Excerpt: The capacity to engage in collective intentionality is a key aspect of human sociality. Social coordination might not be distinctive of humans – various nonhuman animals engage in forms of cooperative behavior (e.g., hunting together) – but humans seem to possess a specific capacity for intentionality that enables them to constitute forms of social reality far exceeding anything that can be achieved even by nonhuman primates. During the past few decades, collective intentionality has been discussed under various labels in a number of empirical disciplines including social, cognitive, and developmental psychology, economics, sociology, political science, anthropology, ethology, and the social neurosciences. Despite all this work, however, many foundational issues remain controversial and unresolved. In particular, it is by no means clear exactly how to characterize the nature, structure, and diversity of the we to which intentions, beliefs, emotions, and actions are often attributed. Is the we or we-perspective independent of, and perhaps even prior to, individual subjectivity, or is it a developmental achievement that has a firstand second-person-singular perspective as its necessary precondition? Is it something that should be ascribed to a single owner, or does it perhaps have plural ownership? Is the we a single thing, or is there a plurality of types of we?

Excerpt: Given that the average American citizen now spends one-fifth of her lifetime engaging with real and fictional worlds via moving images (U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2014), we need a deeper understanding of how this medium influences our habits of perceiving, thinking, and feeling. 4EA cognitive science has already made ample reference to interactions between organisms and technologies (such as virtual realities or sensory substitution devices); yet film has largely been neglected. Here we will argue that an embodied approach to film can deepen our understanding of this medium, while at the same time providing the necessary means to understanding how film has already altered our embodied habits of perceiving and experiencing.

Excerpt: This chapter responds to several accusations that a REC-inspired program for explaining the natural origins of content – the NOC program, for short – is doomed to fail. Section 1 responds to a preliminary general concern that the NOC program is internally incoherent when seen in light of the Hard Problem of Content: a problem identified by RECers themselves. Section 2 considers a different, more softly pitched complaint against the NOC program – namely, that in drawing a sharp distinction between basic, contentless, and content-involving kinds of cognition, REC gives succor to continuity skepticism, the specific complaint being that REC is at odds with evolutionary continuity. Section 3 casts doubt on the idea that REC motivates this kind of continuity skepticism by offering a sketch of how the natural origins of content could be explained in a gapless, REC-friendly way that does not violate evolutionary continuity. Finally, Section 4 considers how REC fares against a different, philosophically motivated variety of continuity skepticism. Although we conclude that REC cannot quell the skeptical worries that a philosophically based continuity skepticism generates, we argue that REC’s representationalist rivals fare no better against this brand of skepticism. Thus, in the final analysis, we have good reasons to doubt that a REC-inspired NOC program promotes or is particularly prone to skepticism about continuity.

Excerpt: Recent work has begun to apply embodied and enactivist approaches to understanding mental disorders (Colombetti 2013; Fuchs 2009; Fuchs and Schlimme 2009; Zatti and Zarbo 2015). We believe that cultural psychiatry stands to gain a great deal from these new paradigms. This chapter will outline an approach to the cultural neurophenomenology of mental disorders that focuses on the interplay of culturally shaped developmental processes and modes of neural information processing that are reflected in embodied experience, narrative practices that are structured by ideologies of personhood, culturally shared ontologies or expectations, and situated modes of enactment that reflect social positioning and selffashioning. Research on metaphor theory suggests ways to connect the approaches to embodiment and enactment in cognitive science with the rich literature on the cultural shaping of illness experience in current medical and psychological anthropology. The resulting view of cultural enactment has broad implications for psychiatric theory, research, and practice, which we will illustrate with examples from the study of the phenomenology of delusions.

Excerpt: Regrettably, phenomenologists who concentrate narrowly on the early Husserl of the Logical Investigations (1900–1901; Husserl 2001a) and Ideas I (Husserl 1977a) often overemphasize his focus on the individual life of intentional consciousness as reconstructed from within (and even on the structure of individual, atomistic lived experiences [Erlebnisse]) and tend to overlook Husserl’s original, radical, and fundamentally groundbreaking explorations of intersubjectivity, sociality, and the constitution of historical cultural life (which would later influence Heidegger and Schütz, among others). In respect of this individualist misinterpretation, Husserl is often his own worst enemy, since he repeatedly and very publicly, for example, in his Cartesian Meditations (Husserl 1950, 1967; hereafter CM), compared his phenomenological breakthrough to subjectivity with Descartes’s discovery of the ego cogito and modeled his phenomenological epoché, albeit with important changes of emphasis, on Descartes’s radical doubt. As a result, Husserl’s phenomenology has too often been designated a methodological solipsism that proceeds through individualistic introspection of conscious experiences, and Husserl’s wider explorations of social and cultural life have been passed over (and many of his original discoveries have been attributed to others, e.g., Heidegger and Gadamer). It is worth reminding ourselves, therefore, of the originality of Husserl’s meditations on the nature of the self, its embodiment, and its intercorporeal, intersubjective communal relations with others. In this chapter, then, I want to focus on Husserl’s mature reflections (i.e., as specifically found in his writings of the 1920s and 1930s) on the intentional constitution of culture, particularly as he understood it to relate to lived embodiment and, especially, the specific relations that hold between lived bodies, their Ineinandersein, Füreinandersein, or what Husserl calls in Cartesian Meditations “a mutual being-for-one-another” (ein Wechselseitig-füreinander-sein; CM, 129; Hua I, 157). As he puts it elsewhere, in the Crisis of European Sciences (Husserl 1970, 1962), Husserl approaches human subjects not only as having “subject being for the world” (Subjektsein für die Welt) but also as possessing “object being in the world” (Objektsein in der Welt; Crisis, 178; Hua VI, 182). How humans can be both in the world and for the world is, for him, the riddle of transcendental subjectivity.

Excerpt: This paper addresses the view, currently and historically popular in phenomenological psychopathology, that schizophrenia involves disturbance of a person’s most basic sense of self, the minimal self. The concept of “minimal self” is to be understood in wholly phenomenological terms. Zahavi (2014) offers what is perhaps the most detailed characterization to date. All our experiences, he maintains, have a “first-personal character”; their structure incorporates a sense of mineness, of their originating in a singular locus of experience. So the minimal self is neither an object of experience/thought nor an experience of subjectivity that is separate from one’s various experiences. Rather, it pertains to “the distinct manner, or how, of experiencing” (Zahavi 2014, 22). Those who subscribe to this view do not insist that minimal self is the only kind of self. As Zahavi acknowledges, “self” may legitimately refer to a range of different phenomena, all of which need to be carefully distinguished from one another. But the minimal self is the most fundamental of these, a condition for the integrity of experience that all other kinds of self-experience presuppose.

Excerpt: Here we have brought together philosophical, neurophysiological, psychological, psychiatric, sociological, anthropological, and evolutionary studies of the interplay of embodiment, enaction, and culture. The constitution of the shared world is understood in terms of participatory and broader collective sense-making processes manifested in dynamic forms of intercorporeality, collective body memory, artifacts, affordances, scaffolding, use of symbols, and so on. The contributors investigate how preconscious and conscious accomplishments work together in empathy, interaffectivity, identifications of oneself with others through emotions such as shame, we-intentionality, and hermeneutical understanding of the thoughts of others. The shared world is seen as something constituted by intersubjective understanding that discloses things in the shared significance they have for the members of a culture. Special emphasis is put on phenomenological approaches to cognition and culture and their relation to other approaches. Our introduction explicates the key concepts, relates them to relevant empirical research, raises guiding questions, and explains the structure of the book. Starting with a phenomenological approach to the intertwinement of mind, body, and the cultural world, we continue with an exploration of the concepts of intercorporeality and interaffectivity. The ideas underlying these concepts are put in dialogue with central tenets of enactivism. We then consider further cultural conditions, such as those of cognitive scaffolding, and explain how these cultural conditions in turn depend on the embodied interaction of human beings. Finally, we outline the book’s structure and introduce the individual chapters.