Philosophers of perception have been readier to postulate the existence of a visual field than to acknowledge sensory fields in other modalities. In this paper, I argue that the set of phenomenal features that philosophers have relied on when positing a visual field aptly characterise, mutatis mutandis, bodily sensation. I argue, in particular, that in localised bodily sensations we experience the body as a sensory field. I first motivate this claim for the case of haptic touch, and then generalise it (...) to other kinds of bodily sensation. I demonstrate the theoretical fruitfulness of this notion of a bodily field for the debate on the phenomenology of bodily ownership. (shrink)

Dysmenorrhea, or menstrual pain, is regularly suffered by 45 to 95% of menstruating women. Despite its prevalence, and despite the philosophical importance of pain as a general phenomenon, dysmenorrhea has been all but completely overlooked in contemporary analytic philosophy of mind. This paper aims at rectifying this situation. We single out three properties of what is often considered the paradigmatic case of painful experience, what we call injury-centered pains, and argue that dysmenorrhea does not have any of them, and hence (...) that it does not neatly conform to the injury-centered model of pain. This calls into question the centrality of the injury-centered model, and suggests novel research avenues within theoretical debates on affectivity. (shrink)

Bodily sensations are mental states typically suitable to be reported in judgments in which a first-person indexical is used to qualify the felt body. In other words, subjects typically have a sense of bodily ownership for the body that they feel in bodily sensations. This paper puts forward, firstly, three desiderata that theories on the sense of bodily ownership should meet. Secondly, it assesses two views that account for the sense of bodily ownership in terms of the spatial content of (...) bodily sensations, appealing to a notion of a sense of boundedness, and argues that they do not meet the goals defined. (shrink)

Experientialism about the sense of bodily ownership is the view that there is something it is like to feel a body as one’s own. In this paper I argue for a particular experientialist thesis. I first present a puzzle about the relation between bodily awareness and self-consciousness, and introduce a somewhat underappreciated view on the sense of bodily ownership, Implicit Reflexivity, that points us in the right direction as to how to address this puzzle. I argue that Implicit Reflexivity, however, (...) does not provide a full solution to the puzzle. I then introduce a novel view on the sense of bodily ownership that inherits a central tenet, Reflexivity, from the above view, without having its flaws. According to Reflexivity, the sense of bodily ownership consists in the reflexive character of bodily sensations, namely in the fact that bodily sensations have experience-dependent properties as part of their content. Cashed out this way, Reflexivity is an attractive way of explicating the notion that bodily sensations are experiences of the body as subject. Reflexivity also highlights a central, but so far neglected, connection between the sense of bodily ownership and the sense of experience ownership. (shrink)

En este artículo se presentan algunas consideraciones relativas al debate sobre si el contenido de la experiencia perceptiva es o no conceptual. En particular, se pretende formular una crítica general al proyecto conceptualista de John McDowell apelando a algunas de sus asunciones de fondo –asunciones relativas a los requisitos que toda teoría sobre la relación entre percepción y juicio ha de cumplir, y que en su caso le conducen a considerar necesaria la tesis de que los contenidos de la percepción (...) son conceptuales. Se argumentará que la postura desarrollada por Husserl en Erfahrung und Urteil ofrece una alternativa en la cual se cumplen aquéllos requisitos sin necesidad de apelar a conceptos en el nivel de los contenidos perceptivos. Finalmente, se sugerirá que la perspectiva genética husserliana permite ofrecer un retrato de la experiencia perceptiva que, a diferencia del de McDowell, permite respetar ciertas intuiciones que parecen relevantes acerca de la misma.In this paper I present some considerations on the debate about whether the contents of perceptual experiences are conceptual or not. In particular, I intend to formulate a general critique to John McDowell’s conceptualist project appealing to some of its background assumptions –assumptions regarding the requirements that any theory about the relation between perception and judgment should meet, and which lead him to take as necessary the thesis that the contents of perception are conceptual. It will be argued that the stance expounded by Huserl in Erfahrung und Urteil offers an alternative in which those requirements are met without the need to appeal to concepts at the level of the contents of perception. Finally, I will suggest that the Husserlian genetic perspective, unlike McDowell’s stance, ends up offering a picture of perceptual experience that can accommodate certain intuitions about it that seem relevant. (shrink)