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.
Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia
August 31, 2019
Elisa Magrì
5 citations
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.
Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia
May 2, 2021
4 citations
The article identifies substantial similarities between Shaun Gallagher and William James, particularly in their non-representational models of direct perception. By combining James's theories of time and spatial perception with Gallagher's Husserlian-inspired retentional-protentional structure, the authors argue that enactivism's theoretical foundations can be strengthened through an integration of phenomenology and Jamesian pragmatics. James's enactive theory of action and perceptual causality offers a promising basis for a coherent enactivist research program.
Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia
August 31, 2014
Gaetano Fiorin, Denis Delfitto
4 citations
The article examines James Higginbotham's claim that the silent subject of infinitival complements after verbs like 'remember' and 'imagine' is unambiguously de se and immune to error through misidentification relative to the matrix subject. The authors criticize Higginbotham's reflexive analysis and show that similar criticisms apply to accounts using acquaintance relations or centered possible worlds. Drawing on cognitive science, they propose an amendment based on the idea that the thematic role 'Experiencer' maps events into 'minimal selves' as defined by Shaun Gallagher.
Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia
August 31, 2022
Stefano Vincini, Valentina Fantasia
3 citations
A philosophical and cognitive science paper examines data on early socio-cognitive development from a nativist cognitivist perspective and reinterprets it through the lens of the 4E-Cognition approach, specifically the pairing hypothesis derived from phenomenology. The analysis shows that these cognitivist-nativist data actually strengthen the 4E-Cognition perspective by expanding the range of findings it can explain. The authors argue that engaging seriously with opposing frameworks—cognitivism and 4E-Cognition—can lead to progress in cognitive science, particularly by addressing the debate between rich and lean explanations of early social cognition.
Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia
December 31, 2021
Riccardo Manzotti
1 citation
Consciousness can be located and bounded using a strictly physicalist approach. The paper identifies two unresolved issues in the extended cognition debate: the ontological status of cognition and the fallacy of the center. It proposes using identity to isolate the physical basis of consciousness, introducing Mind-Object Identity (MOI) as a tentative solution and comparing it with other identity theories of mind.
Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia
June 29, 2013
Sergio Salvatore, Pier Paolo Tarsi
1 citation
The self can be understood as a "hyper-generalized sign" that emerges from intersubjective sense-making, consistent with an emergentist view of personal identity. Integrating phenomenological, cognitive, and enactive research, the paper argues that pre-reflective consciousness and the non-conceptual self of the living body are not separate entities but part of a single psychological construct. This construct includes various forms of the self—minimal, pre-reflective, non-conceptual, ecological, and extended—studied in embodied and situated cognitive science. The theoretical perspective proposes a semiotic model of mind where the self is a dynamic product of intersubjective processes rather than a static substance.
Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia
December 27, 2024
Edoardo Fugali
This work compares enactivist cognitive science with classical phenomenology, focusing on Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. It argues that the relationship between subject, body, and world, along with action's mediating role, supports a dynamic conception of cognition. The transcendental perspective of embodied subjectivity shows continuity among action, perception, and higher cognition, challenging mind-body duality. The text also critiques physicalist naturalism, advocating for a weak naturalism compatible with a transcendental view that grounds subjectivity in an embodied biological organism. An ontology of nature, inspired by Merleau-Ponty, emphasizes qualitative aspects of the “flesh” and overcomes limitations in Husserl's approach.
Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia
December 31, 2021
Alfonso Lanzieri
Bergson's mind-body theory anticipated core ideas of contemporary Externalism and 4E Cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended). His theory of pure perception holds that experience, in its purest state, occurs within things themselves, at a level of reality before experience splits into subject and object. This undivided level is the impersonal origin of subjective consciousness. Bergson's ontology could provide a coherent framework to systematize experimental data within an externalist model, going beyond mere correlation.
Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia
May 1, 2016
Mariaflavia Cascelli
The paper argues that self-consciousness is not an essential component of every conscious experience, even in its minimal, pre-reflective form. By examining the phenomenology of agency and exceptions to the Immunity to Error Through Misidentification principle, the author suggests that self-attribution of agency involves an extended, reflective self-consciousness rather than a minimal, pre-reflective one. This challenges the view that a thin notion of self-consciousness is a necessary prerequisite of consciousness.
Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia
May 1, 2016
Alfredo Tomasetta
A common-sense-based argument against physicalism regarding phenomenal consciousness is presented. The author contends that the widespread presupposition that a physicalist view of consciousness must be correct is not justified. The paper elaborates on a strong prima facie case for rejecting physicalism, grounded in common sense, arguing that the nature or essence of conscious experience cannot be fully captured by physical descriptions. This challenges the assumption that consciousness is entirely physical, suggesting that ordinary intuitions provide compelling reasons to doubt materialism.
Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia
December 28, 2015
Gregor Michael Hoerzer
A commentary on Sandro Nannini's cognitive naturalism examines the analogy between the shift in the concept of time in relativity theory and a proposed shift toward a functional concept of phenomenal consciousness. The author argues that Nannini's naturalization procedure cannot account for the phenomenal feel of conscious states and highlights important differences between the conceptual change in physics and the intended change for consciousness. The commentary challenges the eliminative materialist view that we should abandon the folk psychological concept of consciousness, pointing to the explanatory gap that remains.
Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia
December 28, 2015
Reza Maleeh, Achim Stephan
This paper presents three arguments against Nannini's eliminativist view that consciousness and the Self are illusions. First, the same premises Nannini uses for eliminativism can instead support naturalistic dualism, where phenomenal consciousness irreducibly emerges from physical processes via psychophysical laws. Second, the paper challenges Nannini's claim that science's image should always override the manifest image, using a comparison between Copenhagen and Bohmian interpretations of quantum mechanics to show scientific images can conflict. Third, identifying consciousness as an illusion fails to address the hard problem, because illusions themselves are phenomenal experiences requiring explanation.
Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia
December 29, 2014
Federica Buongiorno
Searle and Dennett each reinterpreted Husserl's concept of intentionality, transforming it into a third-person model of description. This shift creates problematic consequences: it blurs the distinction between a mental act and its content, undermines the representational theory of mind, targets the Cartesian Theater and Homunculus arguments, and rejects the notion of the Unconscious. Both positions stem from a contradictory reductionism also present in naturalized phenomenology and neurophenomenology. These difficulties cannot be resolved by adapting phenomenology to cognitive science or returning to Husserl. Instead, specific problems such as the temporal structure of consciousness and unconscious mental contents should be addressed phenomenologically within a scientific context.
Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia
December 27, 2024
Martina Properzi
The article explores whether incorporating a machine into the body—specifically bio-machine hybrid technologies like biomimetic visual prostheses—affects the minimal self, the simplest sense of individual identity rooted in basic body structures. From a phenomenological perspective, it examines how prosthetics can be experienced as part of one's own body and whether this incorporation alters minimal self-experience. The discussion focuses on a case study of biomimetic visual prostheses, which benefit from advances in digital modeling of bodily signals and bio-integrated materials, to investigate this relationship.
Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia
August 31, 2023
Aurora Alegiani, Massimo Marraffa, Tiziana Vistarini
The authors argue for a reformist agenda in cognitive science that retains computational models while incorporating insights from 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive). They advocate liberalizing the computational-representational framework to address classical cognitive science's anti-biologism and radical internalism. The paper examines two open questions: combining mechanistic-computational with dynamical explanations, and revising the notion of representation, particularly in light of Andy Clark's radical predictive processing. The authors are sympathetic to reform but acknowledge its difficulty, focusing on these issues without presenting empirical findings.