.” But the strong correlationist says: “Just because ‘things-in-themselves’ is a meaningless notion does not mean that they cannot exist. No one has ever traveled to the world-in-itself and come back to make a report on it. Thus, the fact that we cannot think things-in-themselves without contradiction does not prove that they do not exist anyway. There may be things-in-themselves, we simply are not capable of thinking them without contradiction form within the correlational circle.” This step is crucial for Meillassoux, since strong correlationism is the position he attempts to radicalize into his own new standpoint: speculative materialism. As I see it, this step of the argument fails. Strong correlationism cannot avoid collapsing into subjective idealism, since the statements of the strong correlationist are rendered meaningless from within. All three of the other positions in the Spectrum make perfectly good sense even for those who disagree with them. The naïve realist says that things-in-themselves exist and we can know them; the meaning of this statement is clear. The weak correlationist can say that things-in-themselves exist but lie forever beyond our grasp; this too makes perfect sense, even though the German Idealists try to show a contradiction at work here. We can also understand the claim of the subjective idealist that to think anything outside thought turns it into a thought, and that for this reason we cannot think the unthought. The strong correlationist, alone among the four, speaks nonsense . This person says “I cannot think the unthought without turning it into a thought, and yet the unthought might exist anyway.” But notice that the final phrase “the unthought might exist anyway” is fruitless for this purpose. For we have already heard that to think any unthought turns it into a thought. But now the strong correlationist wants to do two incompatible things simultaneously with this unthought. On the one hand, he neutralizes the unthought by showing that it instantly changes into just another thought. But on the other hand, he wants to appeal to the unthought as a haunting residue that might exist outside thought, thereby undercutting the absolute status of the human-world correlate found in idealism. But this is impossible. If you accept the argument that thinking the unthought turns it into a thought, you cannot also add “but maybe there is something outside that prevents this conversion from being absolutely true,” because this “something outside” is immediately converted into nothing but a thought for us. In short, Meillassoux here seems to be offering a kind of Zen koan: his “strong correlationism” is reminiscent of the gateless gate, or the sound of one hand clapping, or the command to punch Hegel in the jaw when meeting him on the road. We cannot at the same time both destroy the realist challenge of the things-in-themselves in order to undercut realism and reintroduce that very realist sense in order to undercut idealism. In a world where everything is instantly converted into thought, we cannot claim that there might be something extra-mental anyway, because this “might be something” is itself converted into a thought by the same rules that condemned dogs, trees, and houses to the idealist prison. This brings us to the third pillar of Meillassoux’s argument, which is the key to all the rest: the necessity of contingency. His strategy is to transform our supposed ignorance of things-in-themselves into an absolute knowledge that they exist without reason, and that the laws of nature can change at any time for no reason at all. In this way the cautious agnosticism of Kantian philosophies is avoided, but so is the collapse of reality into thought as found in German Idealism. Meillassoux does try to prove the existence of things-in-themselves existing outside thought; he simply holds that they must be proven after passing through the rigors of the correlationist challenge, not just arbitrarily decreed to exist in the manner of naïve realism. As he puts it, “Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing” (53). If idealism thinks that the human-world correlate is absolute, for Meillassoux it is the facticity of the correlate that is absolute. He tries to show this with a nice brief dialogue between five separate characters (55-59) which is covered in detail in my forthcoming book,2 but which I will simplify here for reasons of time. In this simplified version, we first imagine a dogmatic realist arguing with a dogmatic idealist. The realist says that we can know the truth about the things-in-themselves; the idealist counters that we can only the truth about thought, since all statements about reality must be turned into statements concerning our thoughts about reality. Here the correlationist enters and proclaims that both of these positions are equally dogmatic. For although we have access to nothing but thoughts, we cannot be sure that these thoughts are all that exist; there could be a reality outside thought, there is simply no way to know for sure. And this latter position is the one that Meillassoux attempts to transform from an agnostic, skeptical point into an ontological claim about the contingency of everything. Consider it this way. How does the correlationist defeat the idealist? The idealist holds that the existence of anything outside thought is impossible. The correlationist, by contrast, holds that something might exist outside the human-world correlate. But this “something might” has to be an absolute possibility. It cannot mean that “something outside thought might exist for thought ,” because that is what the idealist already says. No, the correlationist must mean that something might exist outside thought quite independently of thought. In other words, the correlationist says that idealism might be wrong, and this means it is absolutely true that idealism might be wrong. Thus, correlationism is no longer just a skeptical position. It holds that all the possibilities of the world are absolute possibilities. We have absolute knowledge that any of the possibilities about the existence or non-existence of things-in-themselves might be true, and this means that correlationism flips into Meillassoux’s own position: speculative materialism. As Meillassoux sees it, there are only two options here. Option A is to absolutize the human-world correlate, which is what the idealist does: there absolutely cannot be anything outside thought. Option B, by contrast, is to absolutize the facticity of the correlate: its character of simply being given to us, without any inherent necessity. The correlationist cannot have it both ways by saying: “there absolutely might be something outside thought, yet maybe this is absolutely impossible.” In other words, once we escape dogmatism we can only be idealists or speculative materialists, not correlationists. The human-world correlate is merely a fact, not an absolute necessity. But this facticity itself cannot be merely factical: it must be absolute. Here Meillassoux coins the French neologism factualité , which has been suitably translated into the English neologism “factiality.” (7, 122-3) Factialty means that for everything that exists, it is absolutely possible that it might be otherwise, not just that we cannot know whether or not it might be otherwise. Just as Kant transformed philosophy into a meditation on the categories governing human finitude, Meillassoux wishes to turn philosophy into a meditation on the necessary conditions of factiality, which he calls “figures”—a new technical term for him. (80) One such figure is that the law of non-contradiction must be true, and for an unusual reason. Since everything is proven to be contingent, nothing that exists can be contradictory, for whatever is contradictory has no opposite into which it might be transformed, and thus contingency would be impossible.3 Another such figure is that there must be something rather than nothing: for since contingency exists, something must exist in order to be contingent. It is a daring high-wire act, one that sacrifices realism to the correlational circle in order to rebuild it from out of its own ashes. Some might conclude that the lack of reason in things is a byproduct of the ignorance of finite humans, Meillassoux is making precisely the opposite point. For in fact, the doctrine of finitude usually leads directly to belief in a hidden reason. The fact that it lies beyond human comprehension merely increases our belief in this arbitrarily chosen concealed ground. By defending anew the concept of absolute knowledge Meillassoux evacuates the world of everything hidden. The reason for things having no reason is not that the reason is hidden, but that no reason exists. Thus, even while insisting on the necessity of non-contradiction, he rejects the other Leibnizian principle: sufficient reason. Everything simply is what it is, in purely immanent form, without deeply hidden causes. Or as Meillassoux puts it: “There is nothing beneath or beyond the manifest gratuitousness of the given—nothing but the limitless and lawless power of its destruction, emergence, or persistence” (63).The world is a “hyper-chaos”(64). But this is not the same thing as flux. For the chaos of the world is such that stability might occur just as easily as constant, turbulent change. Let’s now digress a bit, and return to the question of ancestrality, which Meillassoux transforms later in the book into “dia-chronicity.” Correlationism holds that all talk of a world outside the correlate is immediately recuperated by the correlate. The phrase “13.5 billion years ago” becomes “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” and the phrase “the universe following the extinction of humans” becomes “the universe following the extinction of humans for humans .” But notice that whether we talk about the world before or after humans, in both cases it is time that is used to challenge the correlate. Meillassoux has no interest in challenges that might be posed by space. For example, what about a vase in a lonely country house that topples to the floor and smashes when no one is there to watch it? Isn’t this also a challenge to correlationism, no less than the Big Bang or the heat death of the universe long after humans have vanished? In an eight-page supplement to the English translation of After Finitude ,4 possibly in response to my own 2007 review of the French original,5 Meillassoux bluntly denies that space is of any relevance to the question. Spatial distance is a merely harmless challenge to the human-world correlate. After all, even though no one is there in the lonely country house to witness the shattering of the vase, we can say that had there been an observer , that observer would have witnessed the toppling and destruction of the vase. For this event still occurs in a world in which the human-world correlate already exists, whereas the diachronicity of events both before and after the existence of humans makes it impossible to say that had there been an observer they would have witnessed the Big Bang occurring in such and such a fashion. However, it seems to me that Meillassoux merely asserts that the temporal simultaneity of our existence with that of the vase in the lonely country house is enough to render it harmless. It is true that the house does not exist prior to the correlate, but nonetheless it exists outside the correlate, and that is enough to make the same challenge. It is difficult to see why the “had there been an observer” maneuver succeeds in the case of a vase in the countryside in April 2011 but fails in the case of the Big Bang. This is not just a matter of nitpicking Meillassoux’s argumentative style: the fact that he bases his argument on time has at least two important consequences for his position. For in the first place, even though Meillassoux insists that the laws of nature are absolutely contingent, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense. That is to say, it is a paradoxical feature of Meillassoux’s philosophy that he does allow for the existence of laws of nature, and simply believes that they can change at any moment without reason. Within any given moment, laws of nature do exist. He never suggests that different parts of the universe can have different laws at the same time, nor does he have any interest in the laws of part/whole composition that take place within any given instant. Could it be the case that rather than being made of gold atoms, a small chunk of gold could be made of silver atoms, cotton, horses, or that this same small piece of gold could be made of gigantic vaults filled with even more gold? These are not topics that draw Meillassoux’s attention, since he is focused solely on how the laws of nature might change or endure from one moment to the next . Another implication for Meillassoux’s system is that his concept of things-in-themselves turns out to be to be inadequate. For when he proves that things-in-themselves can exist without humans, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense as well. Namely, things-in-themselves existed ten billion years ago, and they will continue to exist after all humans have succeeded in exterminating themselves. However, being able to exist before our births and after our deaths is just one small part of what it means to be a thing-in-itself. The more important part is that even if a thing is sitting on a table right now, in front of me, even if I stroke it lovingly or press my face up against it directly, I am still dealing only with a phenomenal version of the thing; the thing-in-itself continues to withdraw from all access. Yet no such thing is acknowledged by Meillassoux. For him finitude is a disaster, and absolute knowledge is in fact possible. Meillassoux’s thing-in-itself exists in independence only of the human lifespan , not of human knowledge. The fifth pillar of Meillassoux’s argument is his use of Cantor’s transfinite mathematics to show that even if the laws of nature are contingent, they need not be unstable, and thus we cannot use the apparent stability of nature to disprove his metaphysics of absolute contingency. What Cantor showed is that there are different sizes of infinity, and that all these infinities cannot be totalized in a single infinite number of infinities. Meillassoux sees this as crucial, since it allows him to discredit any “probabilistic” argument against his theory. The probabilistic argument (as defended quite clearly by Jean-René Vernes)6 would say this: given that the laws of nature seem so stable, it it is extremely improbable that there is no hidden reason for their remaining so stable. As Meillassoux sees it, probability is of value only when we can index an accessible total of cases. These can even be infinite: for example, there are an infinite number of points where a rope can break when stretched tight, but this does not stop us from calculating probabilities for various sections of the rope to break. By contrast, there is no way to sum up the number of possible laws of nature. For here there is no way to totalize; we cannot stand outside of nature and calculate the possible number of laws so as to determine the probabilities that any one of them might change. Therefore, although we can speak of probability when dealing with intraworldly events such as elections, horse races, and coin-flips, we cannot use the words “probable” or “improbable” when describing alterations at the level of nature as a whole. Rather than commenting on the validity of this argument and its use of Cantor, let me simply note that it once again creates a dualistic ontology. We already saw that Meillassoux treats time differently from space. In analogous fashion, he now treats the level of world differently from that of intraworldly events. The emergence of worlds is purely contingent and virtual and governed by no probability at all, while events within the world necessarily follow laws (even if these laws can change at any moment without reason), and thus their probabilities can be calculated. It is a strategy deeply reminiscent of Badiou’s (2005) own dualism between the normal “state of the situation” and the rare and intermittent “event.” The sixth and final pillar of Meillassoux’s book can be dealt with briefly, since we have already touched on it elsewhere. It comes at the very beginning of the book, when Meillassoux says that we must revive the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and that the primary qualities are the ones that can be mathematized. He admits that he has not yet published a proof of this idea, though in fact it is already known as one of his primary doctrines. And here we encounter the familiar problem with Meillassoux’s inadequate conception of things-in-themselves. “Primary qualities” refers to those qualities that a thing has independently of its relations with us or anything else. But if the primary qualities can be mathematized, this means that they are not entirely independent of us, since our knowledge can get right to the bottom of them. The mathematized qualities of things are independent of us only in Meillassoux’s sense that they will still have those qualities even when all humans are dead. But to repeat, autonomy from the human lifespan is not the same as autonomy from human access. Here once more Meillassoux is concerned only with independence from the human-world correlate across time, not in any given instant. 2. L’Inexistence divine In 1997, the same year in which he turned thirty years old, Meillassoux earned his doctorate at the École normale supériuere with a brazen dissertation entitled L’Inexistence divine ( The Divine Inexistence ). The work was substantially revised in 2003. But even then, with typical fastidiousness, Meillassoux decided that the work was not yet ready for press. It has now been scrapped in favor of some future, multi-volume work bearing the same title. While writing my book on Meillassoux for Edinburgh University Press, I was permitted to translate excerpts from this unpublished work for use as an appendix in my own book; in total, the appendix contains approximately twenty percent of Meillassoux’s 2003 manuscript, the first time any of it will be published in any language. Nonetheless, a portion of the argument was already tested in the article “Spectral Dilemma,” published in English in the journal Collapse (2008: 261-75). There the philosophical motives for the virtual God are already made clear. What troubles us most are early deaths, brutal deaths, deaths of especial injustice– the sorts of deaths in which the brutal twentieth century was so abundant. And here, neither the atheist nor the believer can help us. The atheist can offer nothing but a sad and cynical resignation when reflecting on the victims of these terrible crimes. The believer does little better, being unable to explain how God could have allowed such things to happen, due to the famous intractability of the problem of evil. The solution offered to this dilemma by Meillassoux is bold, and all the more so given that he emerges from such a deeply Leftist, materialist, and unreligious background. His solution is that God does not yet exist, and therefore is not blameworthy for these catastrophes. Given that everything is contingent in Meillassoux’s philosophy, this God and divine justice might never exist, but they can at least exist as an object of hope. Let’s begin by jumping to the end of L’Inexistence divine , where the alternatives are laid out so nicely. There are four basic attitudes that humans can have towards God, Meillassoux says. First, we can believe in God because he exists. This is the classical theist attitude, rejected for the simple reason that it would be amoral and blasphemous to believe in a God who allows children to be eaten by dogs, to use Dostoevsky’s example. Second, we can disbelieve in God because he does not exist: the classical atheist attitude. But this leads to sadness, cynicism, and a sneering contempt for the greatness of human capacity. The third option, rather more complex, is to disbelieve in God because he does exist: in other words, to exist in rebellion against God as the one who must be blamed for the evils of the earth. The examples here might range from Lucifer himself, to the more human figure of Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby-Dick , to Werner Herzog’s even more recent catchphrase, “Every man for himself, and God against all.” That leaves only the fourth option: believing in God because he does not exist. Meillassoux closes his book by saying that the fourth option has now been tried (namely, in the course of his own book), and that now that all four have been specified, we must choose. The first reaction to this theory of the inexistent God will be laughter. Few readers will ever be literally convinced by it, and probably none will immediately be convinced by it. But if we ask ourselves why we laugh, the answer is because it sounds so improbable that an inexistent God might suddenly emerge and resurrect the dead. It obviously sounds more like a gullible theology than a rigorous piece of philosophical work. Yet two things need to be kept in mind. First, Meillassoux’s theories are hardly more unlikely than those of great philosophers of the past such as Plato, Plotinus, Avicenna, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, or Whitehead. We read the great philosophers not because their systems are plausible in commonsense terms that can be measured by the laws of probability. Instead, we read them precisely because they shatter the existing framework of common sense and open up new window on the universe. Second, and even more importantly, Meillassoux has already rejected probability as a valid measuring stick in philosophy. Or rather, he accepts probability in the intra-worldly realm (where it is linked with potentiality), and rejects it at the level of the world itself (where potentiality is replaced with what he calls virtuality). The virtual God can appear at any moment for no reason at all, just as any other new configuration of laws of nature can appear: in a manner that the laws of probability cannot calculate. Responding to those who might ridicule the idea of a sudden emergence of God and a resurrection of the dead, Meillassoux cites Pascal, who asserts that the resurrection of the dead would be far less incredible than the fact that we were born in the first place. This shifts philosophy onto new ground. Rather than concerning ourselves with what is likely to happen in the world as we know it, we focus instead on the most important things that could happen. For this reason, the expected objection that a virtual God is no more likely to appear than a virtual unicorn or a virtual flying spaghetti monster misses the point. Unicorns and spaghetti monsters could also appear, just like any other non-contradictory thing. But these would just be novel bizarre entities among others, not the heralds of completely new worlds. For Meillassoux, the emergence of matter, life, and thought have been the three truly amazing advents of the world so far, each of them dependent on the advent(s) preceding them. As he sees it, there can be no greater intraworldly entity than the human beings who already exist, since nothing in the world is better than the absolute knowledge of which humans alone are capable. This means that the next great advent must be something that perfects human beings rather than superseding them. And this can only be the world of justice, in which the dead are resurrected and their horrible deaths partially cancelled (Meillassoux never considers the possibility of a God who would literally erase the pre-divine past so that it never happened at all). The only immortality worth having is an immortality of this life, not an existence in some ill-defined afterworld. Human existence, he holds, must always be governed by a “symbol” that gives us the “immanent and comprehensible inscription of values in a world.” And just as cosmic history made the three great contingent leaps of matter, life, and thought, with a leap to justice as the only one still to come, a similar structure occurs within human culture and its symbols, which consist so far of the cosmological, naturalistic, and historical symbols, with a “factial” symbol still to come. We can review each of these symbols briefly. The cosmological symbol refers to the ancient dualism between the terrestrial and celestial spheres. Here below everything is conflict, corruption, and decay; but in the heavens nothing is perishable, all movement is circular, and everything is arranged in mutual harmony. This symbol is ended by modern physics when Galileo discovers such blemishes as sunspots and craters on the moon, and when Newton integrates both celestial and terrestrial movement into a single gravitational law. Next comes the naturalistic or romantic symbol, in which perfection comes not from the sky but from nature itself. The world is filled with pretty flowers (Meillassoux claims that the ancients never discussed the beauty of flowers until Plotinus in the third century) and with living creatures naturally moved by pity, at least until society corrupts them. This symbol collapses in the face of reality as we know it, since pity is no more common than war, corruption, and violence. This brings us to the historical symbol, which only now is passing away. Bad things may happen, but history has an inner logic of its own, such that everything works out in the end. The ultimate form of the historical symbol is the economic symbol, whether in a Marxist or neo-liberal form. Just as the Marxist holds that the inner economic logic of the capitalists will inexorably lead them to self-destruction, the neo-liberal assumes that the sum total of individual selfish actions will lead, in the long run, to the greatest possible good. We worship the economy and let it guide history for us, just as the ancients worshipped celestial bodies and held them to be free from blemish. The final remaining symbol is the factial symbol, which Meillassoux hopes will now emerge. Factiality, we recall, is his term for the absolute contingency of everything that exists. Once we have grasped this absolute contingency, we are free to expect the dramatic advent of the coming fourth World: the world of justice, inaugurated by a virtual God and even mediated by a messianic human figure. There is the added feature, however, that this messiah must abandon all claims to special status once the messianic realm of justice is achieved. The messianic figure will then be no more special than any person on the street, since a reign of human equality will have arisen. Although this focus on human being might seem like a return to standard humanism, Meillassoux holds that human pre-eminence has never truly been maintained. Previously, humans have been treated as special only because they contemplate the Good, because they resemble their omnipotent creator, or because they happen to be the temporary victors in a cruel Darwinian death-match between millions of living species. For Meillassoux, by contrast, humans have value because they know the eternal. But it is not the eternal that is important, since this merely represents the blind, anonymous contingency of each thing. What is important is not knowledge of the eternal , but knowledge of the eternal. We should not admire Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods; Prometheus is simply as bad as all the gods, no matter how much he increased our power. Feuerbach and Marx were wrong to say that God is a projection of the human essence, since for Meillassoux the usual concept of God represents the degradation of the human essence. If the traditional God was allowed to inflict plagues and tsunamis on the human race, the Promethean human of the twentieth century simply assumes the right to inflict death camps and atomic fireballs instead. In this respect, we have simply begun to imitate the degradation of humanity that was formerly invested in an omnipotent and arbitrary God. In response to charges that absolute contingency might lead to political quietism, Meillassoux counters that the World of justice would mean nothing unless we had already hoped for it beforehand. A World of justice that came along at random would merely be an improved third World of thought: indeed, a perfect one. But it would have satisfied no craving, and would therefore have no redemptive power. For this reason, we must actively hope for the fourth World of justice for such a fourth World ever to arise. Not only justice, but beauty is dependent on such hope: for Meillassoux, who is here somewhat dependent on Kant, beauty means an accord between our human symbolization and the actual world, which could never be present in a World of the blessed any more than justice could. And just as a messianic figure is needed to incarnate our hope and then abandon power once the World of justice is realized, it is the figure of the child whose fragile contingency shows us a dignity and a demand for justice beyond all power. 3. Meillassoux Radicalized or Reversed Given the promising reception of Meillassoux’s first book, it would not be groundless to engage in early speculation about what it might take to earn him a place in the history of philosophy. Maybe this will never happen—who knows?—but quite possibly it will: his lucid argumentative methods and sheer philosophical imagination at least make him a good candidate to be read well into the future, especially following further elaboration in print of his mature system. Philosophy is often practiced as thought it were nothing more than the amassing of “knockdown arguments.” But this is no more insightful than saying that good architecture is the amassing of steal beams. It is true that poorly constructed building cannot stand for long, but sound construction is merely the first, indispensable step in building. In fact, I am inclined to say that what really makes a philosopher important is not being right, but being wrong . I mean this in a very specific sense. I once heard the interesting remark about twentieth century culture that “you have to remember that the sixties really happened in the seventies.” That is to say, it was in the 1970’s rather than the more honored 1960’s that civil rights, free love, long hair, and the rock and roll drug culture really took root. With respect to the history of philosophy, we might just as easily say: “you have to remember that Plato really happened in Aristotle,” that “Kant really happened in Hegel” or “Hume really happened in Kant,” or that “Husserl’s phenomenology first achieved its truth in Heidegger.” One becomes an important philosopher not by being right, but by attracting rebellious admirers who tell you that you are wrong , even as their own careers silently orbit around your own. To recruit faithful disciples may be comforting and flattering, but the greatest thinkers have generally had to experience refutation at the hands of their most talented heirs. For this reason, I would propose that we size up the magnitude of living thinkers not by deciding how many times they are right and wrong, but by asking instead: who would take the trouble to refute this author? For this reason I do not ask: “Is Meillassoux right?”, since I do not believe in the virtual God myself, nor am I convinced by any important aspect of Meillassoux’s philosophy. Instead, I ask if there are interesting ways to overturn him. Only by being overturned, by no longer remaining a contemporary, does one become a classic. Let’s begin with a simple model of refutation, which can be refined further at a later date once the basic point is established. One kind of refutation simply consists in saying: “This author is a complete idiot.” The refuter now walks away in celebration, and no link between the present and the future is built; all is reduced to rubble. But this sort of mediocre triumphalism is generally practiced by those who achieve little of their own, and is not especially interesting. Much more interesting is the sort of refutation that does not take its target to be a complete idiot. I would like to suggest that there are just two basic ways in which this can be done: radicalization and reversal . It has not escaped my notice that this is a fairly good match for the Deleuzian distinction between irony and humor. Whereas irony critiques and adopts the opposite principle of what it attacks, humor accepts what it confronts but pushes it into highly exaggerated form. The ironist is like the worker who sows chaos by rebeling and contradicting the boss, while the humorist is like the worker who follows orders to an absurdly literal degree, with equally chaotic results. Let’s start with a few examples. In Aristotle’s treatment of Plato, and Heidegger’s of Husserl, we find reversal. Plato’s eidei are transformed by Aristotle into mere secondary substances, and the individual worldly things despised by Plato become what is primary. For Husserl what is primary is whatever is present to consciousness, while for Heidegger this is precisely what is secondary, since the primary stuff of the world withdraws from any form of presence at all. As for radicalization, it is most easily found in the transformation of Kant by German Idealism: “Kant was right to wall off the things-in-themselves from human access, and simply should have realized that the thought of the Ding an sich is also a thought, and thereby the noumena are just special cases of the phenomena,” with much following from this discovery. It would also be easy to read Spinoza as a radicalizer of Descartes, and Berkeley and Hume as radicalized versions of Locke. Perhaps the distinction is now sufficiently clear. Admiring refutations are not those that say “Professor X is an idiot,” which is merely the flip side of the eager disciple’s fruitless “Professor X got everything right.” Instead, it will be some variant of one of the following two options: “Professor X is important, but got it backwards,” or “Professor X is important, but didn’t push things far enough.” In the history of philosophy these two latter cases have often been painful in purely human terms: Aristotle expresses sadness at refuting Plato, Kant is openly annoyed at Fichte, and Husserl feels betrayed and used by Heidegger. Rude handling from later figures almost seems to be the sine qua non of being a great philosopher. Now, it has already been claimed that Meillassoux is an emerging philosopher of the first importance, and by no less a figure than Alain Badiou: “It would be no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy…” (Preface, vii). But rather than taking Badiou’s word for it, or rejecting his word, we might experiment by asking how Meillassoux could be radicalized or reversed. Are there interesting ways of doing this that might launch whole new schools of philosophy, unexpected or even condemned by Meillassoux himself? While no one can see the future, the present is poor when it is not riddled with virtual futures. The relation between philosophers and their predecessors and successors is always somewhat complicated, of course. But generally there is one central divergence at stake, which might be taken as the key to all the others. On this basis we could say that new thinkers primarily radicalize or primarily reverse the main ideas of their chief philosophical forerunner. There may be specific historical conditions and perhaps even personality traits connected with these two types, but this question can be left aside for now. More important for us is that radicalizers will generally be followed by reversers, and vice versa. Consider the textbook example of a reversal in the history of philosophy: Kant’s Copernican Revolution, which inverts the so-called dogmatic tradition that addresses the world itself, and makes the world revolve instead around the conditions by which it is known. While it is not completely impossible that Kant’s successors might have re-reversed this principle back into a new and stronger dogmatic realism, conditions were premature for such a move. Anyone doing this too early would likely have been an angry anti-Kantian reactionary rather than an original thinker in command of a genuinely new realist principle. The far more likely outcome is the one that actually happened: Kant’s reversal of his predecessors was viewed as incomplete, or as retaining lamentable bits of the traditional view, which despite his admirable breakthrough he was unable to shake off. This was the view of German Idealism, anyway. In similar fashion, Spinoza could also be viewed as a radicalizer of Descartes, who is equally accused of preserving various Scholastic dogmas in an otherwise radical project of philosophical reversal. The point is this: reversals in the history of thought tend to be followed soon thereafter by radicalizations of those reversals. The same may hold true in reverse: radicalizations might generally be followed by reversals, given that it is not always possible to be more radical than the radicals have already been. Consider the case of Husserl, who radicalizes Brentano’s early vagueness about what lies beyond immanent objectivity, and Twardowski’s assertion that there must be an external object lying outside the intentional content, by collapsing everything into the intentional sphere: there is no difference between the Berlin in my consciousness and the actual Berlin that is home to millions of people. It is difficult to see how one could be even more radical than Husserl’s idealist turn here. And thus the road is paved to Heidegger’s reversal of classical phenomenology, in which the key point is what lies deeper than any presence to consciousness: the Sein whose power and obscurity cannot be made exhaustively present, but only sends itself in historical epochs. In similar fashion we might also read Leibniz as a reverser of Spinoza’s radicalization, retrieving a strong sense of individual substance and a certain validity of what the Scholastics had said. Returning to Meillassoux, we might ask which kind of philosopher he is: a radicalizer or a reverser? At present, Meillassoux looks to me like a radicalizer (though for now his future remains shrouded in mist). He takes the correlationist tradition, which allows us to speak only of the relation between human and world, and tries to raise it into an even more extreme claim about the absolute contingency of everything. But whereas German Idealism did this by trying to collapse the distinction between thought and world entirely into the “thought” side, Meillassoux does it by trying to shift the non-absolute contingency of the thought-world correlate from epistemology to ontology. It is no longer a question of the inability of human knowledge to know what lies outside the correlate, but the inability of reality itself to be rooted in any definite laws. Furthermore, if we look at the various features of Meillassoux’s philosophy identified earlier tonight, all but one are already so radical that there is no obvious way to push them further. The one exception would be his claim that the world as a whole can change for no reason at any moment, coupled with the inconsistent claim that within a given world there are laws of nature that everything must follow. If gravitational attraction between all masses is a current law in our world, then for Meillassoux there can be no exceptions to this law for as long as it remains in force. A toppled vase will fall to the floor every time for sure,unless there is a cosmic change by which the laws of nature as a whole have altered. (This is reminiscent of the late medieval distinction between the absolute and ordained power of God, according to which God has the power to set or change the laws of nature, but not to contravene those laws locally once they are set.) On this point, to radicalize Meillassoux would simply be to say: there are no laws of nature even in the local sense. Everything that happens, even in the world here and now, is purely contingent and not governed by even a trace of law. And while this would be a more consistent development of Meillassoux’s thoughts on contingency, it is difficult to see how it could lead to a new philosophy. Instead, the admiring successors of Meillassoux are more likely to reverse one of his already sufficiently radical points. At least four candidates come to mind: *First, we have seen that Meillassoux thinks correlationism is challenged by a time before or after consciousness, but not by a space lying outside it. Perhaps this could be reversed into saying that spatial exteriority is the really crucial point. The arguments on this point are perhaps the least convincing in After Finitude (and do not even occur in the original French edition), and therefore it might be a candidate for the “blind spot” of which no philosopher is ever free. *Second, Meillassoux uses Cantor to claim that the contingency of laws of nature would not entail that they are unstable. A successor of Meillassoux might claim that it does make them unstable, and celebrate this fact. This person would then have to explain why common sense seems to encounter a relatively stable world despite its truly rampant instability. Whereas Meillassoux’s problem is to show how stability might exist despite contingency, this successor’s problem would be slightly different: to show why actual, full-blown instability might have the appearance of stability. *Third, Meillassoux claims that the primary qualities of things are those that can be mathematized. He might be reversed by a successor who says the opposite: the mathematizable qualities are the secondary ones, and the primary ones are those that elude symbolic formulation. While this is a perfectly valid possible objection to Meillassoux, it is one that is made in advance by some of his predecessors and is still made by some of his peers, making it less interesting for futurology than some of his other points. *Fourth and finally, whereas Meillassoux claims that God does not exist but might exist in the future, a successor might argue even more bizarrely that God has always existed but might vanish in the future. Let’s arbitrarily select the first of these possibilities, and imagine briefly where it might lead, if pursued in the future by admiring detractors. Meillassoux comes from the circle of Badiou, and some of Badiou’s most ardent admirers are found in Latin America. So, let’s imagine that towards mid-century some ingenious reversers of Meillassoux emerge in that portion of the Spanish-speaking world. Just for fun, let’s call them Castro and Chávez. And in order to avoid any confusion with the present-day politicians of those names, we will stipulate that Meillassoux’s great successors are both women. The philosopher Castro (we will suppose she comes from Peru) reverses Meillassoux’s argument that the ancestral or diachronic are what most threaten the human-world correlate. Instead, she claims that the diachronic does not threaten the correlate at all, and that we must instead look at space as what ruins the correlate and demands a strange new realism. What would such a philosophy look like? In order to determine this, we might ask what price Meillassoux pays for doing it the opposite way. As I see it, he pays in two separate ways. One is that laws of nature for him are contingent over time . The laws of nature apply to the universe as a whole at any given moment, and would be changed globally if they are ever changed at all. The second price he pays is that Meillassoux has no mereology , or theory of parts and wholes. Everything for him is on the level of the given, or immanent in experience, with the sole proviso that the laws governing this immanence might change without notice at any given moment. In reversing Meillassoux, Castro makes the following claims in the preface to her stunning debut book of 2045, The Cosmos and its Neighborhoods , rapidly translated from Spanish into all the languages of the world: Despite his brilliant analysis of the contingency of laws of nature over time, Meillassoux gets two important assumptions wrong. First, he allows for only one set of contingent laws to govern nature as a whole. Second, he allows laws to govern only the world that is immanent in experience, and thereby fails to explore the contingency among part-whole relations. In this book I will argue, first, that the laws of nature vary in any given instant between one region of the universe and the next; and second, that the world is made up of layers of parts and wholes that are also contingent with respect to one another. Those are the words of Castro. This may sound like a hopeless free-for-all of chaos, yet the book somehow succeeds in drawing some compelling deductions about how laws must vary from one place or level in the world to the next. Trapped in the limited horizon of 2011, and not yet inspired by the heavily balkanized political and technological situation of 2050 that somehow lends additional credence to Castro’s vision, we can only vaguely grasp what such a philosophy might look like. After this reversal of Meillassoux by Castro, the usual pattern leads us to expect a radicalization by Chávez, a young Argentine student of Castro. How could the already strange theories of Castro be radicalized? Perhaps as follows, in a disturbing new book entitled The Implosion of the Neighborhoods , which argues as follows: Castro was right to shift the Meillassouxian framework of contingency from time to space. However, in this respect she retained a surprisingly traditional opposition between the two. In this book I will show that time and space collapse into one another. This may sound too much like the discredited four-dimensional block universe of twentieth century physics and philosophy. However, the four-dimensional universe is a model biased in favor of space, merely adding an extra dimension to the commonsense spatial continuum while stipulating that the serial passage of time is an illusion. In this book I will argue instead for a one-dimensional space-time modeled after our experience of time, in which there is no simultaneous co-existence at all between different parts of the universe, or ‘neighborhoods’ as my esteemed teacher Castro has called them. Instead, the various portions of the universe link to one another by succession rather than by coexistence. Buenos Aires, New York, and Amsterdam do not exist simultaneously in the same landscape, but one after the other in the mind of some observer, and this observer can only be an observer much larger than any human. Against Meillassoux’s notion of a virtual God that does not exist now but might exist in the future, I will argue for an actual God that surveys the universe in sequence, thereby generating the illusion of spatial diversity and even the illusion of individual minds located within that diversity. Once this divine observer dies, the universe as a whole must perish. Again, these ideas are so bizarre that we of 2011 can barely comprehend them, just as Aristotle would have had a difficult time grasping the theories of Descartes. We could then perhaps imagine a further reversal of this theory, emanating from the intellectually resurgent Philippines of the twenty-second century. The Filipino School might argue that the universe is already dead, given the collapse of its spatial richness into the serial observations of a flimsy and mortal God. The virtual universe does not yet exist, but might exist in fully spatial form in the future, and this would require the death of God and the resulting liberation of God’s succession of images as independent, spatially situated realities. With a bit of sharpening, we might be able to make all of these imaginary thinkers more intuitively clear. Along with the history of philosophy, there might arise a new discipline generating imaginary futures for philosophy. The richness of Meillassoux’s system comes not from the fact that he is plausibly right about so many things, but because his philosophy offers such a treasury of bold statements ripe for being radicalized or reversed. He is a rich target for many still-unborn intellectual heirs, and this is what gives him the chance to be an important figure. NOTES 1. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude . Trans. R Brassier. (London: Continuum, 2008.) Page 5. The word “correlationism” does not appear in his doctoral thesis. As Meillassoux informed me in an email of February 8, 2011, he first coined this term in 2003 or 2004, while editing for publication a lecture he had given at the École normale supérieure on a day devoted to the theme of “Philosophy and Mathematics,” an event including Alain Badiou as one of the participants. 2. Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making . (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2011). 3. In an email of December 6, 2010, Meillassoux clarifies that in After Finitude he only deduces the impossibility of a “universal contradiction,” not of a determinate contradiction. In the same email he suggests that he can also prove the latter, though the proof is somewhat lengthier than the one found in After Finitude . 4. After Finitude (18-26), in the passage falling between the two sets of triple asterisks. These pages were sent by Meillassoux to translator Ray Brassier (in French) during the translation process, and do not appear in the original French version of the book. 5. Graham Harman, “Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher.” Philosophy Today 51.1 (2007): Pages 104-117. The passage where I raise the question of space can be found in the first column of page 107. 6. Vernes is first cited on p. 95 of After Finitude . See Jean-René Vernes, Critique de la raison aléatoire, ou Descartes contra Kant . (Paris: Aubier, 1982).  . (shrink)

This chapter examines the integrative nature of reflexive monism (RM), a psychological/philosophical model of a reflexive, self-observing universe that can accommodate both ordinary and extraordinary experiences in a natural, non-reductive way that avoids both the problems of reductive materialism and the (inverse) pitfalls of reductive idealism. To contextualize the ancient roots of the model, the chapter touches briefly on classical models of consciousness, mind and soul and how these differ in a fundamental way from how mind and consciousness are viewed (...) in contemporary Western philosophy and psychological science. The chapter then travels step by step from such contemporary views towards reflexive monism, and towards the end of the chapter, to more detailed comparisons with Hindu Vedanta and Samkhya philosophy and with Cosmopsychism (a recently emergent, directly relevant area of philosophy of mind). According to RM there never was a separation between what we normally think of as the “physical world” and what we think of as our “conscious experience”. In terms of its phenomenology, the phenomenal physical world is part-of conscious experience not apart-from it. This phenomenal world can be thought of as a biologically useful representation of what the world is like, although it is not the world as-described-by modern physics, and it is not the thing itself—supporting a form of indirect (critical) realism. The analysis then outlines how 3D phenomenal worlds are constructed by the mind/brain, focusing specifically on perceptual projection, and then demonstrates how normal, first-person conscious experiences (e.g. of phenomenal worlds) and their associated, third-person viewable neural correlates can be understood as dual manifestations of an underlying psychophysical mind, which can, in turn, be understood as a psychophysical form of information processing. This dual-aspect monism combines ontological monism with a form of epistemological dualism in which first- and third-person perspectives on the nature of mind are complementary and mutually irreducible—a principle that turns out to have wide-ranging applications for the study and understanding of consciousness. The chapter then considers the evolution and wider distribution of consciousness (beyond humans) through a brief analysis of the many forms of discontinuity theory versus continuity theory and argues that to avoid the “hard problem” of consciousness one may need to treat its existence as fundamental, and, as co-evolving with the evolution of its associated material forms. This, in turn, takes one to a central issue: What does consciousness actually do? The analysis argues that its central function is to real-ize existence (to know it in a way that makes it subjectively real). With these foundations in place we then come to the heart of the essay—the ways in which reflexive monism provides a very different view of the nature of the universe to those offered either by dualism or materialist reductionism. As summarised in the last paragraph of this section, “In this vision, there is one universe (the thing-itself), with relatively differentiated parts in the form of conscious beings like ourselves, each with a unique, conscious view of the larger universe of which it is a part. In so far as we are parts of the universe that, in turn, experience the larger universe, we participate in a reflexive process whereby the universe experiences itself.” The essay then considers the precise ways in which this reflexive monist understanding of “consciousness” and “mind” relates to later developments in Vedic philosophy and suggests a way of bridging contemporary Western and classical Vedic ways of understanding consciousness and mind. Finally, the chapter considers what can be said of mystical experience and the ground of being, following the principle that this ground must have the power to both manifest the universe in the form that science shows it to be and our ability to experience the universe in the way that we do. In this, RM is shown to be a dual-aspect monist form of cosmopsychism—a recent area of development within philosophy of mind. The essay compares and contrasts this with idealist versions of cosmopsychism and argues that RM allows for an integrated understanding of realism versus idealism, dualism versus monism, how ordinary experience relates to mystical experience, and how consciousness relates to mind. RM also provides an ‘open’ conceptual system that can, in principle, incorporate a range of parapsychological effects. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Background Theory of Delusion and Existential PhenomenologyRichard G. T. Gipps (bio) and John Rhodes (bio)KeywordsPhenomenology, psychological explanation, epistemology, schizophreniaSituating and Clarifying the PaperThe commentaries of Nassir Ghaemi and Giovanni Stanghellini help to sketch out the intellectual landscape of philosophical perspectives in psychiatry, and situate our paper within it. A happy convergence between the analytical philosophy perspective from which we were writing, and the existential–phenomenological paradigm described by both (...) authors, is the result. Stanghellini in particular carefully describes three main theories of existential deformations, tracing delusion formation back to either (i) a disturbance of meaning synthesis conceived as a dysfunction of a Husserlian consciousness, (ii) a disturbance of pre-reflective self-consciousness resulting in a kind of paralyzing hyperreflexivity, and (iii) (Stanghellini’s preferred model) a disturbance of embodiment. This final account views delusion as springing from a failure in the subject’s corporeal and praxical being-in-the-world. As the subject’s practical, pre-reflective grip on the world is loosened, so their minds become unconstrained by that understanding and practical rationality immanent within that grip, and thought, now unconstrained, starts to travel through delusional worlds. Stanghellini accordingly views our model as an example of a disembodiment theory, which allows it to overcome the disadvantages of the first two models, which may both, in their own ways, overvalue the rôle of (disturbances of) reflective consciousness in the formation (and delusional deformation) of everyday understanding.Being situated within a preexisting landscape has both its benefits and its disbenefits, the principle example of the latter being the potential assimilation of anything new to what has already been said. Thus, although we are grateful to our commentators for placing us on the larger historical and conceptual map, it may be helpful to briefly rehearse our motivations for drawing on the philosophical ideas of the Bedrock and Background in our theory of delusion. Our paper was primarily motivated by a concern that current, psychologically mainstream, cognitive models of delusion, although helpfully drawing our attention to common reasoning and perceptual deficits in the person with psychosis, fail to adequately account for what is delusional about delusions. It was, in [End Page 321] particular, to account for the certainty with which the deluded person clings to often quite extraordinary beliefs that we drew on the epistemological notion of the background. And although this epistemological notion fits quite neatly with ontological concerns regarding the embodied and praxical character of human existence, it is the particular epistemic rôle that it played in our theory—to do with the extraratiocinative constraint on judgement provided by the Background—that we wish to stress here.We return to this shortly, but first wish to comment briefly on two specific considerations raised by the commentaries. The first concerns Stanghellini’s claim that, for us, “when studying delusions, the focus should be on providing an adequate framework for understanding, rather than providing empirical hypotheses to be tested” (2008, 311–314). It seems to us, however, that both are equally important. What we wished to stress, however, was that empirical hypothesis testing may be led astray if it is not informed by an adequate framework for understanding. For example, most cognitive psychological experiments on delusions concern themselves with the individual’s ability to make appropriate guesses (e.g., regarding the color of beads in a bag), and their tendency to jump to conclusions; they do not concern themselves with the kinds of extraordinary conviction and certainty met with in delusion. The risk run by empirical researchers of cognitive factors in delusion is that a lack of a prior adequate theorization of delusion makes for accounts that are ultimately only of the formation, not of delusion in particular but rather of false or unusual beliefs more generally. An analytical approach, however, can help to explicate the ways in which the psychiatric concept of delusion fails to be adequately characterized by the quite general ‘external criteria’ of delusion (as Jaspers [1963] called them: falsity, stubbornness, uncommon), and aids in the construction of empirical hypotheses this time constrained by an understanding of the true ‘internal criteria’ of psychotic belief. Such an approach helps to spell out the... (shrink)

This thesis mounts an attack against accounts of perceptual justification that attempt to analyze it in terms of evidential justifiers, and has defended the view that perceptual justification should rather be analyzed in terms of non-evidential justification. What matters most to perceptual justification is not a specific sort of evidence, be it experiential evidence or factive evidence, what matters is that the perceptual process from sensory input to belief output is reliable. I argue for this conclusion in the following way. (...) Chapter 1: The Arguments from HallucinationChapter 1 presents a skeptical argument from hallucination that starts from a premise about the alleged introspective indistinguishability of perception and hallucination, and concludes that perceptual knowledge is impossible. Underlying this argument are certain assumptions about the nature of perceptual justification, and different responses to the argument portray different views of perceptual justification. Evidentialism and dogmatism both reject the premise that appearances do not provide evidence sufficient for perceptual knowledge, although they disagree about the precise nature of the appearances. Epistemological disjunctivism rejects the premise that introspectively indistinguishable experiences provide the same evidence, while upholding the idea that some sort of evidence, namely factive evidence, is necessary for perceptual justification and knowledge. Process reliabilism rejects the premise that evidence is necessary for perceptual knowledge on the grounds that even perceptual justification can be obtained without evidence, as long as the cognitive process producing the belief is reliable.Chapter 2: EvidentialismChapter 2 starts by introducing some motivations for experientialist views of perceptual justification, such as evidentialism and dogmatism, which hold that conscious experiences evidentially justify perceptual beliefs. These motivations have to do with their ability to accommodate the New Evil Demon Intuition that demon-deceived subjects have justified perceptual beliefs and the Blindsight Intuition that blindsighters do not have justified perceptual beliefs. However, experientialist views are also faced with a Sellarsian dilemma: either experience is construed as non-propositional, but then the proposed evidential relation is unclear, or experience is construed as propositional, but then it is ad hoc to hold that they can evidentially justify without being justified themselves.Chapter 2 continues with a discussion of evidentialism, which grasps the first horn of this dilemma. I argue that evidentialism cannot adequately explain why a non-propositional experience constitutes evidence for this rather than that belief, and also does not provide any account of how to determine which belief fits an evidence-set which partly consists out of non-propositional experiences. Although a reliabilist version of evidentialism can provide a better account of these matters, it suffers from counter-intuitive predictions about justification and a conception of evidence that is so liberal that it could even include blindsighters and clairvoyants as having such evidence.Chapter 3: DogmatismChapter 3 focuses on variants of dogmatism, a theory of perceptual justification that grasps the second horn of the Sellarsian dilemma by holding that a perceptual experience with the content that p is sufficient for immediate prima facie justification of the belief that p. I first argue that dogmatism should identify perceptual experiences with high-level conscious states to accommodate the problem of novice vs. expert identification and the problem of the speckled hen. I then argue that this version of dogmatism still fails to meet a certain explanatory challenge which I dub the `Distinctiveness Problem'. Dogmatism should explain what is so distinctive about perceptual experience that enables it, in contrast with desire and imagination, to evidentially justify the belief that p without, in contrast with belief, being justified itself.Phenomenalist answers to this problem fail because they either do not provide a distinctive property of perceptual experience, or else provide a property that is reducible to or possibly caused by beliefs. In both cases, dogmatism would have the result that intuitively unjustifying experiences, such as imaginations, nevertheless become capable of justifying beliefs. Moreover, phenomenalists still need some explanation of why phenomenology is epistemically relevant at all.A new variant of the problem of the speckled hen is an intuitive illustration of this point against dogmatists. If a perceptual experience that p is not reliably connected to the fact that p or the belief that p, then beliefs based on this experience simply will not be intuitively justified. One possible response to this problem incorporates reliability into the content of experience in the sense that an experience cannot have the content that p if it is not reliably connected to both the fact that p and the belief that p. However, this will lose the motivation from the New Evil Demon Scenario, and will make large concessions towards reliabilism.Chapter 4: Epistemological DisjunctivismGiven these problems for experientialist views of perceptual justification, chapter 4 focuses on a different evidential account of justification: epistemological disjunctivism. According to the Justified True Belief version of Epistemological Disjunctivism, the fact that I see that p is the factive and reflectively accessible evidence in virtue of which I know that p. I argue that JTBED faces formidable problems: first, it cannot adequately deal with the basis problem, second, it cannot accommodate the New Evil Demon Intuition, third,it faces the problem of hyper-intellectualization, and fourth, it has no good account of reflective access.Knowledge First Epistemological Disjunctivism, in contrast, holds that seeing that p just is a way of knowing that p. The fact that I see that p constitutes my justification for believing that p, even though it is not necessary for my knowledge that p. Although this view solves most of the above problems, I argue that KFED still faces a challenge of its own: its notion of justification is so strong that justification entails knowledge but is not itself entailed by it. This means that it too faces a hyper-intellectualization objection because it cannot accommodate animal justification, and that it too will struggle to accommodate the New Evil Demon Intuition.Nevertheless, there is something to the epistemological disjunctivist idea that higher-order capabilities are important to perceptual justification. Specifically, higher-order capabilities provide one with a way of accommodating the Blindsight Intuition without appealing to the notion of experiential evidence: blindsighters are epistemically worse off than normal human perceivers because they lack higher-order beliefs about how they are gaining their information. If one holds that these higher-order beliefs provide a special sort of justification for perceptual beliefs, then blindsighters lack this type of justification. Chapter 5: Process ReliabilismAfter displaying the problems of several evidential accounts of perceptual justification, chapter 5 introduces a non-evidential account: process reliabilism. The classic version of this view holds that the reliability of a belief-forming process is necessary and sufficient for the prima facie justification of a specific set of beliefs, namely, those that arise out of belief-independent processes. Two classic major problems for this view consist of counterexamples to both the necessity and sufficiency of reliability for justification. Although the Generality Problem raises some difficulties for reliabilism, they do not appear to be insurmountable.The second part of chapter 5 focuses on a variety of process reliabilism, inferentialist reliabilism, that is explicitly aimed at responding to clairvoyance cases. According to inferentialist reliabilism, one should distinguish between basic and non-basic beliefs, where basic beliefs are those that result out of the non-inferential operation of an inferentially opaque cognitive system that developed in a natural way. Reliability is only sufficient for the justification of basic beliefs, while non-basic beliefs also require conditional reliability and justification of the beliefs on which they are based.This distinction between basic and non-basic beliefs is meant to answer the challenge arising out of clairvoyance cases because these are all supposedly cases in which the resulting beliefs arenon-basic. However, I argue that the beliefs in these cases come out as non-basic primarily because of the etiological constraint on cognitive systems, a constraint that is unfortunately undermotivated. It seems that beliefs can be justified even if they are produced by a cognitive system that developed by accident, or by a system that was artificially designed to produce those beliefs. So even though the inferentialist reliabilist might have a point in distinguishing between basic and non-basic beliefs, it is still in need of a different response to clairvoyance cases. Chapter 6: Rejoinders for ReliabilismChapter 6 improves on the inferentialist reliabilist account of justification by presenting a different way of dealing with the clairvoyance cases and New Evil Demon Scenario. I start from the empirically plausible idea that we know that we are perceiving when we are perceiving, not because of the use of experiential evidence, but rather, because of an unconscious source-monitoring mechanism. I then argue that the existence of such a source-monitoring mechanism could be used to explain why clairvoyance cases actually have to do with defeat rather than absence of prima facie justification: beliefs that pop up in our head should be recognized as stemming from untrustworthy sources, and so we acquire defeating higher-order beliefs about the first-order beliefs. I also argue that this defeat should be able to occur even if the higher-order beliefs are themselves unjustified. This defeater-account of clairvoyance is preferable to several externalist alternatives. Making reliability relative to a specific world seems rather ad hoc, and further requirements on justification, such as evidence-based belief, cognitively integrated belief, or properly produced belief, all appear unnecessary and are susceptible to adapted versions of the clairvoyance case.I further argue for an alternative inferentialist reliablist response to the New Evil Demon Intuition which treats it as mistaken rather than correct. The New Evil Demon Intuition might arise because of a mistaken view of actual perceptual justification as having to do with experiential evidence. This mistaken view could be explained by the fact that experience is actually reliably connected to belief and is often cited in response to a knowledge-challenge. If this is a correct analysis of the New Evil Demon Intuition, then there is an element of question-begging involved when this scenario is still pressed against inferentialist reliabilists who do not adhere to the experientialist assumption it presupposes.With the inferentialist reliabilist account in hand,we are able to see that many of the premises of the epistemological argument from hallucination are problematic. Evidence does not appear to be required for perceptual knowledge, as perceptual justification does not even require such evidence. Moreover, if we accept a reliabilist model of introspection, then we are often able to know on the basis of introspection that we are perceiving rather than hallucinating. Once one gets clear about the alternatives, it becomes apparent that the argument thrives on internalist assumptions about justification and knowledge that one need not accept. (shrink)

Responding to critiques of Dilthey’s interpretive psychology, I revisit its relation with epistemology and the human sciences. Rather than reducing knowledge to psychology and psychology to subjective understanding, Dilthey articulated the epistemic worth of a psychology involving (1) an impure phenomenology of embodied, historically-situated, and worldly consciousness as individually lived yet complicit with its naturally and socially constituted contexts, (2) experience- and communication-oriented processes of interpreting others, (3) the use of third-person structural-functional analysis and causal explanation, and (4) a recognition (...) of the ungroundability, facticity, and conflict inherent in knowledge and life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3.2 (1996) 139-142 Concurrent Contents: Recent and Classic References at the Interface of Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology Articles Abramowitz, S., C. Abramowitz, C. Jackson et al. 1973. The politics of clinical judgment. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 41: 385-391.Audi, R. N. 1972. Psychoanalytic explanation and the concept of rational action. The Monist 56: 444- 464.Barondess, J. A. 1979. Disease and illness--a crucial distinction. American (...) Journal of Medicine 66: 375-376.Barrett, R. J. 1988. Interpretations of schizophrenia. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 12: 357-388.Bechtel, W. 1993. The case for connectionism. Philosophical Studies 7: 119-154.Belzen, J. A. 1995. The impact of phenomenology on classical psychiatry: Rümke's position between Jaspers and Kraepelin. History of Psychiatry 6: 349-385.Benda, C. E. 1967. Neuroses of conscience. Journal of Existentialism 7: 425-442.Binns, P. 1995. Commentary on "Contentless consciousness." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2: 61-63.Blankenburg, W. 1980. Phenomenology and psychopathology. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 11: 50-78.Bloomfield, T. M. 1979. Psychoanalysis: A human science? Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 9: 271-287.Blumenfeld, D. 1972. Free action and unconscious motivation. The Monist 56: 426-443.Boudreaux, G. 1977. Freud on the nature of unconscious mental processes. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 7: 1-32.Bracken, P. J. 1995. Beyond liberation: Michael Foucault and the notion of a critical psychiatry. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2, no. 1: 1-13.Brazier, M. 1995. Commentary on "Who should be committable?." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2, no. 1: 49-50.Bursztajn, J., and A. Brodsky. 1995. Authenticity and autonomy in the managed-care era: Forensic psychiatric perspectives. Journal of Clinical Ethics 5, no. 3: 237-242.Byrnes, J. F. 1979. Suggestions on writing the history of psychological data. History and Theory 16: 297-305.Campbell, E. J., J. G. Scadding, and R. J. Roberts. 1979. The concept of disease. British Medical Journal 2: 757-762.Carveth, D. 1988. In reply to Eagle's reply on "The epistemological foundations of psychoanalysis." Philosophy of the Social Sciences 18: 377-378.Chadwick, R. F. 1995. Commentary on "Karl Jaspers and Edmund Husserl." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2, no. 1: 83-84.Christiansen, B. 1964. The scientific status of psychoanalytic clinical evidence (III). Inquiry 7: 47-79.Davis, M. 1987. Realistic utilitarianism and the social conditions of cognitive psychotherapy. Social Theory & Practice 13: 237-259.Dega, W., et al. 1978. Ethics and mental health: Discussion. Dialectics and Humanism 5: 219-235.Dingle, H. 1949. The logical status of psycho-analysis. Analysis 9: 63-66.Dupeau, J. 1977. Freud and degeneracy. Diogenes Spring: 43-64.Eagle, M. 1988. A reply to Carveth's "The epistemological foundations of psychoanalysis. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 18: 371-375.Elevitch, B. 1974-75. Reasons, motives and psychoanalysis. Philosophical Forum (Boston) 6: 143- 162.Elliot, P. 1995. Policies, identity, and social change: Contested grounds in psychoanalytic feminism. Hypatia 10: 41-55.Fabrega Jr, H. 1980. The position of psychiatric illness in biomedical theory: A cultural analysis. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 5: 145-168.Fisk, G. 1993. Accreditation of psychotherapists. British Journal of Hospital Medicine 50: 437-438.Flynn, B. G. 1985. Reading Habermas reading Freud. Human Studies 8: 57-76.Forrow, L., R. M. Arnold, and J. Frader. 1991. Teaching clinical ethics in the residency years--preparing competent professionals. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 16: 93-112.Friedman, M. 1982. Philosophical anthropology and psychotherapy. Philosophical Context 12: 9-19.Galdston, I. 1969. The ontologic foundations of morality. Existential Psychiatry 7: 69-75.Gardner, S. 1995a. Commentary on "Irrationality and the dynamic unconscious." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2, no. 2: 175-176.Gardner, S. 1995b. Psychoanalysis, science, and commonsense. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2, no. 2: 93-113.Handelsman, M. M. et al. 1995. Does legally mandated consent to psychotherapy ensure ethical appropriateness? The Colorado experience. Ethics and Behavior 5, no. 2: 119-129.Hanlon, M. D. 1977. Commentary on Dunham's "Psychiatry, Sociology and Civil Liberties." Values and Ethics in Health Care 2: 275-278.Heaton, J. M. 1972. Insight in... (shrink)

Following a brief summation of the phenomenological method, the paper considers three metaethical positions adopted by phenomenologists and the implications of those positions for a normative ethics. The metaethical positions combine epistemological and ontological viewpoints. They are non-intellectualism and strong value realism as represented by the axiological views of phenomenologists such as Scheler, Meinong, Reinach, Stein, Hartmann, von Hildebrand, and Steinbock; non-intellectualism and anti-realism as represented by the freedom-centered phenomenologies of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty; and weak intellectualism and weak value (...) realism as represented by Husserl and Drummond. The paper argues that only the third metaethical view can support a normative ethics that is consistent with the essential features of the phenomenological method, that allows for freedom in an agent’s choosing from a multiplicity of first-order goods, including vocational goods, practical identities, and life plans, available in the agent’s factical circumstances, and that provides norms governing the correctness of our actions and our obligations to others. The normative dimension is introduced, first, by the requirement that the fulfillment of first-order evaluations and choices be truthful, that is, that the evaluations be appropriate and the actions right. Second, transcendental considerations revealed in the phenomenological analysis of intentional experience disclose a notion of second-order goods of agency that universally bind agents in their exercise of freedom and their dealings with others. (shrink)

Traditionally, the philosophical study of Folk Psychology has focused on how ordinary people (i.e., those without formal training in academic fields like Psychology, Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Mind, etc.) go about attributing mental states. Those working in this tradition have tended to focus primarily on intentional states, like beliefs and desires . Recently, though a body of work has emerged in the growing field of Experimental Philosophy that focuses on folk attributions of mental states that are not paradigmatically considered (...) intentional. This emerging discussion is concerned with figuring out how (and whether) ordinary people go about attributing mental states of qualitative experience, or what philosophers might call states of phenomenal consciousness . This paper briefly describes some of the primary works in the existing experimental philosophy literature and presents new experimental data that weigh on those hypotheses. Finally, it offers a cognitive model of the processes underlying attributions of mental states, called the Agency Model. (shrink)

This introduction presents a state of the art of philosophical research on cognitive phenomenology and its relation to the nature of conscious thinking more generally. We firstly introduce the question of cognitive phenomenology, the motivation for the debate, and situate the discussion within the fields of philosophy, cognitive psychology and consciousness studies. Secondly, we review the main research on the question, which we argue has so far situated the cognitive phenomenology debate around the following topics and arguments: phenomenal contrast, (...) epistemic arguments and challenges, introspection, ontology and temporal character, intentionality, inner speech, agency, holistic perspective, categorical perception, value, and phenomenological description. Thirdly, we suggest future developments by pointing to four questions that can be explored in relation to the cognitive phenomenology discussion: the self and self-awareness, attention, emotions and general the... (shrink)

Social psychologists often describe “implicit” racial biases as entirely unconscious, and as mere associations between groups and traits, which lack intentional content, e.g., we associate “black” and “athletic” in much the same way we associate “salt” and “pepper.” However, recent empirical evidence consistently suggests that individuals are aware of their implicit biases, albeit in partial, inarticulate, or even distorted ways. Moreover, evidence suggests that implicit biases are not “dumb” semantic associations, but instead reflect our skillful, norm-sensitive, and embodied engagement (...) with social reality. This essay draws on phenomenological and hermeneutic methods and concepts to better understand what social-psychological research has begun to reveal about the conscious access individuals have to their own racial attitudes, as well as the intentional contents of the attitudes themselves. -/- First, I argue that implicit racial biases form part of the “background” of social experience. That is, while they exert a pervasive influence on our perceptions, judgments, and actions, they are frequently felt but not noticed, or noticed but misinterpreted. Second, I argue that our unreflective racial attitudes are neither mere associations nor fully articulated, propositionally structured beliefs or emotions. Their intentional contents are fundamentally indeterminate. For example, when a white person experiences a “gut feeling” of discomfort during an interaction with a black person, there is a question about the meaning or nature of that discomfort. Is it a fear of black people? Is it anxiety about appearing racist? There is, I argue, no general, determinate answer to such questions. The contents of our unreflective racial attitudes are fundamentally vague and open-ended, although I explain how they nevertheless take on particular shapes and implications—that is, their content can become determinate—depending on context, social meaning, and structural power relations. (If, for example, a perceived authority figure, such as a politician, parent, or scientist, encourages you to believe that your uncomfortable gut feeling is a justified fear of other social groups, then that is what your gut feeling is likely to become.). (shrink)

Responding to the myth of a purely sensuous “given”, we turn to phenomenology, to the structure of consciousness in an everyday perception of an everyday object. We first consider Brentano’s model of an act of consciousness: featuring the presentation of an object “intentionally” contained “in” the act, joined by the presentation of that object-presentation in “inner consciousness”. We then dig into Husserl’s intricate “semantic” theory of intentionality: featuring “noematic” meaning within a “horizon” of implicated meaning regarding the object of perceptual (...) consciousness. Brentanian inner consciousness morphs into “inner time consciousness” for Husserl, where noematic sense shapes more basic sensory elements of temporal experience. Drawing on these Brentanian and Husserlian analyses, we develop an enhanced account of how an object is “given” in perceptual acquaintance or “intuition”: by virtue of a structure of meaning entertained in the experience. This account we develop further in a “modal” model of the structure of consciousness in everyday perception: distinguishing fundamental factors of phenomenal intentional experience, including inner awareness, phenomenality, and spatiotemporal awareness. Within this model, we specify how the external object of perception is “constituted” in consciousness by virtue of ideal meaning, all within the real world wherein an intentional relation of acquaintance links the perceptual experience with its object. What is “given” in a familiar type of perceptual acquaintance turns out to be quite complex, embracing: the object perceived, the visual experience, its subject, the spatiotemporal context including consciousness and object, and the manifold of meaning shaping the “constitution” of the given object. Where we refer to historical figures, including Husserl, the aim is theoretical rather than exegetical, seeking to develop a contemporary theory of “the given” with roots in classical philosophical views. The resulting theory develops in a series of explorations of increasing complexity in the phenomenology and attendant ontology of “the given”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Abhidhamma Studies: Buddhist Explorations of Consciousness and TimeDouglas W. ShraderAbhidhamma Studies: Buddhist Explorations of Consciousness and Time. By Venerable Nyanaponika Thera. Fourth edition. Edited with an introduction by Bhikkhu Bodhi. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1998. Pp. 160. Paper $16.95.The delightful, thought-provoking Abhidhamma Studies: Buddhist Explorations of Consciousness and Timeby the Venerable Nyanaponika Thera is the fourth incarnation of a text originally composed shortly after World War II, published in (...) 1949 (Frewin and Co., Ltd.). The Buddhist Publication Society issued a second, revised and enlarged edition in 1965 as well as a third edition, with relatively minor corrections, in 1976. The present edition, edited by Bhikkhu Bodhi, incorporates a variety of welcome changes, reflecting considerable effort and devotion to the task. In addition to authoring a superb introductory essay, Bodhi has "reformulated a few awkward sentences..., reorganized the notes, provided additional references, and supplied a bibliography" (p. viii). Perhaps the most intriguing and potentially significant change is evident in the title itself. Originally subtitled Researches in Buddhist Psychology, an apt but relatively uninformative description of its contents, the title now announces, even to the uninitiated, the book's unique, captivating subject matter: Buddhist Explorations of Consciousness and Time.This book is essential reading for any serious student of Buddhism. Additionally, it will appeal to those interested in a wide variety of both phenomenological and ontological issues: the manifold of experience, the nature of consciousness, the analysis of time, concepts of anattā(ego selflessness) and paticca-samuppāda(dependent origination), and so forth. An intermediate to advanced level of familiarity and understanding of basic Buddhist doctrines is recommended. It will prove particularly useful to scholars and students who have been intimidated by the vast, often cryptic, Abhidhamma literature.Apparently, the Buddha and his teachings were as enticing and yet profoundly puzzling and enigmatic to his contemporaries and followers as they remain to millions today. They challenge everything we commonly take to be real. That which appears substantial, we are told, is not. Contrary to our own (unexamined) inner/ subjective experience, as well as the teachings of most major world religions, we neither arenor havea self, for there is no self either to be or to have. The attempt to reconcile the teachings of the Buddha with existing beliefs and assumptions concerning the nature of reality led to a proliferation of competing philosophical schools. Each school developed its own distinctive Abhidhamma literature, ostensibly representing a deeper understanding of the teachings of the Buddha. In practice, the literature served to distinguish one school from another, guarding against and/or [End Page 637]correcting the "erroneous" teachings of the other schools. Over a period of approximately three centuries, the Abhidhamma Pitaka grew rapidly…in terms of the sheer volume of literature as well as complexity of doctrine. Paralleling that increase, it came to play a position of ever greater prominence, rivaling even the canonical collections of the Buddha's word (the Sutta and Vinaya Pitakas). Together the three became known as the Tipitaka: "Three Baskets of the Doctrine."Unfortunately for scholars, the only Abhidhammas to survive the widespread persecution of Buddhism in India during the twelfth century A.D.were those that had been transported to, and transplanted in, other lands. Specifically, the Theravāda Abhidhamma (seven books in Pāli) found an enduring home in Sri Lanka. The Sarvāstivāda Abhidhamma (also seven books) along with the Śāriputra-abhidharmaśāstra(probably the Dharmaguptaka School) were carried to China, where they were translated from Sanskrit into Chinese. Of these, it is the Theravaāda collection— particularly its first book (the Dharmasanganī) as well as the seventh book (the Patthana)—that forms the subject matter of Ven. Nyanaponika's study. The other two schools have long since vanished, except, as Bhikkhu Bodhi points out, that "a late exposition of the Sarvāstivāda Abhidhamma system, Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakośa, continues to be studied among Tibetan Buddhists and in the Far East" (p. x).Abhidhamma Studiesis divided into five chapters and two appendixes. Chapter 1, which was added in the second edition, provides a brief historical overview of "The Abhidhamma Philosophy." Those who approach the Abhidhamma... (shrink)

The article is addressing one of the central but maybe the most ambiguous and multilayered concepts of Husserl’s phenomenology. Husserl’s insisting on a form of intentionality that implies not just conscious directedness towards objects, but also a constitutive function of mental acts, led to some serious accusations of his idealism and solipsism. Justification of such accusations depends exclusively on whether we understand constitution in an ontological sense, as a creative process which brings worldly entities into being, or in an (...) epistemological sense, as a process which enables us to identify and to interpret a particular givenness as something. In early stages of phenomenology, a so-called “hylomorphic” theory of constitution prevailed, which stated that object of our experience can be present for us only if some sense-data is formed in our intentional acts by a meaning-giving component. This theory proved to be unsatisfying when Husserl turned to a phenomenological description of temporal objects, discovering that not just objects, but also intentional acts have a distinct temporal structure. However, the analysis of temporal constitution reaches even further, because the idea of the “living present”, and its triadic structure of retention-primal impression-protention, holds the key to an explanation of horizon-intentionality, and offers the answer to an essential transcendental question: How is it possible for us to be aware of the world towards which all of our intentional life is directed, and from which all of the motivation for our actions originates? (shrink)

The role of intentions in motor planning is heavily weighted in classical psychological theories, but their role in generating eye movements, and our awareness of these oculomotor intentions, has not been investigated explicitly. In this study, the extent to which we monitor oculomotor intentions, i.e. the intentions to shift one’s gaze towards a specific location, and whether they can be expressed in conscious experience, is investigated. A forced-choice decision task was developed where a pair of faces moved systematically across (...) a screen. In some trials, the pair of faces moved additionally as soon as the participants attempted to gaze at one of the faces, preventing them from ever viewing it. The results of the experiment suggest that humans in general do not monitor their eye movement intentions in a way that allows for mismatches between planned gaze landing target and resulting gaze landing target to be consciously experienced during decision-making. (shrink)

I offer an account of the experience of acting that demonstrates how agentive aspects of experience associated with the execution of intentions are richly integrated with perceptual aspects associated with parts of action taking place in the publicly observable world. On the view I elucidate, the experience of acting is often both an engagement with the world and a type of intimate acquaintance with it. In conscious action the agent consciously intervenes in the world and consciously experiences the world (...) she is changing. In section one, I discuss extant accounts of the experience of acting, noting deficiencies. In sections two and three, I develop my own account, drawing on Casey O’Callaghan’s work on multi-modal perception. In the conclusion, I discuss ramifications for psychology and philosophy. (shrink)

Both Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl addressed sound while trying to explain the inner consciousness of time and gave to it the status of a supporting example. Although their inquiries were not aimed at clarifying in detail the nature of the auditory experience or sounds themselves, they made some interesting observations that can contribute to the current philosophical discussion on sounds. On the other hand, in analytic philosophy, while inquiring the nature of sounds, their location, auditory experience or the audible (...) qualities and so on, the representatives of that trend of thought have remained silent about the depiction of sound and the auditory phenomena in the phenomenological tradition. The paper’s intention is to relate both endeavours, yet the perspective carried out is that of analytic philosophy and, thus, I pay special attention to conceptual analysis as a methodological framework. In this sense, I first explain what sound ontology is in the context of analytic philosophy and the views that it encompasses— namely, the Property View (PV), the Wave View (WV) and the Event View (EV)—. Secondly, I address the problems it entails, emphasising that of sound individuation. In a third section, I propose the possibly controversial conjunction of a “Brentano-Husserl Analysis of the Consciousness of Time” (for short “Brentano-Husserl analysis”) and outline the commonalities of both authors, without ignoring its discrepancies. My main focus is Husserl’s 1905 Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des Inneren Zeitbewusstseins. While addressing the Brentano-Husserl analysis, I elaborate on the problem of temporal and spatial extension (Raumlichkeit and Zeitlichkeit, respectively) of both consciousness and sound. Such comparison is a key one, since after these two developments, one can notice some theoretical movements concerning the shift of attention from sounds to the unity of consciousness, and how they mirror each other. After examining the controversial claims concerning the temporal and spatial extension of both consciousness and sound, I argue in the concluding paragraphs that while considering the accounts of sound ontology, the Brentano-Husserl analysis would probably endorse a Property View and that this could have interesting consequences for the issue of Sound Individuation. (shrink)

Emotions are taken by some authors as a kind of mental state epistemically akin to perception. However, unlike perceptual phenomenology, which allows being treated dogmatically, emotional phenomenology is puzzling in the following respect. When you feel an emotion, you feel an urge to act, you feel, among other things, your body’s action readiness. On the other hand, at least sometimes, you are aware that an emotion by itself is not a sufficient reason to justify an evaluative judgment and/or an action, (...) not even prima facie. How can a single mental state, emotion, seem to be dogmatic and hypothetic at the same time? It seems that emotions alone fall short of the justifying role in which their guiding role would be grounded. If this is true, then emotional experience cannot be epistemically akin to perception. Unless we are willing to claim that emotions cause action blindly (i.e., not rationally), we need an account of the distinctive epistemic role of emotional experience that renders its guidance role rational. In this paper I outline this new problem and its consequences for the metaphysics and epistemology of emotional experience. I also try to offer the sketch of a plausible solution. (shrink)

The intent of the article is to define merleau-ponty's place in the phenomenological tradition and, at the same time, to defend his standpoint, especially on those issues where his thought represents a departure from the tradition. although merleau-ponty espouses a form of the husserlian doctrine of the intentionality of consciousness, his understanding of intentionality differs in several fundamental respects from husserl's. the article attempts to show specifically where merleau-ponty's gestalt- theoretical orientation leads him to modify such basic aspects of husserl's (...) concept of intentionality as the noesis-noema distinction and the claim for atemporality of meaning. a critical comparison is drawn between merleau- ponty's concept of intentionality and that of aron gurwitsch. in a more positive vein, the article provides an extended exegesis of merleau-ponty's position on this central concept in phenomenology, and it also tries to relate the exposition of intentionality to merleau-ponty's thesis of the primacy of perception. finally, an attempt is made to reveal the ontological ramifications implicit in merleau-ponty's revisions to the doctrine of intentionality. (edited). (shrink)

The term 'cosmic consciousness' is mostly used either as an ontological fundamental in metaphysics or to name a mystical experience (event). It was first popularized as a psychological state, an evolutionary attainment following the event, while extension of the mystical experience over time comprises another state, for which the term is also used. Drawing on a personal journey of discovery involving six people's reports of spontaneous cosmic consciousness, including the author's own, this article starts with first-person accounts of the mystical (...) event and state. Then, it reviews the origin of the event–state conflation, and goes on to consider some aspects of the experience and category as used. This includes comments on the phenomenology and conceptual structure of spontaneous cosmic consciousness experience, with the suggestion of a paradigm form along with consideration of 'enlightenment' and the place of psi. (shrink)

In the article, I develop some ideas introduced by Edmund Husserl concerning time-consciousness and embodiment. However, I do not discuss the Husserlian account of consciousness of time in its full scope. I focus on the main ideas of the phenomenology of time and the problem of bodily sensations and their role in the constitution of consciousness of time. I argue that time-consciousness is primarily constituted in the dynamic experience of bodily feelings. In the first part, I outline the main ideas (...) of Husserl’s early phenomenology of consciousness of time. In the second part, I introduce the phenomenological account of bodily feelings and describe how it evolved in Husserl’s philosophy. Next, I discuss the idea of bodily self-affection and the affective-kinaesthetic origin of consciousness’ temporal flow. In order to better understand this “pre-phenomenal temporality”, I analyse the dynamics of non-intentional, prereflective bodily self-affection. In the third part, I try to complement Husserl’s account by describing the specific dynamics of bodily experience. In order to do so, I appeal to Daniel Stern’s psychological account of dynamic bodily experience, which he calls the “vitality affect”. I argue that the best way to understand the pre-phenomenal dynamics of bodily feelings is in terms of the notion of rhythm. (shrink)

Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy approaches human transformation as an overcoming of Western metaphysics. The nature of this transformation does not imply a mere change of a worldview, an ethical or spiritual fulfillment, or even self-transcendence. Instead, Heidegger speaks about a dislodgement of human essence. In the article I address the notion of dislodgement as central for understanding the nature of the shift required for the human selfhood to be grounded in Da-sein. I stress the relation between dislodgement and an overcoming (...) of reason as the basis of overcoming metaphysics. I then focus on the way dislodgement transforms the nature of experience, freeing it from the metaphysical constriction of a priority of beingness and the psychological subjectivity that accompanies it. I point out that such a dislodged experience transgresses the ontological-ontic distinction and thus offers a phenomenological basis for experiencing the truth of Beyng. I also suggest that the way to become prepared for such a full-fledged dislodgement is to be attentive to the moments in which our experience betrays its belonginess to Beyng. (shrink)

Consciousness is central to what we study in psychology and how we study it. This paper provides a description of the fundamental features and processes of consciousness. Based on Husserl's phenomenology, it begins with a description of Husserl's two most foundational, phenomenological claims: that we 'see' conscious acts, and that we 'see' that we 'see' them. Upon this footing, I explore two forms of skepticism, and I demonstrate their inherent problems. With skepticism described, I explicate an ontology of consciousness. (...) First, I provide a "presentational" model of consciousness that depicts the relation between conscious acts and the objects of consciousness. Second, I explain the importance of "Evidenz." Third, I provide a description of the ubiquitous nature of essences and their importance for a model of consciousness. Fourth, I briefly explain Husserl's account of transcendence. And finally, I describe intentionality and provide a clarification of the nature and function of ideas. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

The aim of this study is to explore the relationship between affectivity and moral experience from a phenomenological perspective. I will start by showing how in a phenomenologically oriented account emotions can be conceived as intentional evaluative feelings which play a role in both moral epistemology and the motivation of moral behaviour. I will then move to discuss a particular kind of affect, "existential feelings" (Ratcliffe in Journal of Consciousness Studies 12(8–10), 43–60, 2005, 2008), which has not been considered (...) so far in the discourse on moral and affective experience. Relying on the notion of pre-intentionality through which Ratcliffe characterizes existential feelings (Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 53(6), 602–626, 2010) and on some insights into the relationship between affectivity and ethics developed by De Monticelli (2003, 2006), I suggest that key to the role played by existential feelings in moral experience is that they determine the kinds of evaluations that it is possible for us to make and the range of our possibilities of action. I then illustrate and further develop this idea through a phenomenological analysis of some forms of psychopathological experience. More specifically, by considering some experiential features of depression and borderline personality disorder, I claim that, by acquiring an existential character, emotions such as guilt, feelings of isolation, anger and shame can radically alter the structure of the individual evaluative perspective, having a deep impact on both moral judgements and behaviours. (shrink)

Vasily Sesemann’s manuscript Self-Knowledge, Self-Consciousness and Objectification explores the relationship of consciousness with self-consciousness and the subconscious, as well as various forms of objectification of consciousness. This manuscript can be attributed to a group of manuscript texts that discuss the origin of consciousness and the metaphysical relationship between matter and spirit. Sesemann studied consciousness, describing it as an intentional experience and rejecting its naturalistic explanations. Sesemann revealed the irreducibility of life to physiological chemical processes and, at the same time, (...) rejected the dualistic opposition of spirit and matter, soul, and body. The article aims to show that the concept of consciousness formulated by Sesemann is phenomenological. The philosopher rejects naturalistic and objectivist explanations of consciousness. Consciousness must be explored as an experiential subjectivity, not as an object. Sesemann criticizes naturalistic psychology and argues that consciousness is an intentional activity in the world. Consciousness is embodied self-awareness and empathic connection with other living beings. (shrink)

Phenomenology is about subjective aspects of the mind, such as the conscious states associated with vision and touch, and the conscious states associated with emotions and moods, such as feelings of elation or sadness. These states have a distinctive first-person ‘feel’ to them, called their phenomenal character. In this respect they are often taken to be radically different from mental states and processes associated with thought. This is the first book to fully question this orthodoxy and explore the (...) prospects of cognitive phenomenology, applying phenomenology to the study of thought and cognition. Does cognition have its own phenomenal character? Can introspection tell us either way? If consciousness flows in an unbroken ‘stream’ as William James argued, how might a punctuated sequence of thoughts fit into it? Elijah Chudnoff begins with a clarification of the nature of the debate about cognitive phenomenology and the network of concepts and theses that are involved in it. He then examines the following topics: • Introspection and knowledge of our own thoughts • Phenomenal contrast arguments • The value of consciousness • The temporal structure of experience • The holistic character of experience and the interdependence of sensory and cognitive states • The relationship between phenomenal character and mental representation -/- Including chapter summaries, annotated further reading, and a glossary, this book is essential reading for anyone seeking a clear and informative introduction to and assessment of cognitive phenomenology, whether philosophy student or advanced researcher. It will also be valuable reading for those in related subjects such as philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology and epistemology. (shrink)

The article addresses the popular reading of Ingarden that his aesthetic theory is determined by ontology. This reading seems to suggest that, firstly, aesthetics lacks its autonomy, and, secondly, the subject of aesthetic experience is reproductive, and passive. The author focuses on Ingarden’s aesthetics formulated by him in the period of 1925–1944. Moreover, the study presents selected elements of Ingarden’s phenomenology of aesthetic experience, and by doing so, the author aims at showing how Ingarden’s aesthetics was reconsidered by Blaustein, a (...) student of Ingarden, whose theory seems to lead one beyond the scope of ontology. Blaustein, namely, reconsiders Ingarden’s theory of purely intentional objects by interpreting it in a descriptive-psychological, or phenomenological fashion. The article is divided into four parts. In section 1, the author highlights historical interconnections between Ingarden, and Blaustein. Section 2.1. is devoted to Ingarden’s phenomenological approach towards aesthetic experience as a phasic structure. At this basis, in section 2.2., Ingarden’s early theory of intentional objects is to be discussed. Section 3 concerns Blaustein’s contribution to phenomenology of aesthetic experience. Given that Blaustein formulates his theory in discussion with Ingarden, section 3.1. is devoted to Blaustein’s critical assessment of Ingarden’s method, and aesthetics. Next, in section 3.2., the author presents Blaustein’s original theory of presentations, and its use in aesthetics. Finally, in section 4, the author lists similarities, and differences between Blaustein’s and Ingarden’s aesthetic theories. (shrink)

Six arguments against the view that conscious experience derives from a material basis are reviewed. These arguments arise from epistemology, phenomenology, neuropsychology, and philosophy of quantum mechanics. It turns out that any attempt at proving that conscious experience is ontologically secondary to material objects both fails and brings out its methodological and existential primacy. No alternative metaphysical view is espoused (not even a variety of Spinoza’s attractive double-aspect theory). Instead, an alternative stance, inspired from F. Varela’s neurophenomenology is (...) advocated. This unfamiliar stance involves (i) a complete redefinition of the boundary between unquestioned assumptions and relevant questions ; (ii) a descent towards the common ground of the statements of phenomenology and objective natural science : a practice motivated by the quest of an expanding circle of intersubjective agreement. (shrink)

When faced with intertemporal choices, which have consequences that unfold over time, we often discount the future, preferring smaller immediate rewards often at the expense of long-term benefits. How psychologically connected one feels to one’s future self-influences such temporal discounting. Psychological connectedness consists in sharing psychological properties with past or future selves, but connectedness comes in degrees. If one feels that one is not psychologically connected to one’s future self, one views that self like a different person and is less (...) likely to wait for the future reward. Increasing perceived psychological connectedness to one’s future self may lead to more far-sighted decisions. Episodic prospection may help in this regard. Episodic prospection is our ability to ‘pre-experience’ the future by mentally simulating it, drawing on information from episodic memory and other sources. Episodic memory and prospection are thought to involve a special form of consciousness, which underpins the capacity to appreciate the connection between one’s past, present, and future selves. Simulating the future self through prospection may increase felt psychological connectedness and support future-oriented decision-making. Yet this is where a puzzle arises. The imagery of episodic memory and prospection is perspectival: often one views the visualised scenario from a detached perspective, seeing oneself from-the-outside as if viewing another person. The aim of this paper is to characterise how the perspectival imagery of prospection relates to psychological connectedness, and to show that even though such imagery involves a detached perspective it can still be used to help reward one’s future self. (shrink)

The present paper argues that neither the autophenomenological nor the heterophenomenological approach works in order to do justice to the reality of experiences, because neither approach escapes phenomenological scepticism. By regarding the potentials of neuroscience and transpersonal psychology in addition to analysing the epistemology of experiencing, it is argued that an interdisciplinary-transpersonal psychological method is preferable that covers first- second- and third-person accounts. Furthermore, it is argued that, in order to make such an approach fruitful for interdisciplinary research, a pragmatic (...) view of reality that takes experiences seriously is needed. (shrink)

The paper defends the position that phenomenological interviews can provide a rich source of knowledge and that they are in no principled way less reliable or less valid than quantitative or experimental methods in general. It responds to several skeptic objections such as those raised against introspection, those targeting the unreliability of episodic memory, and those claiming that interviews cannot address the psychological, cognitive and biological correlates of experience. It argues that the skeptic must either heed the methodological and epistemological (...) justification of the phenomenological interview provided, or embrace a more fundamental skepticism, a “deep mistrust”, in which scientific discourse can have no recourse to conscious processes as explananda, with ensuing dire consequences for our conception of science. (shrink)

Kant's account of the experience of the sublime in nature and the incommensurability of its bases in the two European traditions of philosophy that feed into modern cognitive psychology, the holism of Leibniz and the analytic reductionism of Locke, are used to develop a new theory of human nature in terms of developmental interactions between initially separate cognitive domains. More recent illustrations of this separation/interaction are found in debates over 'emergence' in modern science and theories of consciousness. Shifting from competitive (...) epistemologies to a resulting ontology of human nature, the cognitive development of mind through childhood can itself be understood as multiple but necessarily incomplete fusions between person knowing and a thing/tool knowing , based here on a Vygotskian model of their reciprocal internalizations, and leading into our ostensibly differentiated and humanly unique multiple adult intelligences. A consequence is that human consciousness, while based on these selective and necessarily partial domain integrations, as in the separate directionalities of spirituality and science/technology, is fundamentally and permanently unbalanced. Kant's sublime and Rudolf Otto's related analysis of numinous-uncanny feeling exemplify the inner dynamism of this intrinsic unbalance, constituting the species specific form of the perpetual orientation to novelty that drives us forward toward the very best and very worst of the human condition. (shrink)

This paper asks whether phenomenal intentionality (intentionality that arises from phenomenal consciousness alone) has a relational structure of the sort envisaged in Russell’s theory of acquaintance. I put forward three arguments in favor of a relation view: one phenomenological, one linguistic, and one based on the view’s ability to account for the truth conditions of phenomenally intentional states. I then consider several objections to the relation view. The chief objection to the relation view takes the form of a dilemma (...) between Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of the properties constitutive of the contents of phenomenally intentional states on this view: the Aristotelian view seems unable to account for all the apparent contents of phenomenally intentional states, but the Platonic view seems to be ontologically unacceptable. I also consider other objections from physicalism, phenomenology, and epistemology. (shrink)