Gallagher S. (2017) Phenomenological approaches to consciousness. In: Schneider S. & Velmans M. (eds.) The Blackwell companion to consciousness. Second edition. Wiley & Sons, Hoboken NJ: 711–725.
Phenomenology involves a first‐person approach to consciousness. Husserl initiated phenomenology as a transcendental investigation in opposition to naturalism. It includes a methodologically guided analysis of intentionality as the primary characteristic of consciousness. Phenomenology also addresses the issue of the phenomenal character of consciousness tied to the notion of pre‐reflective self‐awareness, to embodiment, and to variations in intentional structures. It also offers a detailed analysis of the temporal nature of consciousness which helps to explain not only how one can have a coherent experience of an object, but also how the subject of experience – a pre‐reflective self – can maintain identity over time. Husserl and later phenomenologists, like Merleau‐Ponty, emphasized the embodied nature of consciousness in a way that foreshadowed recent enactivist accounts.
Gärtner K. (2017) Conscious experience and experience externalization. In: Hipólito I., Gonçalves J. & Pereira J. G. (eds.) Schizophrenia and Common Sense: Explaining madness and social values. Springer, Cham: 97–112.
According to Sass and Parnas, schizophrenia is essentially a self-disorder which leads to the externalization or alienation of experience. This view is based on the phenomenological assumption that subjects suffering from schizophrenia manifest disturbances in the most basic presentation of the self, i.e. in the sense of being the experiential subject of experience. Interestingly, recent interpretations of the phenomenal character within the study of consciousness involve a similar claim. Just like Neo-Phenomenologists (including Sass and Parnas), proponents of such a view argue that, rather than overemphasizing the qualitative features of phenomenal properties, we need to turn to the most basic feature of experience, namely pre-reflective self-consciousness. In this paper, I will reflect on Sass and Parnas’s phenomenological account of schizophrenia and show how a particular model of conscious experience fits their claims. My aim is to give a road map to naturalizing phenomenal consciousness and present a way to ground the phenomenological view of schizophrenia.
Hutto D. D. (2009) Mental representation and consciousness. In: Banks W. P. (ed.) Encyclopedia of consciousness. Volume 2. Academic Press, New York: 19–32.
Intentionality and consciousness are the fundamental kinds of mental phenomena. Although they are widely regarded as being entirely distinct some philosophers conjecture that they are intimately related. Prominently it has been claimed that consciousness can be best understood in terms of representational facts or properties. Representationalist theories vary in strength. At their core they seek to establish that subjective, phenomenal consciousness (of the kind that involves the having of first-personal points of view or perspectives on the world – perspectives that incorporate experiences with specific phenomenal characters) is either exhausted by, or supervenes on, capacities for mental representation. These proposals face several serious objections.
Thompson E. (2006) Sensorimotor subjectivity and the enactive approach to experience. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4(4): 407–427. Fulltext at https://cepa.info/4152
The enactive approach offers a distinctive view of how mental life relates to bodily activity at three levels: bodily self-regulation, sensorimotor coupling, and intersubjective interaction. This paper concentrates on the second level of sensorimotor coupling. An account is given of how the subjectively lived body and the living body of the organism are related (the body-body problem) via dynamic sensorimotor activity, and it is shown how this account helps to bridge the explanatory gap between consciousness and the brain. Arguments by O’Regan, Noë, and Myin that seek to account for the phenomenal character of perceptual consciousness in terms of ‘bodiliness’ and ‘grabbiness’ are considered. It is suggested that their account does not pay sufficient attention to two other key aspects of perceptual phenomenality: the autonomous nature of the experiencing self or agent, and the pre-reflective nature of bodily self-consciousness.
Representationalism is a thesis about the phenomenal character of experiences, about their immediate subjective ‘feel’. 1 At a minimum, the thesis is one of supervenience: necessarily, experiences that are alike in their representational contents are alike in their phenomenal character. So understood, the thesis is silent on the nature of phenomenal character. Strong or pure representationalism goes further. It aims to tell us what phenomenal character is. According to the theory developed in Tye 1995, phenomenal character is one and the same as representational content that meets certain further conditions. One very important motivation for this theory is the so-called “transparency of experience.” The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the appeal to transparency more carefully than has been done hithertofore, to make some remarks about the introspective awareness of experience in light of this appeal, and to consider one problem case for transparency at some length, that of blurry vision. Along the way, I shall also address some of the remarks Stephen Leeds makes in his essay on transparency