Varela's enactive approach to cognitive science has been elaborated into a theoretical framework of agency, sense-making, and sociality, while his key methodological innovation — neurophenomenology (NP) — continues to inspire empirical work. We argue that the enactive approach was originally expressed in NP as three core tenets: (1) phenomenological pragmatics, (2) embodied cognition, and (3) conscious efficacy. However, most efforts in NP have focused on applying tenet 1, while tenet 2 has received notably less attention, and there is even explicit (...) distancing from tenet 3. By way of a critical review of four case studies, we show how NP thereby falls short of its full potential. Crucially, it needs to demonstrate that the first-person perspective matters, not only as a source of correlations with third-person data, but because lived experience, as such, makes a difference in its own right to the living body's dynamics. Given that methods for improving subjective reports have become accepted in human neuroscience (tenet 1), and given the increasing availability for recording multi-scalar organismic activity during embodied action (tenet 2), we propose it is time to integrate these research strands by using this issue of conscious efficacy as a pivot point (tenet 3). The development of genuinely experience-involving accounts of neurophysiological activity during embodied action holds promise for rebooting neurophenomenology in stronger form. (shrink)

Peripersonal space (PPS) is frequently defined as a plastic, pragmatic and goal-directed multisensory buffer that connects the brain-body with its immediate environment. While such characterisations indicate that peripersonal spatiality is profoundly embodied and enactive, comparatively few attempts have aimed to systematically synthesise PPS literature with compatible phenomenological accounts of lived space provided by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Moreover, in traditional cognitive neuroscience, neurophysiological activity is thought to map onto discrete ‘cognitive correlates’. In contemporary 4E approaches to cognition, however, phenomenology-derived notions such (...) as ‘pre-reflective cognition’ and ‘motor-intentionality’ frequently appear, yet their neural correlates may be comparatively difficult to pin down. Pre-reflectively, agents seemingly do not thematise spatial properties as operationalised in key experimental paradigms (e.g., spatial rotation tasks) but are instead inherently spatially embedded within the world. To refine this distinction, I survey how tools co-determine this distinctly spatial ‘world-embeddedness’ using a neurophenomenological methodology (Varela, _Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3_(4), 330–349, 1996 ). Specifically, I conduct two neurophenomenological analyses of tool-perception and tool-use, examining both how distance modulates affordance-perception and how tool-use remaps bodily space via the withdrawal of tools from intentional-objects into co-constituting motor-intentionality itself. I conclude by briefly distinguishing this interpretation of spatial cognition from cognitivist frameworks. Thereafter, I briefly highlight the temporal scaffolding underlying PPS while conceptually grounding my account within Embodied Simulation Theory (Gallese, _Reti, Saperi, Linguaggi_, (1), 31–46, 2018 ). What is at stake is thus both an explicitly embodied-enactive account of bodily space that is qualitative and situational instead of quantitative and positional, as well as a viable, interdisciplinary strategy for unifying pre-reflective cognition with neurophysiological data. (shrink)