Context: Seventeen years ago Francisco Varela introduced neurophenomenology. He proposed the integration of phenomenological approaches to first-person experience – in the tradition of Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty – with a neuro-dynamical, scientific approach to the study of the situated brain and body. Problem: It is time for a re-appraisal of this field. Has neurophenomenology already contributed to the sciences of the mind? If so, how? How should it best do so in future? Additionally, can neurophenomenology really help to resolve or dissolve the “hard problem” of the relation between mind and body, as Varela claimed? Method: The papers in this special issue arose out of a conference organised by the Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society in Bristol, UK, in September 2012. We have invited a representative sample of the speakers at that conference to present their work here. Results: Various papers argue that the first-person methods of phenomenology are distinct from, and more robust than, the failed “introspectionist” methods of early modern psychology. The “elicitation interview” emerges as a successful and widely adopted method to have emerged from this field. Phenomenological techniques are already being successfully applied to neuroscientific problems. Various specific proposals for new techniques and applications are made. Implications: It is time to take neurophenomenology seriously. It has proven its worth, and it is ripe with the potential for further immediate, successful applications. Constructivist content: Varela’s key aim was to develop a non-dualising approach to the science of consciousness. The papers in this special issue look at the philosophical and practical details of successfully putting such an approach into practice.

Key words: Phenomenology, neuroscience, dynamical systems, first-person methods, second-person methods, the elicitation interview, introspection, consciousness

Open peer commentary on the article “Consciousness as Self-Description in Differences” by Diana Gasparyan. Upshot: The account, in the target article, of consciousness as a self-contained, self-referential autopoietic system faces a potential problem when we seek to ground meaning and norms. I will discuss three ways in which meaning can be grounded, the last of which requires reasons for action to be grounded from a subjective point of view, with the qualitative character of affective valence performing a regress-stopping role. I will explore the implications of my conclusions for a methodological approach based on second-order cybernetics.

Open peer commentary on the article “Sensorimotor Direct Realism: How We Enact Our World” by Michael Beaton. Upshot: This commentary is broadly sympathetic to the claims made in the target article. I start by questioning whether we can have direct access to an external reality in such a way that our experience is not intrinsically private. I then suggest that the argument for direct realism presented here is inconclusive with regard to whether external objects play a causal or a constitutive role.

Open peer commentary on the article “A First-Person Analysis Using Third Person-Data as a Generative Method: A Case Study of Surprise in Depression” by Natalie Depraz, Maria Gyemant & Thomas Desmidt. Upshot: The generative method outlined in the target article produces some interesting results, demonstrating the value of cardio-phenomenology. The proposed division of categories reflecting the structure of experience into sub-categories suggests that prior theoretical commitments may have influenced the process of analysis in ways the authors might not have foreseen or intended. This commentary discusses potential areas for future work, proposing that some modifications to the methodology might lessen possibly unforeseen influences on the central process of classification.

Open peer commentary on the article “Heterarchical Reflexive Conversational Teaching and Learning as a Vehicle for Ethical Engineering Curriculum Design” by Philip Baron. Upshot: The target article advocates the use of conversational heterarchical curriculum design as part of the process of decolonisation in South African universities. A stated objective is to reduce the amount of abstraction in the syllabus. I discuss whether the reduction of abstraction is an appropriate aim of decolonisation, considering some of the potential consequences and questioning whether a less abstract teaching style would be advisable in practical terms and compatible with students’ values.

Open peer commentary on the article “Visual Representation in the Wild: Empirical Phenomenological Investigation of Visual-spatial Working Memory in a Naturalistic Setting” by Aleš Oblak. Abstract: This commentary requests some further details about the study and raises some concerns about factors that may have affected the findings or the interpretation thereof. These include the possibility that the author’s co-researchers were imagining drawing the motifs and remembering planned movements rather than, or alongside, the motifs themselves. I also discuss the potential effects of differing levels of drawing skills and of experience in the micro-phenomenological method.

Open peer commentary on the article “The Tangled Dialectic of Body and Consciousness: A Metaphysical Counterpart of Radical Neurophenomenology” by Michel Bitbol. Abstract: While sympathetic to the view that lived experience is prior, epistemologically, at least, to any conclusions we draw about an apparent external world, I argue that to deny that the ontological shift proposed in the target article leaves us with a hard problem is problematic. The worry is that retaining an ontology in which physical bodies and conscious experience co-exist and interact leaves us with the question of how there ever came to be conscious beings capable of constructing a subjective view of a physical external world. One possible response would be to endorse panpsychism, but this option is rejected. I propose an alternative approach: panabstractism, which is the view that what there is consists of concrete matter and abstract relations, with each constituting the other, a distinction that is orthogonal to the traditional mind/body dichotomy.

Open peer commentary on the article “Enacting the “Body” of Neurophenomenology: Off-Radar First-Person Methodologies in Pragmatics of Experiencing” by Jakub Petri & Artur Gromadzki. Abstract: Petri and Gromadzki’s claims about radical neurophenomenology’s position with regard to the existence of a “gap” require clarification. I raise questions about how the three disciplines outlined would contribute, specifically, to an understanding of reciprocal constraints between the experiential and that which is perceived to be external to the subject; and to experience of co-constitution. Finally, I suggest that the methodology proposed in the target article could potentially benefit from being supplemented by the use of neurofeedback, in order to retain the neuro element of neurophenomenology.