Acts, Normativity, Personhood Outline of a Theory of Embodied Rationality (original) (raw)
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Outline of a Theory of Embodied Rationality
Phenomenology is experiencing a new flourishing by its powerful contributions to the embodied / enactive approach to consciousness and cognition, which seems nowadays a leading paradigm in consciousness studies. The embodied-enactive perspective definitely puts the perceiving subject back into the world, stressing the actual dynamic reciprocity between embodied agents and the environments with which they interact. Yet there is one crucial aspect of perceptual experience that this approach tends to neglect, namely its normative dimension. Now incapability to give account of normativity was the main target of Husserl’s (and Merleau-Ponty’s) classical criticism of scientific naturalism of old. So, I take it to be an urgent task to provide for a phenomenological account of normativity, and one compatible with the embodied-enactive approach. Going the proposed path will end up to bridging the explanatory gap between embodied subjectivity and personhood, i.e. the nature of a rational agent.
THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF RATIONAL AGENCY
The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Agency Edited By Christopher Erhard, Tobias Keiling, 2021
Phenomenology is experiencing a renaissance thanks to its powerful contributions to the embodied/enactive approach to consciousness and cognition, which has become a prominent paradigm in contemporary consciousness studies. The embodied-enactive perspective puts the perceiving subject back into the world, stressing the dynamic reciprocity between embodied agents and the environments with which they interact (Varela et al. 1991; Gallagher 2005; Hanna and Maiese 2009; Colombetti 2011; Bower and Gallagher 2013). Nevertheless, contemporary phenomenology still lacks a satisfactory overall account of normativity and rationality, up to the standards set by classic works in phenomenology (see this Handbook, Part A). This contribution aims to bridge the gap between work on the embodied mind and rational agency or personhood. The first part of the present contribution addresses the state of the art in contemporary debates. The second offers some relatively original developments toward a full-fledged phenomenology of rational agency. More specifically, the proposed theory of acts should be read as a genetic phenomenology of embodied and individualized personhood. For we are probably born to become rational agents, more or less reasonable, accountable, and morally sensible persons and we are definitely not born rational (or responsible) agents, capable of giving reasons for our actions. Still less are we born “pure” or disembodied moral agents.
Einstimmigkeit and Intersubjectivity: Husserl on the Social Roots of Perceptual Normativity
Paper presented at the Coloquio de Doctorandos en Filosofía UDP-UAH Abstract: In this talk, I motivate and present an account of visual perception which highlights its normative, rational character. To do so, I rely on Husserl’s phenomenology and in particular on his peculiar and unique notion of reason. The theory of reason I present—which we can call perceptual reason—involves three central facets, which are developed in the first half of the presentation. These are the horizonal character of perception, the notion of motivated possibilities, and the role of attention in perception. However, in presenting this picture, an important problem comes to the fore, which is addressed in the second half of the talk. Namely, in order for the norms of perception to be truly binding for the individual perceiver, they must have their origin in a wider intersubjective context. This means, in short, that what we anticipate as we perceive the world is already delimited and organized according to what counts as normal for our particular community. In light of this, I draw some important connections between Husserl’s notions of coherence, optimality, normality and reason in the context of perception.
Act Psychology and Phenomenology: Husserl on Egoic Acts
Husserl Studies, 2017
Husserl famously retracted his early portrayal, in Logische Untersuchungen, of phenomenology as empirical psychology. Previous scholarship has typically understood this transcendental turn in light of the Ideen's revised conception of the ἐποχή, and its distinction between noesa and noemata. This essay thematizes the evolution of the concept of mental acts in Husserl's work as a way of understanding the shift. I show how the recognition of the pure ego in Ideen I & II enabled Husserl to radically alter his conception of mental acts, coming to understand them all in terms of genuine *acts* (doings or performances) in a way that had been essentially precluded for descriptive psychologists (Brentano, Natorp, and the early Husserl) so long as the pure ego was denied. This reading challenges a widespread assumption in the secondary literature that "mental act" is a merely technical term or misnomer.
Husserl Studies, 2021
In this paper, I compare the original version of the enactive view-autopoietic enactivism-with Husserl's phenomenology, regarding the issue of the relationship between consciousness and nature. I refer to this issue as the "problem of naturalism". I show how the idea of the co-determination of subject and object of cognition, which is at the heart of autopoietic enactivism, is close to the phenomenological form of correlationism. However, I argue that there is a tension between an epistemological reading of the subject-object correlation that renounces to search for its metaphysical ground, and the enactivist focus on the biological basis of cognition, which seems to imply a view of nature as the metaphysical ground of the conscious mind. A similar problem arises in Husserl's phenomenology in the contrast between the idea of the fundamental subject-object correlation, the concept of nature as a correlate of transcendental constitution, and the investigation of the corporeal and material grounding of consciousness. I find a way out of this problem by drawing on the distinction between static and genetic phenomenology. I argue that the investigation of the temporality of experience in genetic phenomenology leads us to investigate the metaphysical ground of the subject-object correlation, understood dynamically as co-constitution and co-origination. Then I propose to complement phenomenology and enactivism with a form of neutral monism, which conceives of the co-constitution of subject and object as grounded in a flow of fundamental, pre-phenomenal qualities.
The Forgotten Phenomenology: “Enactive Perception” in the Eyes of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty
Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy (https://jffp.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jffp/article/view/928), 2020
This paper compares the enactive approach to perception, which has recently emerged in cognitive science, with the phenomenological approach. Inspired by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, the enactive theorists Alva Noë and Evan Thompson take perception to be a result of the interaction between the brain, the body and the environment. Their argument turns mostly on the role of self-motion and sensorimotor knowledge in perceptual experience. It was said to be entirely consistent with phenomenology, indeed its revival. However, this issue is under debate. To show this, I begin with analyzing the enactive conception as a physicalist attempt to overcome the challenge of dualism and representationalism. I then turn to Husserl’s transcendental method and argue that Noë’s solution, unlike Husserl’s, remains naturalistic, as it does not take the phenomenon of intersubjectivity and the constitution of the “cultural world” into account. Afterwards I turn to Merleau-Ponty and demonstrate that there is some certain common ground with Noë, but also major differences. I conclude that the enactive approach is not completely refuted by the phenomenological one, insofar as the latter partly contains the first. Yet the enactivists deal merely with the necessary physiological conditions of perception qua animal perception, not with the sufficient sociocultural conditions for the understanding of human perception, like the inquiry into the historical and linguistic circumstances under which the understanding of human mind is made possible. The reason why the recent transformation of phenomenology into neurophenomenology is perceived as a revival is virtually inherent to the specific scientific ethos of enactivism and reveals a certain oblivion of the objectives of philosophical phenomenology. https://jffp.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jffp/article/view/928
Embodied Subjectivity: The Phenomenological Roots of New Cognitive Science
Methode. Analytic Perspectives, 2013
The flourishing of the embodied/embedded approach in contemporary cognitive science goes hand in hand with the reappraisal of the phenomenological notion of lived body, on the ground of the criticism raised against both the representationalist attitude and the method-ological solipsism of standard cognitive science. From this point of view the interest for the phenomenological philosophy of body was initially guided by Merleau-Ponty, whose approach seemed more attentive than the Husserl's one to the bodily-worldly dimension of subjective experience. Beyond any contraposition between both philosophers, it is true that also Husserl's considerations on the lived body as common power of sensation and action constitute an essential source of inspiration for the contemporary sensorimotor and enactive theories of subjectivity. Husserl's analysis of lived body provides to the exponents of embodied cogni-tive science the theoretical framework for a philosophical legitimization of the sensorimotor approach, since lived body constitutes the zero orientation point that makes possible every perception and action and founds therefore a basic motor intentionality on the ground of the intimate relationship between kinaesthesia and perception. Phenomenology can offer to cog-nitive science a theoretical framework that allows a rigorous description of the manifold ways the subject make experience of the world starting from its embedded/embodied constitution and a regressive analysis that aims at a genetic reconstruction of its development.
Review of Steven Crowell "Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger
Steven Crowell's latest monograph is a careful and nuanced thematic and historically grounded defense of the philosophical importance of what is now frequently called "classical" phenomenology (specifically Husserl and Heidegger) in addressing the issues of meaning, normativity, agency and first-person knowledge, topics central to contemporary analytic philosophy of mind and action. This well argued book situates Husserl and Heidegger not just at the center of contemporary debates in the philosophy of mind and action, but also as interlocutors in current disputes over normativity and practical knowledge (as found in the neo-pragmatism of John McDowell and Robert Brandom, among others), as well as the current discussions concerning firstperson authority and mental content.