Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia
September 11, 2015
Michela Summa, Thomas Fuchs
13 citations
Dementia impairs narrative self-understanding, but more basic levels of self-experience—pre-reflective self-awareness and an episodic sense of self—are preserved until the final stages of the illness. The paper distinguishes three layers of selfhood: the minimal or pre-reflective self, the episodic self, and the narrative self. Against the view that dementia reduces the self to a bare minimal self, the authors argue that forms of self-reference and episodic self-awareness remain intact even when narrative identity is disrupted. This analysis clarifies conceptual confusion in dementia research about self and person.
Frontiers in Psychiatry
June 21, 2023
Lily A. L. Martin, David Melchert, Monika Knack et al.
4 citations
Motor abnormalities and basic self-disorders are both considered potential endophenotypes of schizophrenia, but their relationship is rarely studied directly. Using data-driven gait markers previously identified in schizophrenia patients, this work links those movement markers to measures of basic self-disorder from EASE interviews. Quantitative correlations were supported by qualitative content analysis of four patients' interviews. Results indicate an association between movement markers and self-disorders, particularly in cognition, self-experience, and bodily experiences. Although individual movement marker scores did not precisely match patients' descriptions of anomalous self- and body experience, higher marker scores trended with more intense descriptions of specific experiences like hyperreflexivity. The findings support an integrated view of the patient and may inform therapeutic approaches targeting self- and body-experience in schizophrenia.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2025
Thomas Fuchs
2 citations
Concepts, even abstract ones like space, time, and truth, remain rooted in bodily experience and social interaction rather than being free-floating symbols. Concrete concepts emerge from sensorimotor interactions transformed into simulated actions; abstract concepts arise through metaphorical extensions of bodily experience and participatory sense-making in social contexts. Neurobiological evidence shows strong connections between language processing and sensorimotor and social brain systems, tracing language evolution to reuse of motor coordination areas. Phenomenological analysis reveals how bodily intentionality underlies grammatical structures. Container schemas, for example, provide the embodied basis of categorization. Human reason is not disembodied but fundamentally rooted in embodied interaction and intersubjective practice.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
April 6, 2026
Thomas Fuchs
1 citation
The feeling of being alive reveals a deep link between biological life and subjective experience. Self-awareness is not a mental model produced in the brain but a manifestation of the whole organism's life. The feeling of life has two components: vitality (basic vital feelings) and conation (drive, urge, desire), both grounded in self-regulating processes that maintain the organism's homeostasis. The sufficient basis of self-awareness lies in the organism's self-organization and relationship to its environment, not in neural correlates of consciousness. The paper also examines how depression and Cotard syndrome disrupt the feeling of being alive.
Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience
May 15, 2026
Felix Tretter, Henriette Löffler-stastka, Hans Braun et al.
An interdisciplinary group of experts argues that progress in understanding and treating neuro-psychiatric disorders requires an integrative, multi-perspective approach that acknowledges differences between system levels, their complex interactions, and domain-specific languages. They review the past decade and find that many research programs remain reductionist and fail to critically examine neurobiological explanations and interdisciplinary interfaces. They call for establishing an interdisciplinary neurophilosophy that develops a critical philosophical stance within neuroscience, applying complex systems science to integrate knowledge. An ecological perspective is needed, viewing the brain as a regulative organ in a situated organism extended to tools, technologies, and social structures. The debate about free will illustrates that respecting complexity and irreducibility of mental phenomena avoids inappropriate reductionist and deterministic assumptions.