A review of the attempts at establishing neurophenomenology as a new research paradigm for neuroscientific research on music concludes that the integration of the first-person perspective of phenomenology and the third-person perspective of neuroscience remains an unfinished project. Relevance: This paper proposes methods for phenomenological investigation of music, and discussion of research in the neurosciences and music.

This paper reports on the Kuhnian revolution now occurring in neuropsychology that is finally supportive of and friendly to phenomenology – the “enactive” approach to the mind-body relation, grounded in the notion of self-organization, which is consistent with Husserl and Merleau-Ponty on virtually every point. According to the enactive approach, human minds understand the world by virtue of the ways our bodies can act relative to it, or the ways we can imagine acting. This requires that action be distinguished from passivity, that the mental be approached from a first person perspective, and that the cognitive capacities of the brain be grounded in the emotional and motivational processes that guide action and anticipate action affordances. It avoids the old intractable problems inherent in the computationalist approaches of twentieth century atomism and radical empiricism, and again allows phenomenology to bridge to neuropsychology in the way Merleau-Ponty was already doing over half a century ago.

Key words: occipital lobe, causal power, john benjamin, phenomenal consciousness, efferent activity.

The article briefly describes the relatively young field of cognitive science dedicated to the research of lived human experience – the so-called phenomenological inquiry (or first-person research). It enumerates the reasons for the renewed interest in the study of experience and outlines the field’s relation to the rest of cognitive science. With the help of an example (phenomenology of thinking), the article attempts to illustrate the importance of systematic study of experience and addresses some open questions emerging from such an enterprise.

Key words: phenomenological inquiry, first-person perspective, experience, thoughts

Open peer commentary on the article “The Organization of the Living: Maturana’s Key Insights” by Fritjof Capra. Abstract: I problematize the ambiguity in the use of the terms, “cognition” and “mind.” Do these terms describe specific dynamics of physical changes within the organism (i.e., a third-person perspective) or subjective experience (a first-person perspective? I argue that the lack of precision in addressing cognitive science’s domain of research creates a blind spot about the central importance of subjective experience.

Phenomenology and empirical research are not naturally compatible and devising an empirical technique aiming at researching experience is a challenge. This article presents second-person in-depth phenomenological inquiry – a technique that tries to meet this challenge by allowing the transformation of a participant greatly interested in the investigation of their own subjective experience, into a co-researcher. It then provides an example of this technique being used in a study on enaction of beliefs, more closely showing the cooperative research process of researcher and co-researcher and its result: a grounded theory. The article ends with a discussion on the techniques strengths and weaknesses.

Key words: phenomenological inquiry, first-person perspective, experience, enaction, belief

The aim of this article is to set up a reciprocal relationship between a scientific study of perception, and phenomenology as a philosophical method. The domain chosen for this exercise is the constitution of spatiality, and in particular spatial depth. After recalling the question of depth as it is presented in The phenomenology of perception by Merleau-Ponty, we present an original experimental study based on a sensory substitution device. This study, which is based on an approach to perception as the extraction of sensory-motor loops, is carried out following two successive points of view: an objective, “third person” perspective, and a “first person” perspective involving a phenomenological analysis of the experience of the subject. The concluding discussion, based on the original phenomenological status of tools, proposes the existence of an “asymmetrical reciprocal envelopment” between that which is constitutive and that which is constituted. This makes it possible to determine the objective “correlates” of the elements of the phenomenological description of the constitution of the experience of depth.

Key words: depth perception, phenomenology, experimental study, third person perspective, first person perspective, tools, constitution.

Researchers in the field of empirical phenomenology often base their understanding on the theories of philosophical phenomenology, particularly favouring Husserl in their discussions and explaining obtained results in terms of pre-reflective and reflective experience. In this article we first outline various authors’ intuitions on the phenomenological tradition, before going on to examine certain assumptions of the empirical phenomenological tradition. In the second part we present preliminary results of our empirical phenomenological research in the attempt to point to the enormous phenomenological richness of pre-reflective awareness. To an extent we attempt to contribute to the understanding of the techniques of modern empirical phenomenological research by discussing the presuppositions of its relevant authors.

Key words: experience, phenomenological inquiry, first-person perspective, elicitation interview, pre-reflective consciousness.

Fostering our understanding of how humans behave, feel and think is a fundamental goal of psychological research. Widely used methods in psychological research are self-report and behavioral measures which require an experimenter to collect data from another person. By comparison, first-person measures that assess more subtle facets of subjective experiences, are less widely used. Without integrating such more subtle first-person measures, however, fundamental aspects of psychological phenomena remain inaccessible to psychological theorizing. To explore the value and potential contribution of first-person methods, the current article aims to provide an overview over already established first-person methods and compare them on relevant dimensions. Based on these results, researchers can select suitable first-person methods to study different facets of subjective experiences. Overall, the investigation of psychological phenomena from a first-person perspective can complement and enrich existing research from a third-person perspective.

Excerpt: Merleau-Ponty (French phenomenological philosopher, born in 1908 and deceased in 1961) refers to habit in various passages of his Phenomenology of Perception as a relevant issue in his philosophical and phenomenological position. Through his exploration of this issue he explains both the pre-reflexive character that our original linkage with the world has, as well as the kind of “understanding” that our body develops with regard to the world. These two characteristics of human existence bear a close relation with the vision of an embodied mind sustained by Gallagher and Zahavi in their work The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. Merleau-Ponty uses concepts like those of the lived or own body and of lived space in order to emphasize, from a first-person perspective, the co-penetration that exists between subject and world.

Open peer commentary on the article “Modeling Subjects’ Experience While Modeling the Experimental Design: A Mild-Neurophenomenology-Inspired Approach in the Piloting Phase” by Constanza Baquedano & Catalina Fabar. Upshot: Baquedano and Fabar’s provoking article highlights several difficulties of neurophenomenology, and brings into light the necessity of further clarification of its basic concepts such as human experience, first-person perspective, phenomenological validation, explanation, adequate measurement and so on. Particularly, it becomes more and more clear that the “explanatory gap” cannot be liquidated by means of explanation procedures alone, for the unavoidable variety of modes and forms of (mutual and individual) human understanding cannot be exhaustively reduced to just any one of these modes.