There is no science that does not rest on a metaphysics, though typically it remains concealed. It is the responsibility of the philosopher to uncover this metaphysics, and then to subject it to criticism. What I have tried to show is that cybernetics, far from being the apotheosis of Cartesian humanism, as Heidegger supposed, actually represented a crucial moment in its demystification, and indeed in its deconstruction.

Key words: antihumanism, converging technologies, cognitive science, cybernetics, descartes, heidegger, nanotechnology, sartre, synthetic biology, technoscience.

Excerpt: As this volume makes clear, research on embodied cognition draws from a number of disciplines and is supported by a variety of methodological strategies. In this chapter I focus on what phenomenology has contributed to our understanding of embodied cognition. I take “phenomenology” to mean the philosophical tradition initiated in the twentieth century by Edmund Husserl and developed by a variety of philosophers, including Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Aron Gurwitsch, and numerous others. More recently phenomenologists following this tradition have been drawn into theoretical and empirical research in the cognitive sciences, and especially into discussions of enactive and embodied conceptions of the mind (e.g. Dreyfus, 1973, 2002; Gallagher, 2005; Gallagher and Zahavi, 2012; Thompson, 2007; Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, 1991). I’ll start by looking at some of the historical resources that define the phenomenology of the body. I’ll then consider how phenomenology, as a methodology, relates to scientific investigations of embodied cognition, and finally go on to identify some of the insights about embodied cognition that phenomenology provides.

‘Behavioral coordination’ theory of language of Maturana (1928–) does not give a clear explanation for the questions of how naming takes place and where a word adequate for our experience comes from. This flaw may be alleviated by Sartre (1905–1980)s ‘reflection’ theory. According to Sartre’s theory, we can make two types of sentences from the same data: for example, “I am conscious of this chair” and “There is consciousness of this chair.” The difference between the two sentences is the existence of ‘I’ in the first or its lack in the second. Where did ‘I’ come from or how was it removed? There must be a field in which ‘I’ is brought forth, and it may also be a field where naming can take place. This essay concerns a naming process with special reference to Sartre’s philosophy. At first, Maturana’s biology and his linguistic theory are explained, and Sartre’s fundamental ontology and in relation to this, his theory of reflection (two types of reflection) are introduced. Next, Sartre’s notions of language (words and naming) are explained. Then, after operational correspondences between Maturana’s ‘coordination’ and Sartre’s ‘reflection’ are examined, our primary questions are answered. Finally, constraints burdened on our cognition with language and the possibility of liberation from them are discussed. Main arguments: (1) Maturana’s ‘coordination’ and Sartre’s ‘reflection’ are operationally equivalent concepts; (2) Sartre can complement Maturana’s languaging theory of naming by providing both the domain for naming (the domain for the synthesis of identification, or for universalizing synthesis) and a mediator of naming (the cogito, namely the consciousness, of a languaging person).

Key words: j. -p. sartre, h. r. maturana, languaging, naming, coordination, pure reflection, impure reflection, synthesis of identification

Open peer commentary on the article “Developing a Dialogical Platform for Disseminating Research through Design” by Abigail C. Durrant, John Vines, Jayne Wallace & Joyce Yee. Upshot: The question of more appropriate dissemination formats for research through design (RTD) is important, but secondary. Artefacts are just media in the knowledge-generating process. RTD is a much more powerful concept than presented here.

ERRATUM: In Table 1 on page 33, last row, the content of the right cell should read as follows:
by/through
ƒƒ■ Conciliation of theory and practice (strong theory)
ƒƒ■ embedded, implicated, engaged, situated (Sartre, Situationist) theory. ƒƒ
■ “Such research helps build a genuine theory of design by adopting an epistemological posture more consonant with what is specific to design: the project.”

Excerpt: Classical approaches in the philosophy of mind consider that the recognition of intentionality is the problem of the adoption of an intentional stance: identifying the behavioural criteria, which trigger the representation of the perceived object by an internal system of naive psychology (Premack, 1990; Cisbra et al., 1999; Meltzoff & Decety, 2004). This naive psychology poses many problems, in particular, how to account for the mutual recognition without falling into the aporias of the inclusion of representations: I have to have the representation of his representation of my representation of… his perception. Furthermore, in this approach, the recognition of another subject is only hypothetical, resulting from an inference based on well-defined perceptions. However, in our everyday experience as well as in many phenomenological descriptions (e.g., Merleau-Ponty, 1945; Sartre, 1943) the lived experience of the presence of others seems certain and directly perceptive. How in everyday life or through technical devices (such as Internet), can we have the impression of the presence of another subject, and under which conditions can we differenciate another person from an object or a program?

Does all conscious experience essentially involve self-consciousness? In his Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person, Dan Zahavi answers “yes.” I criticize three core arguments offered in support of this answer – a wellknown regress argument, what I call the “interview argument,” and a phenomenological argument. Drawing on Sartre, I introduce a phenomenological contrast between plain experience and self-conscious experience. The contrast challenges the thesis that conscious experience entails self-consciousness.

Key words: dan zahavi, phenomenology, conscious experience, self-consciousness, first-person thought, post-fichtean, sartre, shoemaker, refrigerator light fallacy, existential subjectivity

Excerpt: “There is no place in the phenomenology of fully absorbed coping”, writes Hubert Dreyfus, “for mindfulness. In flow, as Sartre sees, there are only attractive and repulsive forces drawing appropriate activity out of an active body”. Among the many ways in which history animates dynamical systems at a range of distinctive timescales, the phenomena of embodied human habit, skilful movement, and absorbed coping are among the most pervasive and mundane, and the most philosophically puzzling. In this essay we examine both habitual and skilled movement, sketching the outlines of a multi-dimensional framework within which the many differences across distinctive cases and domains might be fruitfully understood. Both the range of movement phenomena which can plausibly be seen as instances of habit or skill, and the space of possible theories of such phenomena are richer and more disparate than philosophy easily encompasses. We seek to bring phenomenology into contact with relevant movements in psychological theories of skilful action, in the belief that phenomenological philosophy and cognitive science can be allies rather than antagonists. We aim to identify some tensions within recent phenomenological approaches. In rejecting “mindfulness” and arguing that “mindedness is the enemy of embodied coping”, we suggest that Dreyfus is representative of many theorists and practitioners who privilege one aspect or feature of the phenomenology of flow as if it captured the entire phenomenon. Though we do not theorise flow explicitly here, the constructive view we sketch in the final section of the paper is closer to Csikszentmihalyi’s idea that sustained flow experience requires ongoing challenge, the sense of having one’s skills constantly stretched: as he puts it, “although the flow experience appears to be effortless, it is far from being so”, and often involves “highly disciplined mental activity” in the form of “complex mental operations.… completed in a few seconds, perhaps in a fraction of a second”. 3 The kind of mental operations in question are not reflective or considered deliberations, not intellectual instructions to the body, and yet they are in the realm of the psychological, both complex and mindful. Explaining just what ‘mindful’ operations might be in play here for different practitioners on different occasions – what mixes of rich attention, kinesthetic awareness, inter-animated forms of memory, and idiosyncratic sensuous experience – will require careful consideration of many different cases of skilful and absorbed embodied activity.

A theory of the structure and cognitive function of the human imagination that attempts to do justice to traditional intuitions about its psychological centrality is developed, largely through a detailed critique of the theory propounded by Colin McGinn. Like McGinn, I eschew the highly deflationary views of imagination, common amongst analytical philosophers, that treat it either as a conceptually incoherent notion, or as psychologically trivial. However, McGinn fails to develop his alternative account satisfactorily because (following Reid, Wittgenstein and Sartre) he draws an excessively sharp, qualitative distinction between imagination and perception, and because of his flawed, empirically ungrounded conception of hallucination. His arguments in defense of these views are rebutted in detail, and the traditional, passive, Cartesian view of visual perception, upon which several of them implicitly rely, is criticized in the light of findings from recent cognitive science and neuroscience. It is also argued that the apparent intuitiveness of the passive view of visual perception is a result of mere historical contingency. An understanding of perception (informed by modern visual science) as an inherently active process enables us to unify our accounts of perception, mental imagery, dreaming, hallucination, creativity, and other aspects of imagination within a single coherent theoretical framework. Relevance: Argues for an enactivist approach to understanding perception, mental imagery, and imagination. Critiques Cartesian (including merely implicitly Cartesian) approaches to the same.

Excerpt: What must immediately surprise any reader new to the discourses of systems theory or what is sometimes called “second-order cybernetics” is the rather systematic reliance of this new theoretical paradigm on the figure of vision and, more specifically, observation. That surprise might turn into discomfort if not alarm for readers in the humanities who cut their teeth on the critical genealogy of vision and the look which runs, in its modernist incarnation, from Freud’s discourse on vision in Civilization and Its Discontents through Sartre’s Being and Nothingness to Lacan’s seminars and finally to recent influential work in psychoanalysis and feminist film theory. With the possible exception of Michel Foucault, no recent intellectual has done more to call into question the trope of vision than America’s foremost pragmatist philosopher, Richard Rorty. From his ground-breaking early work Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature onward, Rorty has argued that the figure of vision in the philosophical and critical tradition is indissolubly linked with representationalism and realism, where representationalism assumes that “making true’ and ‘representing’ are reciprocal relations: the nonlinguistic item which makes S true is the one represented by S, ” and realism maintains the “idea that inquiry is a matter of finding out the nature of something which lies outside the web of beliefs and desires, ” in which “the object of inquiry – what lies outside the organism – has a context of its own, a context which is privileged by virtue of being the object’s rather than the inquirer’s.” Instead, Rorty argues, we should reduce this desire for objectivity to a search for “solidarity” and embrace a philo-sophical holism of the sort found in Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, which holds that “words take their meanings from other words rather than by virtue of their representative character” and “transparency to the real.” Hence, Rorty rejects the representationalist position and its privileged figure, and argues instead that “Our only usable notion of ‘objectivity’ is ‘agreement’ rather than mirroring."

Key words: Luhmann, Rorty, Habermas, Žižek, Maturana, Varela, closure

Drawing on the work of Scheler, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl and Sartre, this article presents an overview of some of the diverse approaches to intersubjectivity that can be found in the phenomenological tradition. Starting with a brief description of Scheler’s criticism of the argument from analogy, the article continues by showing that the phenomenological analyses of intersubjectivity involve much more than a “solution” to the “traditional” problem of other minds. Intersubjectivity doesn’t merely concern concrete face-to-face encounters between individuals. It is also something that is at play in simple perception, in tool-use, in emotions, drives and different types of self-awareness. Ultimately, the phenomenologists would argue that a treatment of intersubjectivity requires a simultaneous analysis of the relationship between subjectivity and world. It is not possible simply to insert intersubjectivity somewhere within an already established ontology; rather, the three regions “self,” “others,” and “world” belong together; they reciprocally illuminate one another, and can only be understood in their interconnection.