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Redrawing the Map and Resetting the Time: Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Shaun Gallagher  and
Francisco J. Varela
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Extract

In recent years there has been some hard-won but still limited agreement that phenomenology can be of central and positive importance to the cognitive sciences. This realization comes in the wake of dismissive gestures made by philosophers of mind who mistakenly associate phenomenological method with untrained psychological introspection (e.g., Dennett 1991). For very different reasons, resistance is also found on the phenomenological side of this issue. There are many thinkers well versed in the Husserlian tradition who are not willing to consider the validity of a naturalistic science of mind. For them cognitive science is too computational or too reductionistic to be seriously considered as capable of explaining experience or consciousness. In some cases, when phenomenologists have seriously engaged the project of the cognitive sciences, rather than pursing a positive rapprochement with this project, they have been satisfied in drawing critical lines that identify its limitations.

On the one hand, such negative attitudes are understandable from the perspective of the Husserlian rejection of naturalism, or from strong emphasis on the transcendental current in phenomenology.

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Footnotes

1

Originally published in electronic form in The Reach of Reflection: The Future of Phenomenology, ed. S. Crowell, L. Embree and S. J. Julian (17-45). Electron Press (at http://www.electronpress.com/reach.asp).

2

Francisco Varela died on May 28, 2001.

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