Husserl on Other Minds

Husserlian phenomenology, as the study of conscious experience, has often been accused of solipsism. Husserl’s method, it is argued, does not have the resources to provide an account of consciousness of other minds. This chapter will address this issue by providing a brief overview of the multiple angles from which Husserl approached the theme of intersubjectivity, with specific focus on the details of his account of the concrete interpersonal encounter – “empathy.” Husserl understood empathy as a direct, quasi-perceptual form of intentionality through which the sense of the Other is constituted. Furthermore, his account of empathy is holistically integrated with his overall theory of intersubjectivity, including his discussions of the objectivity of nature, and the social, historical, and communal aspects of subjectivity. Husserl’s theory of empathy continues to cast a long shadow, influencing both the analytic and continental approaches to the problem of other minds, as well as contemporary account of social cognition in the cognitive sciences

Now we got truck everywhere, we don't travel anywhere: A phenomenology of travelling by community mutika in the northern Kimberley, Western Australia

Motor vehicles tend to be highly personalised in all kinds of cultural milieus. The process of personalisation is primarily achieved through a projection of the travelling subject's own bodily schema onto the body of the vehicle. These strongly libidinal/narcissistic bodily investments are made visible, for example, in the penchant for personalised numberplates that expand parts of a vehicle owner's/user's bodily ego into that of their vehicle, in how some male truck drivers paint their wife's or girlfriend's name on their cab panels so that the driver is imaginarily travelling inside the desired woman's cab/body, or even in the way we might speak of a vehicle being 'gutsy' or 'gutless'. The projection of bodily schemata is also apparent in the way we internally differentiate a vehicle so that we might speak not just of its 'body', but also of its 'headlights', its 'tail' or 'arse-end', its steering arms and so on. Conversely, a vehicularisation of the human body is evident in idioms such as 'punching someone's lights out', 'making tracks' or 'going off the rails'. This dialectic between corporealisation of vehicles and a vehicularisation of the body is no less evident in the tropes used by the Indigenous people of the Kimberley region of north-western Australia where the forms of embodiment that are projected onto (and introjected from) vehicles take on the specificity of local body imagery and the particular ways in which vehicles are used there

From insufficiency to anticipation, an introduction to 'Lichaamskaart'

In this paper we take up the point of symbolic-imaginary anticipation and we combine it with the mirror stage, worked out by Jacques Lacan in numerous publications. We place the mirror stage within its complex temporal framework and explain how the three topological categories (RSI) follow from this most intimate of subjective experiences in the double mirror set up. All kinds of psychopathological mechanisms are traceable to this period in subjective development. Until recently it was impossible to find direct traces of this defining and unchanging moment. Since the beginning of 1990 a new method of therapy was devised in Duffel, named ‘lichaamskaart’, or body map. We point out the likeness and differences between the double mirror stage and the construction of the lichaamskaart. In conclusion we illustrate the relationship between anticipatory systems and the therapeutic process involved in lichaamskaart

Is that me in the mirror? Depersonalisation modulates tactile mirroring mechanisms

Our sense of self is thought to develop through sensory-motor contingencies provided, not only by observing one's own body, but also by mirroring interactions with others. This suggests that there is a strong link between mirroring mechanisms and the bodily self. The present study tested whether this link is expressed at early, implicit stages of the mirroring process or at later, more cognitive stages. We also provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first demonstration of how inter-individual differences in our sense of bodily self may affect mirroring mechanisms. We used somatosensory event-related potentials (SEPs) to investigate the temporal dynamics of mirroring highly self-related information (viewed touch on one's own face) compared to other-related information (viewed touch on a stranger's face), in individuals with low and high levels of depersonalisation, a mental condition characterised by feeling detached or estranged from one's self and body. For the low-depersonalisation group, mirroring for self-related events (P45) preceded mirroring for other-related events (N80). At later stages (P200), mirroring was stronger for other-related than self-related events. This shows that early, implicit and later, more cognitive processes play different relative roles in mirroring self- and other-related bodily events. Critically, mirroring differed in the high-depersonalisation group, specifically for self-related events. An absence of early, implicit mirroring for self-related events over P45 suggests that the associated processes may be the neural correlates of the disembodiment experienced in depersonalisation. A lack of differential mirroring for self- and other-related events over P200 may reflect compensatory mechanisms that redress deficiencies in mirroring at earlier stages, which may break down to give rise to symptoms of depersonalisation. Alternatively, or in addition, they may represent an attenuation of processes related to self-other distinction. Our study thus shows that mirroring, especially for events on one's own face, can be strongly affected by how connected the observer feels to their own bodily self

Understanding Meta-Emotions: Prospects for a Perceptualist Account

This article clarifies the nature of meta-emotions, and it surveys the prospects of applying a version of the perceptualist model of emotions to them. It first considers central aspects of their intentionality and phenomenal character. It then applies the perceptualist model to meta-emotions, addressing issues of evaluative content and the normative dimension of meta-emotional experience. Finally, in considering challenges and objections, it assesses the perceptualist model, concluding that its application to meta-emotions is an attractive extension of the theory, insofar as it captures some distinctive features of meta-emotions—specifically their normative dimension—while locating them within the domain of occurrent affective experiences

The Curious Case of Collective Experience: Edith Stein’s Phenomenology of Communal Experience and a Spanish Fire-Walking Ritual

In everyday language, we readily attribute experiences to groups. For example, 1 might say, “Spain celebrated winning the European Cup” or “The uncovering of corruption caused the union to think long and hard about its internal structure.” In each case, the attribution makes sense. However, it is quite difficult to give a nonreductive account of precisely what these statements mean because in each case a mental state is ascribed to a group, and it is not obvious that groups can have mental states. In this article, I do not offer an explicit theory of collective experience. Instead, I draw on phenomenological analyses and empirical data in order to provide general conditions that a more specific theory of collective experience must meet in order to be coherent

Expression and Extended Cognition

I argue for the possibility of an extremely intimate connection between the emotional content of the music and the emotional state of the person who produces that music. Under certain specified conditions, the music may not just influence, but also partially constitute the musician’s emotional state