Phenomenology and Naturalism: Editors' Introduction

Abstract

and Nature: Examining the Relationship between Phenomenology and Naturalism', points to a problem that, like many fundamental problems in philosophy, is at once strikingly contemporary and classical: how can we account for the place of human experience in nature when the special sciences that have emerged from experience to study nature seem unable to situate it? Questions about the relationship between consciousness and the natural world have been at the centre of many philosophical debates: how can we relate first-and third-person data? Is it possible to explain exhaustively, or at all, consciousness in naturalistic terms? Although these questions have been the driving force of much recent philosophical work, one issue in particular has been underexplored within this broad field: what is the relationship between phenomenology (as a philosophical method for describing lived experience) and the broadly accepted idea that philosophy should be consistent with a naturalistic worldview. Put otherwise, how does human thought think about a nature that by its own account precedes it; how can we think a world without thought? These are two sides of the same question. On the one hand, we ask: how do we think about experience or consciousness as located in nature? And on the other hand, how do we think about what exceeds or transcends thought, but does not exclude it (or rather contains it), namely nature? These questions have emerged in various registers and in different traditions throughout the history of philosophy and have taken on a particular poignancy with the rise of modern science and the naturalistic worldview that underpins it. But they all ultimately refer to a seemingly intractable ontological problem that has played a large role in the history of philosophy from the pre-Socratics to Kant and Heidegger: what is the

Constitution Embodiment

“…Here, a proper concept of constitution embodiment allows us to demarcate clearly between philosophical and scientific claims. Whatever abstract reasons have been given in the methodological debates about the relationship between science and philosophy (Petitot et al, 1999;Dreyfus, 2007;Noë, 2005Noë, , 2011Wheeler & Kiverstein, 2012;Carel & Meacham, 2013;Fernandez, 2016), the present discussion shows concretely how the relationship has to be conceived of a given concrete philosophical problem.…”

Addiction, cure or care?

“…In this section, we will support them through first-person reports. Specifically, we won't tackle the first two general questions which are extensively treated by Carel (2007Carel ( , 2013Carel ( , 2016 thus focusing only on those that are closely linked with addiction. Our aim is to highlight lived body disruptions in addiction.…”

“…In the literature, a disruption in bodily subjectivity is often addressed through the description of the body as not belonging to the subject anymore for example in schizophrenia and depersonalization (Fuchs, 2007;Ciaunica et al, 2021b). However, this kind of disruption is at the end of a spectrum, as Carel (2007Carel ( , 2013Carel ( , 2016 highlights, the simply lived sensation that the mediating role of the body is disrupted is enough to spot a change in the degree of bodily subjectivity. While this conclusion is already supported by the evidence provided above, we also argue that there are two more indicators of this.…”

Exoskeletons, Rehabilitation and Bodily Capacities

“…At first glance, correlating the third-person perspective of experts with the phenomenological paradigm may seem contradictory and open to obvious epistemological challenges, but such an attempt is not without precedent. Projects combining phenomenology and natural sciences (Carel and Meacham, 2013), the growing number of studies in the field of embodied cognition (Dourish, 2004; Gallagher, 2017; Kyselo and Di Paolo, 2015) as well as postphenomenology (Ihde, 2002, 2009; Ihde and Malafouris, 2019, Selinger, 2006) suggest this is a promising approach. Because motility is one of the basic attributes of our experience of the world, exoskeletons have a clear impact on how impaired bodies are lived and experienced.…”