The paper argues that affordances—opportunities for action in the environment—can be understood as dispositions, contrary to some views in embodied cognition. It distinguishes habit from skill and reassesses the phenomenology of dispositions, proposing that dispositions are motivational factors depending on sensitivity to context clues (regulated by habit and attention) and the subject's positionality (inseparable from context-awareness). Drawing on Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, it contends that both elements support a dispositional view of affordances, reconciling relational and skill-based accounts.
Empathy, as described by Edith Stein, depends on a bodily self-displacement that is a precondition for a more complex orientation toward others. This view shares similarities with Varela and Depraz's neurophenomenology but cannot be reduced to a naturalized phenomenological account. Instead, bodily self-displacement aligns with Ratcliffe's theory of radical empathy, grounding empathy in a dynamic model of embodied self-experience within the broader dimension of affectivity.