Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
June 17, 2026
Zamir Kadodia
Deficit-based language about autism does more than describe; it actively shapes the affective atmospheres autistic people experience. The paper develops the concept of neuronormative atmospheres—affective environments that privilege neurotypical styles of embodiment while backgrounding or normatively discouraging autistic styles. Such language holds these atmospheres in place through institutional embedding and cross-contextual reactivation. Shifting to neurodiversity-affirming language is thus not merely semantic but an ethical and political intervention into the affective conditions of social life.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
May 14, 2026
Marcelo Lopes
Philosophical approaches to psychopharmacology have addressed conceptual, explanatory, and moral questions but have largely overlooked the experiential aspects of psychopharmacological intervention. Phenomenology, as a philosophical discipline providing rigorous first-person descriptions of mental illness experience, has profoundly influenced psychiatry but has rarely been applied to psychopharmacology. This paper argues for a mutually enlightening relationship between phenomenology and psychopharmacology, suggesting this view can lead to more sophisticated psychopharmacological research and practice while opening phenomenological inquiry into how experiential structures can be artificially altered.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
May 2, 2026
Justin Aaron Moll
When people lose their ability to make sense of the world, they experience phenomena ranging from extreme crises or epiphanies to everyday learning, frustration, or indifference. This paper integrates phenomenological philosophy (especially post-Heideggerian traditions) with neurocognitive and neurophysiological research on predictive processing and enactivism to create a unified model of such breakdowns. The resulting model describes a U-shaped distribution: extreme breakdowns challenge fundamental dimensions of sensemaking and become either crises or epiphanies, while less fundamental disruptions produce a continuum of learning, indifference, and frustration. The concept of response—how one reacts to a disruptive event—determines whether the experience enriches or problematizes sensemaking.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
March 23, 2026
Evan Thompson
The author replies to commentaries on the book The Blind Spot, which argues that science must account for human experience rather than pretend to an objective view from nowhere. The response engages with points raised by Chirimuuta, Froese, Kyselo, and Vanney, defending the book's critique of reductionism and its call for a science that incorporates first-person experience and sense-making. The author maintains that ignoring the subjective, embodied dimension of knowing creates a blind spot that undermines scientific understanding.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
March 16, 2026
Joshua Sealy
A new framework called phenomenological congruence reframes disability and pathology by focusing on how well a person's experiences align with their environment over time. The framework defines phenomenological congruence as sufficient and reliable coupling between an agent and their ecology, making situations feel navigable, readable, and accessible. It introduces phenomenological flexibility, the capacity to negotiate different environments. Pathology arises when opportunities for such congruence are disrupted, serving as an evaluative benchmark. Disability is not pathology but a marker of specific needs and risks, inviting care, solidarity, and inclusion. The approach integrates developmental psychology, critical disability theory, and Canguilhem's view of health as 'more than normal'.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
March 3, 2026
Ezequiel A. Di Paolo
The author examines Alva Noë's use of the concept of style to describe how people access the world and form their selves, drawing on his earlier work in Action in Perception. Style is presented as an expansive, flexible concept that can be understood in enactive terms—as communal processes of form-taking that develop, entwine, and differentiate historically. This relational view of style as socially constituted does not conflict with its common use to describe the cohesive activity of individuals, objects, or places, but rather clarifies it.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
January 24, 2026
Marius Werz
Enactivism, a theory of mind and life, is undergoing a metaphysical shift as some theorists adopt the 'affirmationist' ontologies of Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze, which view becoming as a non-teleological process where identities emerge from pre-individual fields. The author argues that this turn is incompatible with enactivism's foundational commitment to self-organizing organismic totalities. Instead, the paper develops a metaphysical framework that preserves these commitments while rejecting functionalist assumptions. It aligns enactivism with Marxist dialectical materialism and reinterprets Hans Jonas's account of life, which grounds meaning and purpose in the dynamic structure of living form rather than instrumental functions, offering a renewed foundation for theorizing purposiveness, autonomy, and change.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
December 10, 2025
Daniel Villiger
Mystical experiences, among the most profound human experiences, may arise from a specific neurocognitive state described by the REBUS hypothesis, originally developed to explain how psychedelics alter brain function. During a mystical experience, the brain reduces the influence of its high-level predictions while increasing the weight of sensory input. This shift explains key features: heightened sensory awareness produces a sense of deep knowing (noetic quality), while relaxed prior beliefs lead to feelings of oneness, altered time and space perception, ineffability, and positive mood. The account is conceptual and speculative but aligns with other models suggesting mystical experience involves maximal uncertainty or breakdown of attention.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
October 16, 2025
Rasmus Sinn, Marc Borner
Jean-Paul Sartre's early phenomenology treats dreaming as an active, imaginative consciousness distinct from perception. Predictive Processing (PP) theory, which describes the brain as continuously generating predictions across hierarchical neural levels, conceptualizes dreaming as the predictive brain's activity constrained by REM sleep physiology and disconnected from sensory input. Although PP typically views imagination and perception as overlapping while Sartre treats them as separate mental phenomena, this paper argues the conflict can be resolved across sub-personal and personal levels of analysis. Under PP, relentless prediction generation without sensory constraint parallels Sartre's notion of dreaming consciousness as "fascinated" by its own images, helping refine PP accounts and situating Sartre's phenomenology as a resource for contemporary dream research.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
November 22, 2024
Onerva Kiianlinna
Two prominent models of the mind—enactivism and representationalism—are often seen as contradictory, but this article argues they can coexist in explaining how people form aesthetic judgments. The main disagreement between the models does not apply to aesthetic judging, because perceiving aesthetic value is not a form of basic cognition that must be either enactive or representational. Instead, aesthetic judgment requires subjective, embodied metacognitive evidence, which allows incorporating aspects of both models. The proposed view, representational enactivism, treats the aesthetic subject as an emergent functional system while characterizing its sub-systems in representationalist terms, doing justice to the phenomenon of aesthetic judging.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
June 16, 2026
Rick Bellaar, Jasper Feyaerts
The article argues that the 'ipseity disturbance model' of self-disorders cannot explain why people's reports of disturbed mineness have first-person authority. It also contends that the phenomenological account of a 'loss of common sense', typically paired with that model, fails to account for first-person authority in reports of paradigmatic self-disorders. An alternative 'grammatical' account of first-person authority, drawn from Wittgenstein and Moran, is presented and applied to such reports, including pre-psychotic experiences. Recent revisions of the ipseity disturbance model in terms of hyperreflexivity are evaluated. The authors argue that a change in the grammar of intentional concepts allows understanding reports of the hyperreflexive phenomenology of self-disorders as both first-personal and authoritative.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
April 1, 2026
Joshua Rust
Some social institutions might qualify as minimal agents, but not the full-blown intentional agents that humans are. Enactivist accounts of minimal agency, which normally apply to living organisms, can be extended to institutions. Two enactivist models are considered: a forward-looking Jonasian model oriented toward self-persistence, and a backward-looking retentive model responsive to precedent. Through a critique of structural functionalism, the paper argues that the retentive model better explains institutional agency. This conclusion is independently supported by philosophers such as Christian List, Philip Pettit, and Ronald Dworkin, who also characterize institutional agency as retentive.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
November 11, 2025
Philipp Schmidt-Boddy
Inner speech and self-talk in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) can disrupt self-familiarity, contributing to a fragmented sense of self. A review of empirical studies on intrapersonal dialogicality, auditory verbal hallucinations, and self-talk in BPD shows that these linguistic processes likely generate and sustain experiences of self-estrangement. Connecting these findings with philosophical accounts of self-familiarity, the paper argues that overt or covert dialogues within oneself can either support or undermine a stable sense of self. Understanding linguistic self-relation is thus critical for therapeutic change and recovery in BPD.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
May 27, 2024
Janna van Grunsven, Lavinia Marin, A. Gammon et al.
A 4E-inspired ethics exercise at a technical university used a tinkering workshop where engineering students redesigned a healthcare artifact to develop two types of moral imagination: world-directed (reimagining affordances through material choices) and person-directed (empathetically placing oneself in users' embodied perspectives). Student testimonies indicated both types were enlivened, but fostering robust person-directed imagination proved challenging. Engaging with a critique by Clavel Vázquez and Clavel-Vázquez (2023) that person-directed moral imagination is limited in contexts of embodied difference, and drawing on 4E insights and critical disability studies, the authors argue this critique goes too far. They conclude a 4E approach can incorporate such warnings while positively contributing to engineering ethics education.