The recognition of others as conscious individuals with subjective experience is rooted in a pre-reflective, bodily form of intersubjectivity, not in abstract reasoning. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty's concept of intercorporeality, the body plays a dual role: at a basic level, perceiving others' actions triggers bodily simulation that generates an embodied understanding; at a second level, the body contributes to meaning-making through embodied metaphors in language. The case of schizophrenia clarifies this twofold role, showing that disturbances in bodily self-experience can undermine the very conditions for recognizing others as epistemic agents. This reframing carries epistemological implications for the problem of other minds.
Panpsychism, the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous, has gained renewed interest but its implications for free will remain underexplored. This paper examines whether panpsychist ontologies support compatibilist or libertarian free will. Constitutive micropsychism aligns with compatibilist freedom and determinism, while emergentist (non-constitutive) panpsychism offers a metaphysical basis for legitimizing libertarian free will.
Qualia—the ineffable, qualitative properties of conscious experience—are often dismissed as unscientific and irrelevant to psychology. This paper argues that some complex human behavior cannot be explained without accepting qualia as traditionally understood. In art research, aesthetic properties are acknowledged to depend partly on their resistance to structural analysis, and the same logic applies to sensory qualia. There is no sharp boundary between simple qualia and complex artistic properties. Both should be accepted as legitimate objects of special sciences, perhaps reducible in an idealized sense but indispensable in certain explanatory contexts.