What the participants share, their common “sense” of the world, creates a foundation, a framing, an orientation that enables human actors to see and act in coordination with one another. For recurrent activities, the methods the participants use to understand each other as they act change, making the intersubjective space in which actors operate richer and easier to produce. This article works through some of the issues that emerge from a close examination of intersubjectivity as it is managed through (...) representation and interaction. The data that are presented document, in detail, a sequence of related interactions, within and across episodes of cooperation, where continuity and change can be observed. The emergence of conversational structure and coordinating representations are significant milestones in the long‐term development of a representational practice that support the runtime co‐construction of intersubjective space. Conversational structures emerge interactively to mediate recurrent points of coordination in the domain activity, and only secondarily the conversation itself. Coordinating representations change the representational practice of the participants by making it easier to manage their “shared view” of the collective work, enabling the participants to make progress, expand the field of the common activity, while exhibiting more control of if and when explicit grounding occurs. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes between implicit self-related information and explicit self-representation and argues that the latter is required for self-consciousness. It is further argued that self-consciousness requires an awareness of other minds and that this awareness develops over the course of an increasingly complex perspectival differentiation, during which information about self and other that is implicit in early forms of social interaction becomes redescribed into an explicit format.

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that calls the mineness of one's own sensations, thoughts and actions into question and threatens the person with a loss of self. In order to understand this illness in its essence, an approach based on phenomenological psychopathology is therefore indispensable. Conversely, disorders of the self in schizophrenia should be of crucial interest for any philosophy of subjectivity in order to test its concepts of self-awareness, personhood and intersubjectivity by reference to empirical phenomena.Contemporary neurobiological concepts (...) of schizophrenia predominantly emphasize the importance of impaired integration of somatosensory inputs into stable central-nervous representations... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Autism and Intersubjectivity:Beyond Cognitivism and the Theory of MindRichard Gipps (bio)The papers that make up this special issue of Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology are obviously united by both topic and approach. They all look at autism through a philosophical lens—both at infantile autism (Gallagher 2004a, 2004b; McGeer 2004; Shanker 2004) and at schizophrenic autism (Stanghellini and Ballerini 2004). Moreover, they are all concerned with the foundations of our (...) understanding of people and their minds, both the minds of others (Gallagher 2004a, 2004b; Shanker 2004; Stanghellini and Ballerini 2004) and that of oneself (McGeer 2004). The developmental disorder of infantile autism provides a conspicuous example of a disruption in the ability to develop such an understanding and enter into the social world, whilst schizophrenic autism provides a conspicuous example of what happens when one falls out of it (Stanghellini and Ballerini 2004).Yet what further affords the opportunity of this introduction is the possibility of discerning a strong common theme that runs through the philosophical treatment the papers provide. For they are united in their rejection of the primarily cognitive approach toward our capacity to relate to one another (or to ourselves) as to minded people taken by many in the mainstream of developmental psycho(patho)logy today.1 Such mainstream approaches ascribe to the developing child a 'theory of mind,' tacit knowledge of which supposedly enables them to negotiate the social world. In place of such an intellectualist, disengaged, cognition-focused psychology, we are offered perspectives that stress the primitive foundational character of our pre-reflective (noncognitive) engagement with one another, our emotion, our expression, and our embodiment.The grounds for this stressing of the affective and praxical dimensions of personal life over the cognitive and representational are twofold. First there is the developmental trajectory itself, and the claim is that the autistic child's interpersonal lacunae manifest themselves considerably before they develop the cognitive capacities for social knowledge (Gallagher 2004a; Shanker 2004). The principle ground, however, is philosophical, and the claim here is that what needs to be rejected in the developmental psycho(patho)logy is an alienated ontology and estranged epistemology that has implicitly become inscribed within it, constraining its explanatory project and limiting its vision of possibilities.2 That at least is how I [End Page 195] would put it and, by way of providing an overarching philosophical presentation of the papers of this issue, what follows shall be its elaboration.The ontology in question has it that the mind is an inner domain, that bodily behavior is an outer domain, that belief and thought epitomize the former, that intentionality is a function of the former and only derivatively manifest in the latter, that the form of our embodiment is contingent, that understanding is manifest primarily in thought and not intrinsically in praxis, that the mind is populated by free-standing inner representations, and that perception and the emotions are extrinsic to the understanding (Gallagher 2004a, 2004b; McGeer 2004; Shanker 2004). And such an ontology carries a host of epistemological implications. The self retreats from the interpersonal interactive domain, taking up residence even behind the subject's own mind, which itself becomes an objectified domain. In our own case, we are left in the predicament of needing to inspect (or intro-spect) our own inner states to find out how things are for us; our self-reports (avowals of what we think and feel) thereby become avowals of judgments of what we take ourselves to think and feel (McGeer 2004). And when we confront others the task becomes one of cognitively figuring out, from merely 'outer' clues, how things stand with them on the inside. The encounter with others is then epistemologically fraught, relying on inference and theory to take us from an outer domain of mere movement to a hidden inner world of intentionality (Gallagher 2004a, 2004b; Shanker 2004).Thus, an alienated ontology of the person and their mind bequeaths its own epistemological problematic, and the estranged epistemology gives to developmental psychology the task of filling in the details of the actual cognitive states and mechanisms which instantiate the theories and inferences which it has discerned a priori to be required. And psychopathology... (shrink)

1. Introduction. The problems of other minds ; Body, mind and other minds ; The analogical theory ; The critical theory ; Functionalism and mental states as theoretical entities ; A brief outline of things to come -- 2. Functionalism and the nature of mental representations. Functionalism and cognitive psychology ; Folk psychology and the representational theory of mind -- 3. Theory theory and simulation theory. A very short introduction to the world of theory theory and simulation theory ; A (...) look at simulation theory ; A look at theory theory -- 4. Intentionality and the theory theory. The generic theory theory ; Cognitive and primordial intentionality ; Theory theorists and primordial intentionality ; Fodor's computational theory of primordial intentionality -- 5. The body schema. Historical notes on the notion of body schema ; An outline of a notion of body schema -- 6. On the notion of primordial intentionality. Concrete and abstracts movements ; Why primordial intentionality is not reducible to cognitive intentionality ; The intentionality of primordial intentionality -- 7. The irreducibility of primordial intentionality. The first argument against homuncular functionalism ; The second argument against homuncular functionalism -- 8. Transferring the body schema. Husserl's phenomenology of intersubjectivity ; Towards a primordial intentionality of intersubjectivity ; Some implications and a comparison to Husserl -- 9. Theory theory and simulation theory revisited. Attribution of primordial intentionality as cognitive simulation ; If homuncular functionalism were true ... ; Primordial intentionality and belief-desire psychology ; The theory of body schematic transfer and the simulation theory -- 10. Body schematic transfer and the conceptual problem of other minds. Strawson on the problem of other minds ; Disarming Strawson's objections ; Solving the conceptual problem -- 11. Concluding remarks -- Summary in Swedish -- References. (shrink)

NOTHING APPEARS LESS PROBLEMATIC than self-consciousness. Without it, no inquiry seems possible, for how can one seek knowledge unless one is aware of undertaking that quest? Moreover, consciousness of anything other than the self is always plagued with knowing something whose existence cannot lie in the consciousness of it. As Descartes observed, whenever one represents an object different from one’s consciousness, it is always doubtful whether that object exists or corresponds with its representation. By contrast, insofar as consciousness of (...) one’s self-consciousness is the very being of self-consciousness, the gap between object and representation here seems uniquely absent. Not only is my representation of myself as self-conscious constitutive of my being self-conscious, but nothing prevents that representation from corresponding to what it is about. (shrink)

Chapter I contains an examination of the criticisms which some philosophers have advanced against Kant concerning the problem of our knowledge of other thinking beings. In the course of this examination the nature and scope of Kant's inquiry is brought into focus: it is a transcendental inquiry which deals with the a priori conditions of the possibility of experience. This means two things: The question whether there are other thinking beings besides myself is for Kant not a philosophical , but (...) an empirical question which can be answered only a posteriori, that is, by actual experience. The a priori conditions must nevertheless be such that they do not preclude but leave room for the experience by which we find out whether there are other thinking beings besides ourselves. Chapter II develops the central thought of the Transcendental Deduction in order to deal with two complementary issues: with Kant's confusions with respect to the 'subjective', and with the notion of an 'object of representations'. It is argued that objectivity in the Critical-transcendental sense ranges equally over the 'outer' and 'inner'. This means that inner experience is objective, i.e., can be expressed in judgments which possess objective validity and necessary universality for everybody. Chapter III deals with the Second Analogy. The main purpose here is to show what types of objects are constituted by means of the categories: the determination of a manifold of sensible intuition by means of the category of cause and effect is its determination as a happening or as an event. In chapter IV, finally, it is shown that and how a particular type of empirical objects, namely thinking beings, can be seen as falling under the objects which are constituted by the categories. (shrink)

Husserl proceeds to show how a world-representation emerges from our world-experience, and how an idea of the world plays a role in the expansion of world-representations. He also draws our attention to the appropriation of other world-representations in a process of adjustment and compensation leading to intersubjective world-representations, and offers an analysis of the status of world-representations within transcendental phenomenology. In this article I will underline the relevance of Husserl’s concept of horizonedness to the characterization of the three levels (...) of world-experience, worldrepresentation, and the world as an idea. In getting clear on this relevance several points must be emphasized. (shrink)

I accept the main thesis of the article according to which representation of knowledge is more basic than representation of belief. But I question the authors’ contention that humans' unique capacity to represent belief does not underwrite the capacity for the accumulation of cultural knowledge.

Through the application of Material Engagement Theory to enactivist analyses of social cognition, this paper seeks to examine the role of material culture in shaping the development of intersubjectivity and long-term scalar transformations in social interaction. The deep history of human sociality reveals a capacity for communities to self-organise at radically emergent scales across a variety of temporal and spatial ranges. This ability to generate and participate in heterogenous, multiscalar relationships and identities demonstrates the developmental plasticity of human (...) class='Hi'>intersubjectivity. Perhaps human sociality’s most unique feature is this intersubjective plasticity, that is, the ability for diverse collectivities of individuals and groups to adopt and transition between numerous social identities and behaviours with profound rapidity and flexibility. However, the most influential models in the study of social cognition, the Social Intelligence Hypothesis and Theory of Mind, promote a view of intersubjectivity that is rooted in methodological individualism and primarily understood as a capacity for observation and prediction. This approach leads to significant issues when confronted with the diversity and plasticity of hominin social organisation, particularly in regards to the computational burdens and information processing bottlenecks such scalar changes imply for cognitivist models. This paper examines the metaphysical assumptions in computational models of the mind that result in representational apriorism and an epiphenomenal treatment of material culture that hinder our understanding of the evolution and development of social cognition. Specifically, this article critiques the logics of computation, information processing, representationalism, and content within Neo-Darwinian frameworks that obscure and distort the interrelationships of evolutionary, developmental, ecological and cultural processes. Through a synthesis of material engagement and enactivist approaches to social cognition, this article argues that it is possible to explain the emergent and multiscalar dynamics of hominin sociality in terms of ecologically distributed and developmentally plastic interactions between brains, bodies and material culture. (shrink)

My main concern in this article is the relevance of theoretically integrative approaches. I argue that such approaches are methodologically better equipped for the psychology of religion because they correspond with the inherent complexity of religiosity. In order to concretize this matter I critically evaluate the hypothesis proposed by some cognitive researchers that the attraction of counter-intuitive representations provides an explanation of religion. Irrelevant aspects are left out in this hypothesis. In contrast to this I rely on cognitive-analytic perspectives that (...) are based on a broader theoretical foundation. This generates a more complete picture that also connects to the tradition built on Otto's idea of the wholly other. From this perspective it is more plausible to assume that religious representations are trajectories of the early evolving tripartite sense of self, other and world and, further, formed by individual mentalization capacity. This can be conceptualized in terms of interplay between specific complex representational constellations rooted in different phases of early development. Integrative approaches that depict mental activity as a dynamic and multifaceted phenomenon embedded in intersubjectivity are relevant for the psychology of religion. (shrink)

This paper argues that, from the perspective of phenomenological philosophy, the study of intersubjectivity is closely tied to questions of the representational mind. It focuses on developmental studies of children's understanding of the human mind, setting out some of the main findings and theoretical explanations. It then takes up Husserl's idea of looking at persons in the 'personal attitude'. Understanding motivational connections among a person's subjective experiences is an essential feature of this attitude. Proposing a unified theoretical interpretation of (...) children's representational achievements, the paper suggests that understanding motivational connections among one's representations requires an ability for reflection that children apply in progressively more refined ways to themselves and others. (shrink)

The arguments advanced in this paper are the following. Firstly, that just as Trevarthen’s three subjective/intersubjective levels, primary, secondary, and tertiary, mapped out different modes of access, so too response is similarly structured, from direct primordial responsiveness, to that informed by shared pragmatic concerns and narrative contexts, to that which demands the distantiation afforded by representation. Secondly, I propose that empathy is an essential mode of intentionality, integral to the primary level of subjectivity/intersubjectivity, which is crucial to our (...) survival as individuals and as a species. Further to this last point, I argue that empathy is not derived on the basis of intersubjectivity, nor does it merely disclose intersubjectivity, rather it is constitutive of intersubjectivity at the primary level. Empathy is a direct, irreducible intentionality separable in thought from the other primary intentional modes of perception, rationality, memory and imagination, but co-arising with these. In regard to the inter-personal level, the concrete relations with others, primary empathy is both the ground for the possibility of the secondary manifestations—pity, sympathy, perspective taking, etc., and motivates them. Thirdly, it is the movement in the core of subjectivity initially generated by shifting attention between the ‘I’ and ‘we’ perspectives and later ‘solidified’ through affect to become shifting identification, which opens up the intersubjective domain. So we can affirm that we are not only born into sociality but our sociality goes to the roots of our being as Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty have claimed. (shrink)

Consider the claims that representations of physical laws are intersubjective, and that they ultimately provide the foundation for all other intersubjective knowledge. Those claims, as well as the deeper philosophical commitments that justify them, constitute rare points of agreement between the Marburg School neo-Kantians Paul Natorp and Ernst Cassirer and their positivist rival, Ernst Mach. This is surprising, since Natorp and Cassirer are both often at pains to distinguish their theories of natural scientific knowledge from positivist views like Mach’s, and (...) often from Mach’s views in particular. Thus the very fact of this agreement between the Marburg School neo-Kantians and their positivist stalking horse points to a deep current of ideas that runs beneath the whole of the post-Kantian intellectual context they shared. (shrink)

In Historical Representation Frank Ankersmit seeks a juste milieu between postmodern theory and historical practice. But he still insists that the meaning of a historical representation “is not found, but made in and by [the] text.” Thus “there will be nothing, outside the text itself, that can govern or check [the conceptualization].” Accordingly, “a representation itself cannot be interpreted as one large description. I would not hesitate to say that this—and nothing else—is the central problem in the (...) philosophy of history.” On the other hand, he affirms that “a historical representation ‘is about’ a certain part of the past,” that historical debate is a “semantic quarrel not about the exact meaning of words, but about the past.” Everything hinges on how to grasp this idea of “aboutness.” I propose an alternative reading of post-positivist philosophy of science in hopes of reaching the juste milieu. The issue is whether colligatory concepts in history have a more radically constructed character than theoretical terms in natural-scientific theory, and whether, as with the latter, they can make intersubjective claims to warrant. My view is that colligatory concepts in historical representations can be conceived to refer in roughly the same way that theoretical terms do in natural-scientific theories. All the problems I find in Ankersmit’s approach come to the fore in his fruitful analogy to portrait painting. First, the personality the portrait evokes is not restricted to the representation, but is of the sitter. We are offered insight not into painting but into an actual character. That is, there is a cognitive, not simply an aesthetic, dimension to representation. Historical terms pick out something intersubjectively affirmable in reality, and discrimination is possible among rival versions. The question is how to regard—to explain and to evaluate—these underdetermined objects of consideration, not to preclude them by stipulation. (shrink)

In this essay I examine Hélène Cixous's readings and figurings of women in colonial and decolonizing cultural spaces and slippages between universalized Western metaphors and metonyms and their colonial and orientalist significance. These readings, figurings, and slippages provide a supplementary framing of Cixous's utopian model of intersubjective exchange, her representation of the relation between materiality and textuality, and her universalization of the singular transcendental subject.

In this essay I examine Hélène Cixous's readings and figurings of women in colonial and decolonizing cultural spaces and slippages between universalized Western metaphors and metonyms and their colonial and orientalist significance. These readings, figurings, and slippages provide a supplementary framing of Cixous's utopian model of intersubjective exchange, her representation of the relation between materiality and textuality, and her universalization of the singular transcendental subject.

Heidegger’s representation of Dasein’s death relation in Division Two of Being and Time remains a singularly prominent reflection on death in the canon of twentieth century continental philosophy. At the same time, though, it is a representation whose limitations have been established by commitments made in Division One, specifically in Heideggers’s account of being-with. My interests in this paper are in the intimate relation between intersubectivity and death, and I engage in a comparative phenomenology in order to free (...) things up. More specifically, I provide a critique of certain key aspects of Heidegger’s account of Dasein, and then I contrast this with the radically different way that the Iroquois practice and experience the connection between intersubjecivity and death. The Iroquois tribe establish their connection between themselves through formal condolences rituals. As I articulate in the paper, for the Iroquois, the relationship to the dead is the source of my relations with those who are living. Dead people are not just an anonymous “they,” and the words said about them are not just idle chatter, but the source of responsibility to continue the community. (shrink)

This essay explores notions of maternal desire within feminist psychoanalysis with an interest in challenging heteronormative frameworks of analysis. Providing close critical readings of texts by Jessica Benjamin, Julia Kristeva, Kaja Silverman and Hortense Spillers, I trace conceptual openings through which to interpret maternal sexuality as a mobile process of intersubjectivity that is grounded in changing historical relations of experience. I argue that Spillers’ approach transforms a critical process of reading desire away from the insularities and exclusions of conventional (...) psychoanalytic knowledges towards a democratic and reflexive process of representation and analysis. (shrink)

The shared circuits model (SCM) relies on well-regarded theories of perception-action, mirror neurons, and forward models, but the functional/informational level of the model limits its ability to explain complex behavior such as true imitation. Data from our lab and others confirm the more general details of the model, accepted by most, but specify the neural mechanisms involved in perception-action processes.

The notion of intersubjectivity has achieved a primary status in contemporary psychoanalytic debate, stimulating new theoretical proposals as well as controversies. This paper presents an overview of the main contributions on inter-subjectivity in the field of neurosciences. In humans as well as—probably—in other species, the ability for emotional resonance is guaranteed early in development. Based on this capacity, a primary sense of connectedness is established that can be defined inter-subjective in that it entails sharing affective states and intentions with (...) caregivers. We propose to define such a form of inter-subjectivity ascontingent, since the infant’s early abilities for resonance do not imply the more generalized capacity to permanently conceive of the relationship outside the realm of current interactions and the infant-caregiver’s mutual correspondence of internal states. This form of connection, hence, results in a self-referential, bodily, and affectively codified, context- and time dependent, like-me experience of interactions. The gradual maturation of brain structures and processes as well as interactive experiences allow proper intersubjectivity exchanges, grounded on new intentional and representational capacities, to evolve. In this more mature form of intersubjectivity, the individual is allowed to conceive of her own psychic space both as distinct and as possibly connected with the other’s contents and experience, even in the absence of current behavioral indicators of such correspondence. This multi-layered model of intersubjectivity, which is embraced by current neuroscience research, seems to allow for new interpretations of psychoanalytic models of human relatedness based upon classic clinical observations. (shrink)

I discuss Husserl’s account of intersubjectivity in the fifth Cartesian Meditation. I focus on the problem of perceived similarity. I argue that recent work in developmental psychology and neuroscience, concerning intermodal representation and the mirror neuron system, fails to constitute a naturalistic solution to the problem. This can be seen via a comparison between the Husserlian project on the one hand and Molyneux’s Question on the other.

The aim of this paper is to present the principles of intersubjectivity as a second-person relational account of mind, set against individualist first- and third-person accounts of the sharing of mental representations. I will set out a summary of these positions and defend the claim that understanding proto-conversations as “expressive communications” allows one to understand them as genuine communications, as in, mutually manifest communications that entail intersubjectivity. To support this interpretation, I will propose a novel explanation of expression, (...) understood as constitutive of the mental state. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to examine the objective side of subjectivity formation through music. I attempt to show how music is a way to configure subjectivity in its interiority, but in a way that it can be shared between other individual subjectivities. Music has an objective structure, but this structure is the temporal and sonorous interiority of subjectivity. It has as its objective manifestation and consequence the feelings and emotions. These feelings are subjective, and in the level of (...) subjective Geist they are related to intuition. Hegel believes that such intuition cannot be properly communicated, due to its exclusive access to the individual subject himself. Despite that, music is an art, and it takes part in the level of absolute Geist. That means that music is the connection between the objective and subjective sides of Geist, being a product of social relations, including the sharing, experience and recognition of subjective operations by the participants in society as something in common. Art is related to intuition but it is not intuition itself, nor it is reduced to the capacity of intuition. All three capacities of the subjective Geist in the theoretical Geist (namely intuition, representation and thinking) can be part of the relationship between art and the individual perspective.However, the link between art and intuition is an analogy between the subjective Geist and the absolute Geist, considering that art is a level of manifestation of social self-consciousness where the people and the social group have not yet become conscious of its content in its manifestation. The exposition of the ideal content of social relations is manifested through absolute Geist, beginning with its sensible manifestation. After this process, it is signified through a practice related to representation, and finally it is related to a conceptually and linguistically mediated practice, philosophy. These products cannot be a consequence of a mere subjective connections, but must be (as part of absolute Geist) a consequence of the objective relation between individuals in its subjective manifestations. Furthermore, subjective capacities are a condition without which the development of the absolute Geist is not possible. At the same time, it is not possible that subjective Geist’s capacities can be fully realized without social relations. Science is not a product of an individual-solipsistic relationship with the environment, but a product of a social relations, including language, shared experiences and shared ways of comprehension, such as the common way to feel and receive the environment in a subjective level discussed below. I divide this exposition into three parts: (1) music and subjectivity, where I deal with the relation between body vibration, time, sound and the formal interiority of the listener/musical subject, analyzing the form of music in its subjective side (the relation to the listener); (2) music and content, where I examine the content generated by music as being the process of formation itself (i.e. the process of given form to the interiority of subjectivity through sounds becomes its own content, namely, the feelings); and (3) music and words, where I scrutinize the relationship between music and words’ capacities to make reference and to have content, considering the connection between pure music and lyrics, and between music and poetry as singular forms of art. I conclude with the idea that music has a specific role in Hegel’s system, which is to bring to light and develop absolute Geist’s (understood as the objectivation and formation of a social and cultural subjectivity) internal aesthetic form. (shrink)

The principal aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship between intersubjectivity and grammar. We argue that intersubjectivity represents, on the one hand, a prerequisite for the development of language as a symbolic system, and therefore also for the development of grammar. Furthermore, we attempt to show that language, and especially grammar, codify intersubjectivity. That is to say, grammatical constructions represent the intersubjective interactions that situated agents maintain in different pragmatic contects. We call this phenomenon the (...) meta-representational capacity of language. Our main object of analysis is the development of the ditransitive construction in the Spanish language. The evolution of this construction makes it clear that there is an important correlation between the degree of complexity of the codified intersubjective interaction and grammatically obligatory nature and the prominence of the grammatical construction that codifies it: the greater the complexity, the greater its obligatoriness, and vice versa. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 25, Issue 1, pp 131 - 161 Martin Buber denied consistently that he was a theologian because he repudiated abstract discourse about God. However, he did affirm that intersubjective events in the world express theological truth, even if that truth cannot be possessed or professed thereafter as noetic content. In this paper I introduce a concept of “embodied theology” to elucidate this nuance in Buber’s religious thought, and I show how his Ḥasidic writings shed unique light on (...) these matters. Through hermeneutical investigations of his Ḥasidic tales vis-à-vis the original sources, I illuminate Buber’s conviction that genuine sages convey theological meaning through the very spiritual-corporeal dynamics of their lives—or what Buber calls their “sacramental existence.”. (shrink)

The theory of language that underlies Plotinus’ Enneads is considered in relation to his broader metaphysical vision. For Plotinus, language is neither univocal nor equivocal, but is something in-between, incapable of precisely describing reality, but nonetheless not completely useless. Propositional knowledge expressed discursively represents an imperfect shadow of reality which is defective in relation to the pure apprehension of Intellect. Passages in Plotinus which relate language to the sensible world are examined and it is argued that, although it plays a (...) useful role in relating the sensible world to Intellect, discursive reason is nonetheless intrinsically inferior to both as a mode of representation. Plotinus holds that the inadequacy of language is “global” in character; language cannot describe any aspect of reality precisely, from the mundane to the transcendent. Language as a whole is an inferior image or imitation of the world as a whole. Therefore, the flaws in our linguistic representations cannot all be untangled or conceptually unpacked by means of language. There are passages in the Enneads which hint at an underlying semantic holism. Plotinus’ theory implies that apparent verbal contradictions which occur in different contexts might nonetheless still represent the optimal linguistic description of a reality that strictly speaking is ineffable. Therefore, discursive logical deduction is not always reliable, and needs to be subordinated to a vision of Intellect. True philosophical reasoning (dialectic) represents ostension towards the transcendent. Those who are sufficiently liberated to attain to an apprehension of the Forms, thereby come to inhabit the same “higher world”, involving a shared mystical intersubjectivity, which can be expressed linguistically, but only in an approximate manner. Plotinus’ theory presents a potential way out of the nihilistic impasse into which contemporary philosophy has arguably become enmeshed. (shrink)

Fifty years after the death of Edmund Husserl, the main founder of the phenomenological current of thought, we present to the public a four book collection showing in an unprecedented way how Husserl's aspiration to inspire the entire universe of knowledge and scholarship has now been realized. These volumes display for the first time the astounding expansion of phenomenological philosophy throughout the world and the enormous wealth and variety of ideas, insights, and approaches it has inspired. The basic commitment to (...) phenomenological concerns found in all this variety makes this collection a most signifi cant historical document. This second volume of the collection bears witness to a deliberate shift of attention from the earlier to the later phase of Husserl's reflections. We see how his issues - intersubjectivity, ethics, human encounter, the societal world, empathy, the sphere of the self, and the surpassing of dichotomies (bodylpsyche, etc.) - are now at the center of attention in the human sciences. Among the authors are H. Tellenbach, A. Rigobello, C. Balzer, C. Bjurvill, V. Molchanov, E. Syristova, O. Balaban, R. Boehm, M. Sancipriano, O. M. Anwar, Y. Okamoto, B. Holyst, T. Sodeika, and M. De Negri. The studies were gathered at the programs held by The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning in the commemorative year 1988/1989, chiefly at the First World Congress of Phenomenology at Santiago de Compos tela, Spain, with the aim of assessing the current state of phenomenology. A-T. T. (shrink)

The paper introduces and formally defines a functional concept of a measuring system, on this basis characterizing the measurement as an evaluation performed by means of a calibrated measuring system. The distinction between exact and uncertain measurement is formalized in terms of the properties of the traceability chain joining the measuring system to the primary standard. The consequence is drawn that uncertain measurements lose the property of relation-preservation, on which the very concept of measurement is founded according to the representational (...) viewpoint. Finally, from the analysis of the inter-relations between calibration and measurement the fundamental reasons of the claimed objectivity and intersubjectivity of measurement are highlighted, a valuable epistemological result to characterize measurement as a particular kind of evaluation. (shrink)

Central to the discourse on the intentional structure of consciousness encompasses further forms of experience, for instance, the notion of one’s direct experience of others. In essence, one’s experience of others is materialized through intersubjective engagement which is fundamental in comprehending the relation of the Self and Other. Intersubjective engagement between the two cognizing subjects is evidently interactive negotiation of understanding, thus necessarily meditational. This paper will substantiate the meditational or reflective nature of intersubjective engagement with the phenomenology of self-projection, (...) giving emphasis on the experience of the Self in relation to Others. The activity of self- projection onto others which is argued to take place through introspection, incorporates modes such as representation, simulation, imitation, empathic interaction and self-attribution. Furthermore, this paper will conclude intersubjectivity as an advent of joint construction of meaning and representation between the two cognizing subjects, thus, the collaborative endeavor of shared construction of meaning and representation is attained throughout the process. (shrink)

In this volume Rorty offers a Deweyan account of objectivity as intersubjectivity, one that drops claims about universal validity and instead focuses on utility for the purposes of a community. The sense in which the natural sciences are exemplary for inquiry is explicated in terms of the moral virtues of scientific communities rather than in terms of a special scientific method. The volume concludes with reflections on the relation of social democratic politics to philosophy.

Despite the fact that reproduction of experiments by peers has traditionally been regarded as of the utmost importance in enabling the intersubjectivity of scientific practice, reproductions may yield discordant results and deciding which result should be favored may not be an easy task. According to Harry Collins, experimental disagreement is resolved by the action of social, political and economic factors, but not by means of epistemic and scientific, or so-called internal reasons. His motivation for such a claim is the (...) presence of an infinite regress at the core of experimental activity that, according to him, cannot be stopped with scientific resources alone: the experimenters’ regress. The goal of this... (shrink)

We will argue that Sartre’s failure and Beauvoir’s success in formulating a successful existential ethics lie in their distinct understandings of transcendence. Sartre’s struggle between transcendent consciousness and immanent body undermines being-in-the-world and being-with-others (what is, in Sartre’s language, only a being-for-others) as a way to enrich the self. Contra Sartre, Beauvoir’s notion of transcendence is an upsurge of being which originates in and necessitates bodily immanence. For Beauvoir, transcendence is to be gained only by revelling in immanence, a gesture (...) that puts oneself at risk toward the Other. This putting oneself at risk is, however, the only way to generate an authentic and no longer conflictual encounter with the Other. (shrink)

This paper explores how phenomenological notions of rhythm might accommodate a richer description of preverbal infant-caregiver dialogue. Developmental psychologists have theorized a crucial link between rhythm and intercorporeality in the emergence of intersubjectivity and self. Drawing on the descriptions of rhythm in the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Erwin Straus, Henri Maldiney and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, the paper emphasizes the role of art and aesthetic processes proposing that they not only be considered as metaphorical or representational aspects of rhythm but as (...) primary resources that can enrich and deepen our understanding of self-emergence and intercorporeality in preverbal infant-caregiver dialogue. (shrink)

The paper deals with the early Yogācāra strategies for explaining intersubjective agreement under a ‘mere representations’ view. Examining Vasubandhu, Asaṅga, and Sthiramati’s use of the example of intersubjective agreement among the hungry ghosts, it is demonstrated that in contrast to the way in which it was often interpreted by contemporary scholars, this example in fact served these Yogācāra thinkers to perform an ironic inversion of the realist premise—showing that intersubjective agreement not only does not require the existence of mind-independent objects (...) but is in fact incompatible with their existence. By delineating the phenomenological complexity underlying this account, the paper then proceeds to unpack the emergent Yogācāra account of intersubjectivity, its implications on the understanding of being, the life-world, and alterity, arguing that it proposes a radical revision of the way we conceive of the ‘shared’ and ‘private’ distinction in respect to experiences, both ordinarily and philosophically. (shrink)

How did the events of the early modern period affect the way gender and the self were represented? This collection of essays attempts to respond to this question by analysing a wide spectrum of cultural concerns - humanism, technology, science, law, anatomy, literacy, domesticity, colonialism, erotic practices, and the theatre - in order to delineate the history of subjectivity and its relationship with the postmodern fragmented subject. The scope of this analysis expands the terrain explored by feminist theory, while its (...) feminist focus reveals that the subject is always gendered - although the terms in which gender is conceived and represented change across history. Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture not only explores the representation of gendered subjects, but in its commitment to balancing the productive tensions of methodological diversity, also speaks to contemporary challenges facing feminism. (shrink)

The Russian philosopher and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin has traditionally been seen as the leading figure in the group of intellectuals known as the Bakhtin Circle. The writings of other members of the Circle are considered much less important than his work, while Bakhtin's achievement has been exaggerated in proportion to the downgrading of the thinkers with whom he associated in the 1920s. This volume, which includes new translations and studies of the work of the most important members of the (...) Circle, sets out to correct the distortions in the established representations of its activity. The original contributions to literary and linguistic theory made by Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev (but frequently credited to Bakhtin) are assessed, and the distinctiveness of their approaches is highlighted. (shrink)

This paper scrutinizes the dialogical character of knowledge from the perspectives of Hegel’s and Davidson’s philosophies. First, it outlines their analogous trains of thought, particularly their “anti-representational” and “intersubjective” accounts of knowledge. Second, it draws a parallel between the two by discussing their contrasting views of the structure and goal of knowledge, showing that while Davidson advocates an open-ended, scheme-less empirical knowledge, Hegel maintains the notion of a (universal-rational) scheme and a goal-oriented dialectical process in which “the true is the (...) whole.” This section then critically traces their underlying disagreement to their divergent views on the nature of meaning, language, and thought. Finally, it argues that their views can be seen as complementary to two versions of dialectic, showing that while Hegel’s approach, akin to Platonic dialectic, focuses on the self-contained and “Truth”-oriented “negotiational” movement of ideas, Davidson’s, reminiscent of Socratic elenchus, emphasizes the truth-oriented ‘conversational’ interaction of subjects exchanging concepts. (shrink)

Despite popular representations to the contrary, creative people are rarely insane. But creativity and madness may be connected in other ways; we find suggestions of schizotypy in the biographies of many artists, and schizophrenia and related conditions seem to be disproportionately represented in talented and creative families. There are attractions, therefore, in the idea that creativity depends on the controlled deployment of capacities that are uncontrolled in psychosis: an idea explored by psychoanalytically inclined writers such as Ernst Kris and Hanna (...) Segal. (shrink)

Most models of generational succession in sexually reproducing populations necessarily move back and forth between genic and genotypic spaces. We show that transitions between and within these spaces are usually hidden by unstated assumptions about processes in these spaces. We also examine a widely endorsed claim regarding the mathematical equivalence of kin-, group-, individual-, and allelic-selection models made by Lee Dugatkin and Kern Reeve. We show that the claimed mathematical equivalence of the models does not hold. *Received January 2007; revised (...) April 2008. †To contact the authors, please write to: Elisabeth Lloyd, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, 130 Goodbody Hall, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405; e-mail: [email protected]; Richard Lewontin, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138; Marcus Feldman, Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

This chapter aims to establish a philosophical discussion about the epistemological conditions of “observation”, from the cybersemiotic transdisciplinary view of knowing. For this purpose, the discussion will be divided into three parts, each one of them with the intention of outlining a conceptual critique that later allows a pertinent justification of the observation from a transcendental semiotics. This work is based on a problem: it seeks to show that a the cybersemiotic point of view, to consider on a foundationalist stance, (...) fails to overcome the epistemological contradictions involved in the contemporary critique of modern philosophy. Hence, the objective on this work is to propose as an alternative the teleological and nominalist attitude of transcendental semiotics, and also as an epistemological principle that allows overcoming problems of the foundationalist. Then, in a first moment, we will seek to establish a critique of the phenomenology of observation from the pragmatic point of view, developed by N. R. Hanson and Richard Rorty. In this direction, the contradictions involved in the definition of knowledge will be shown from the phenomenological (perception without representation) and phenomenological (states of inner consciousness) positions. In general terms, the epistemological problems found in the foundations of knowledge based on observation will be exposed: specifically, the problem of the empirical basis and perception and the question of the mind as an inner space. Then, in a second moment, a characterization of the "observation" and the "observable fact" will be made from the cybersemiotic point of view. In this sense, these concepts will be described from the peircean semiosis, starting from the theoretical link proposed by Soren Brier. Hence, when considering the observation within the sphere of significance, the approaches will show a non-phenomenological characterization of knowledge and, from there, the overcoming of pragmatic critiques towards phenomenology. The closing will allow circumscribing knowledge from a communicative, semiotic and autopoietic approach. Finally, and as a contribution to the state of the discussion, the present chapter will make a defense of the cybersemiotic phenomenology of observation but considering the pragmatic conditions of knowledge from a transcendental semiotics perspective. In this sense, the transcendental concepts of truth-consensus and fin-ideal will be used to develop a relevant theoretical field that allows a transcendental justification of the communicative-intersubjective nature of knowledge postulated by cybersemiotics. (shrink)