This book investigates the phenomenon of perspectival flexibility in its different facets and with particular attention to social experience. Our experience of other individuals goes hand in hand with the awareness that they have a unique perspective on the experienced objects and situations. The same object can be seen from different points of view; an event can awaken different emotional reactions in different individuals; and the positions we take can be mediated in part by our belonging to social or cultural (...) groups. All of these occurrences are grasped by the metaphor of perspective and perspectival flexibility. The original essays in this volume employ approaches from philosophy, particularly phenomenology, and from psychopathology to show how perspectival flexibility is grounded in the interplay of perception and imagination, and develop on this basis a fruitful reassessment of social experience. The chapters are divided into five sections: imagination and the as-if, imagination and its disturbances in psychopathology, imagination and the experience of others, the sociality of imagination, and the aesthetic, ethical, and socio-political grounds of perspectival flexibility. This book is an essential resource for researchers in philosophy and psychology working on social cognition, the epistemological and conceptual problems of other minds, and imagination and the experience of fiction. (shrink)

This paper explores the question concerning the relationship between basic and higher layers of experience and self-experience. The latter distinction implicitly presupposes the idea of a univocal foundation. After explaining the formal ontological law of foundation, an attempt is made to clarify how the idea of foundation may be suitable to understand the relationship among moments, or layers, of self-experience. To this aim, the phenomenological descriptions of self- and world-experience in dementia and schizophrenia are compared. The comparison between these two, (...) in many ways radically different, pathologies allows us to highlight both the potentialities and the limits of resorting to the foundational relationship for the description of lived experience. Taking the challenges coming from the description of dementia and schizophrenia into serious consideration, the meaning of the “stratified” account of self-experience will be eventually reassessed, and a way to complement the idea of foundation among layers will be proposed. (shrink)

Body Memory, Metaphor and Movement is an interdisciplinary volume with contributions from philosophers, cognitive scientists, and movement therapists. Part one provides the phenomenologically grounded definition of body memory with its different typologies. Part two follows the aim to integrate phenomenology, conceptual metaphor theory, and embodiment approaches from the cognitive sciences for the development of appropriate empirical methods to address body memory. Part three inquires into the forms and effects of therapeutic work with body memory, based on the integration of theory, (...) empirical findings, and clinical applications. It focuses on trauma treatment and the healing power of movement. The book also contributes to metaphor theory, application and research, and therefore addresses metaphor researchers and linguists interested in the embodied grounds of metaphor. Thus, it is of particular interest for researchers from the cognitive sciences, social sciences, and humanities as well as clinical practitioners. (shrink)

Several works published in the last decades defend the claim that the concept of creativity should be demystified. With the aim of showing that creativity is not an obscure power owned by only few individuals and free from constraints, authors working at the intersection field between philosophy and cognitive science have notably focused on the structure and evolution of cognitive mechanisms underlying our creative capacities. While taking up the suggestion that we should try not to mystify creativity, this article argues (...) that what is required for such demystification is primarily a transcendental and phenomenological inquiry. Kant’s and Merleau-Ponty’s works are here discussed in order to develop such a transcendental inquiry into creativity. Both Kant and Merleau-Ponty bring to the fore the conditions of possibility for creative acts, and highlight fundamental role of creativity itself in the formation of meaningfulness. The keystone of both philosophers’ inquiries is the emphasis on the interdependence between creativity and rules. Yet, due to the different approaches to the transcendental, Kant’s and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts do not fully converge, but should rather be considered as complementary. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDie Unterscheidung von verschiedenen Gedächtnisformen und -systemen sowie die Beziehung zwischen Gedächtnis und Leiblichkeit stehen sowohl im Fokus der kognitionswissenschaftlichen, als auch der phänomenologischen Debatte. In diesem Artikel wird versucht, beide Ansätze zum Thema in einen Dialog zu bringen. Das Leibgedächtnis wird hier zunächst phänomenologisch als der konkreteste Ausdruck des impliziten Gedächtnisses bestimmt. Basierend auf Edmund Husserls Analysen zum Zeitbewusstsein und zur leiblichen Erfahrung werden folglich die Strukturen und die Dynamik des Leibgedächtnisses hervorgehoben. Dabei wird gezeigt, dass das Leibgedächtnis sowohl (...) in den Wahrnehmungsprozessen als auch in der Gestaltung des präreflektiven leiblichen Selbstbewusstseins eine unentbehrliche Rolle spielt. Schließlich wird die Relevanz der durchgeführten phänomenologischen Analysen im Rahmen der aktuellen Debatte über Gedächtnissysteme in den Kognitionswissenschaften diskutiert. (shrink)

This paper develops a phenomenological analysis of the disturbances of self-experience in dementia. After considering the lack of conceptual clarity regarding the notions of self and person in current research on dementia, we develop a phenomenological theory of the structure of self-experience in the first section. Within this complex structure, we distinguish between the basic level of pre-reflective self-awareness, the episodic sense of self, and the narrative constitution of the self. In the second section, we focus on dementia and argue (...) that, despite the impairment of narrative self-understanding, more basic moments of self-experience are preserved. In accordance with the theory developed in the first part, we argue that, at least until the final stages of the illness, these self-experience in dementia goes beyond the pure minimal self, and rather entail forms of self-reference and an episodic sense of self. (shrink)

Il presente articolo si propone di mettere in luce la rilevanza teorica della fenomenologia per la psicopatologia. A tal fine, l’argomentazione sarà focalizzata sul lavoro dello psichiatra tedesco Wolfgang Blankenburg. Nel concepire e sviluppare la sua cosiddetta “psicopatologia del senso comune”, Blankenburg fa costantemente appello alla fenomenologica husserliana ed instaura con essa un dialogo proficuo sul piano teorico ed epistemologico. Questo confronto consente a Blankenburg, da un lato, di elaborare un approccio alla psicopatologia fondato fenomenologicamente e, d’altro lato, di ridefinire (...) lo statuto della psicopatologia stessa come disciplina scientifica. Attraverso l’analisi critica dei lavori di Blankenburg e la valutazione del suo reinvestimento di alcuni momenti centrali del pensiero di Husserl, si mostrerà come questi possano avere un impatto di rilievo nell’ambito della psicopatologia. In particolare, si discuterà come i due pilastri del metodo fenomenologico husserliano, l’epoché e la descrizione eidetica, possano svolgere un ruolo considerevole nelle ricerche di psicopatologia. (shrink)

This article aims to highlight the relevance of Bernhard Waldenfels’ responsive phenomenology for questions related to normality and to the different kinds of deviation from what is taken tobe normal. The article begins with a discussion of two limit cases in the understanding of the concepts of normality and deviation: a strictly normative understanding, according to which each deviation is norm-deviation, and a descriptive understanding, according to which deviation is what underlies individuality. Considering Waldenfels’ responsive philosophy in connection with Kurt (...) Goldstein’s and George Canguilhem’s philosophies of the organism, both understandings are critically discussed. In particular, the article shows how both views turn out to be one-sided and should be revised on the basis of a responsive account of the organism and its situated relation to circumstances, events, and affordances in the world it inhabits. The analysis of the different forms of responsiveness of the human organism, and notably the distinction between ‘catastrophic’ or pathological and ‘creative’ or organising kinds of responsiveness, can allow us to develop a relational and dynamic account of normality and deviation. Accordingly, neither normality nor deviation should be taken as univocally defined states; they should rather be reassessed on the basis of the processes in and through which order is interrupted, disturbed, and possibly reshaped or newly instituted. (shrink)

Das Verhältnis zwischen Husserl und Kant zählt zu den kontroversesten Themen im Bereich systematischer Forschung zur Transzendentalphilosophie. Dieses Verhältnis ist unter anderem deshalb kompliziert, weil Husserl relativ ambivalent über Kants Philosophie urteilt. Einerseits betrachtet er Kant als den Entdecker der Transzendentalphilosophie und somit auch als Vorläufer der transzendentalen Phänomenologie. Andererseits äußert er sich gegenüber bestimmten Aspekten der Philosophie Kants, die er als Reste einer nicht überwundenen metaphysischen Tradition betrachtet, kritisch. Die Anerkennung einer solchen Ambivalenz scheint der Ausgangspunkt von Pradelles Forschungen (...) zu Husserl und Kant zu sein. Diese bewegen sich zwischen der Hervorhebung der Bedeutung der Kant’schen Erbschaft für Husserls Phänomenologie und der Anerkennung, dass eine solche theoretische Erbschaft eine tiefreichende Änderung, wenn nicht sogar eine Umkehrung, innerhalb der Phänomenologie erfährt. Das zeigt sich sowohl in... (shrink)

This paper develops an analysis of the relation between fiction and make-believe based on the achievements of imagination. The argument aims at a “reciprocal supplementation” between two approaches to fiction. According to one approach, pretense or make-believe structures play a crucial role in our experience of fiction. Discussing Husserl’s view on bound imagining and Walton’s account of fiction as make-believe, I show why pretense and make-believe cannot thereby be reduced to the mere reproduction of something we would experience as original. (...) According to the other approach, which is presented in Ricoeur’s work on imagination, fiction exemplifies a productive or creative power of imagination that is not active in pretense or make-believe activities. The reciprocal supplementation between these two approaches concerns the following aspects: on the one hand, I wish show why Husserl and Walton allow us to rectify Ricoeur’s claim that make-believe is only reproductive. On the other hand, taking up some of Ricoeur’s insights, I wish to clarify why such an impact should be understood in terms of transformation. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to develop a phenomenological analysis of pretense. In different forms of pretense, something we take to be fictive is somehow transposed into a context that we experience as real. Due to this ‘transposition’, the context itself, under certain respects, becomes unreal or fictional. When we ‘live’ in a pretense context, we bracket or conceal what we take for real. Departing from both meta-representational and simulationist approaches, the phenomenological interpretation of pretense is developed based, on (...) the one hand, on the analysis of the role of perceptual and, on the other hand, on the inquiry into the central moments making up the sociality of pretense. In relation to the intersubjective/social nature of pretense and to reassessment of the relation between ‘being’ and ‘appearing’, which result from the analysis of the role of perceptual, different forms of perspectival flexibility that are actualized in pretense will be discussed. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the performative character of fictional language. While assuming that all speaking is a form of acting, it aims to shed light on the nature of fictional, and particularly literary, speech acts. To this aim, relevant input can be found in the discussion of the ontological status of fictional entities and of their constitution and in the inquiry into the interaction between author and receiver of a fictional work. Based on the critical assessment of different approaches in (...) the debate on speech-act theory and literary fiction, the article first clarifies why the study of the performative character of fictional language cannot be reduced to either the discussion of the status of singular speech acts in the fiction or the inquiry into the pretend or unserious nature of fictional speech acts formulated by an author. While referring to Roman Ingarden’s, Jean-Paul Sartre’s, and Wolfgang Iser’s work, it subsequently argues that such a performative character should be understood as a specific serious affordance—or appeal—to imagine and thus to participate in the constitution of the fictional world. (shrink)