Panoramas of Mind and Meaning

Normativity, Meaning, and the Promise of Phenomenology, 2019

This volume aims to assess the philosophical importance of phenomenology as a method for studying the normativity of meaning and its transcendental conditions. Using the pioneering work of Steven Crowell as a springboard, contributors to this volume examine the promise of phenomenology for illuminating long-standing problems in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, action theory, the philosophy of religion, and moral psychology. The essays are unique in that they engage with the phenomenological tradition not as a collection of authorities to whom we must defer, or a set of historical artifacts we must preserve, but rather as a community of interlocutors with views that bear on important issues in contemporary philosophy. Normativity, Meaning, and the Promise of Phenomenology will be a key resource for students and scholars interested in the phenomenological tradition, the transcendental tradition from Kant to Davidson, and existentialism. Additionally, its forward-looking focus yields crucial insights into pressing philosophical problems that will appeal to scholars working across all areas of the discipline.

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.

Routledge, 2024

How can we be responsible for our attitudes if we cannot normally choose what we believe, desire, feel, and intend? This problem has received much attention during the last decades, both in epistemology and ethics. Yet its connections to discussions about reasons and rationality have been largely overlooked. This book develops the foundations of an ethics of mind by investigating the responsibility that is presupposed by the requirements of rationality that govern our attitudes. It has five main goals. First, it reinterprets the problem of responsibility for attitudes as a problem about the normativity of rationality. Second, it connects substantive and structural rationality by drawing on debates about responsibility. Third, it supports recent accounts of the normativity of rationality by explicitly defending the view that epistemic reasons and other ‘right-kind’ reasons are genuine normative reasons. Fourth, it breaks the stalemate between rationalist and voluntarist accounts of mental responsibility by proposing a hybrid view. Finally, it argues that irrationality can warrant moral blame, thus revealing an unnoticed normative force of rational requirements. Length of manuscript: 85,000 words

2013

Rationalization masquerades as rationality in human affairs. Rational discourse is displaced by social conformity in academia. Mind’s habitual mode of functioning leads to error in the name of rational thinking – among them, its tendency to divide and subdivide reality in an endless fragmentation of knowledge, to confound description with explanation, to view reality in terms of irreconcilable polar opposites, to mistake symbolic abstraction for the reality it represents, and to draw conclusions predetermined by its own premises. The apparently insoluble problems confronting humanity today are the result of mind’s divisive, piecemeal functioning. Solution to those problems lie in formulating a perception of society and the world as an integral whole. That is only possible by an action of the whole mind, which is the basis of the insights and intuitions that are the source of our greatest human initiatives, scientific discoveries and artistic creativity. This is a call to transcend the limits imposed by mind’s characteristic functioning as a basis for formulating comprehensive solutions to the pressing challenges facing humanity today.

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.

Philosophical Issues, 2014

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.