Essentially, we provide an overview of social approaches to imagination within phenomenology and, by analysing D&D, we argue that there is room for a more socially robust conception where what is imagined is continuously co-constituted by multiple people and irreducible to an individual's act.
Here, we argue that D&D is a prime example of what we call 'co-constitutive imagination': cases where imagined phenomena emerge intersubjectively through ongoing reciprocal engagement, and where imaginative acts actively shape and are shaped by what is jointly imagined by a group of people.
Here is a fun one. After working on and off on this for a couple of years, it is finally out. Have you wondered what a phenomenological analysis of imagination would look like if Husserl had played D&D? Well... here is the answer! link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Concerning non-egoic collective memory, I focus on how what we encounter in the social world may scaffold (narratively and normatively) how we explicitly remember the distant past, as well as how the shared past of a group can structure an implicit body memory that shapes our bodily selfhood.
Concerning egoic collective memory, I mostly focus on how an individual's episodic memory comes to be experienced in the first-person plural ('we' remember) while impacting that individual's social identity at a narrative level.
Building on phenomenological analyses of embodiment, episodic memory, and the intersubjective dimensions of perception, as well as on narrative approaches to social identity, and aspects of Bourdieu's practice theory, I analyse those two forms of collective memory.
I introduce a phenomenological distinction between egoic and non-egoic collective memories: collective memories of past events we lived through and can remember episodically, and collective memories of distant past events we didn't live through.
I have a new paper out! Most research on collective memory focuses on either its sociological or its psychological aspects. I complement those approaches with a phenomenological analysis of how collective remembering is experienced from the first-person perspective. link.springer.com/article/10.1...
ABSTRACT. The early moderns surely didn’t defend an embodied, extended, embedded, or enacted conception of the mind, but we aim to show that this perspective can make sense of some of their practices; in particular, the epistemology of early modern experimentation. Focusing on Newton’s early optical work, we argue that the epistemic warrant he claims for his experimental results turns crucially on how the experimenter is situated towards gaining particular kinds of maker’s knowledge. Our account provides one answer to a long-standing puzzle regarding Newton’s method: his appeal to ‘compelled assent’ as an epistemic standard. We thus provide both a novel interpretation of Newton’s epistemology and a proof of concept towards applying tools from contemporary philosophy of mind to the history of science.
Just accepted:
Situated Cognition in Early Modern Experimentation: The Case of Compelled Assent
– Kirsten Walsh, Adrian Currie & Tom Roberts
Abstract in alt text or read the full paper here:
#philsci #philsky #hps
I just got an email notifying me that a paper I published 2 years ago has finally been published in an actual issue of Phenomenology of the Cognitive Sciences. So now, a paper I wrote years ago and was "Bogotá (2023)" is now technically my latest publication. I don't know how to feel about all this
Sad that I missed the labubu on Marx's grave in my attempt to keep away from social media for some time!
It was great to work on this project led by Lars Sandved-Smith, and alongside @hohwy.bsky.social, @jdkiverstein.bsky.social, and @antoinelutz.bsky.social.
The idea is to aim at a disciplined circulation between first and third-person perspectives, using the formalism of deep parametric active inference and the dual information geometry of Bayesian mechanics as a generative passage.
More specifically, we aim to provide a principled methodology for the scientific study of consciousness that, following phenomenological philosophy, focuses not on the contents of experience (i.e., what is experienced) but on its structures (i.e., how it is experienced).
I'm back from the dead to announce a paper that was published a couple of days ago and that I worked on. We're all very proud of this one. We elaborate on Varela’s neurophenomenology, proposing Bayesian mechanics as a generative passage between phenomenology and neurobiology.
Out now! Mind as Metaphor (OUP, 2023) t.co/eBlYtDd5lY
Hi. DM me the details. 650 words sounds short for an article, so I’m a bit confused.
I love you Britain, but after having a proper taste of Finnish trains over the last four months I don’t think I want to travel in one of your trains ever again.
El listado está lejos de ser completo. Por favor hagan sugerencias para completarlo. No se sientan incómodos al sugerir su propio nombre, y disculpas de antemano por la omisión. Gracias!
go.bsky.app/4XmN14ihttps...
Spanglish es my language del thought.
Two reviews, one talk, one abstract, one revision, and my birthday on a single week. Never again.
What makes it a bit funnier is that my PhD thesis was also titled 'Life and Mind'. But in my defense, that wasn't the title I wanted. For bureaucratic reasons, I had to submit a 'preliminary title' in a rush for the university to contact potential examiners, and then they didn't let me change it :(
I find it hilarious that Springer allowed two books in the same series to have essentially the same title.
Here is an open-access, pre-print version of the paper: www.researchgate.net/publication/...
But if anybody wants the pdf of the published version, reach out to me and I'll send it over.
There is also a nice discussion about why I think that sense-making does not fall into the 'hard problem of content' that radical enactivists talk about. Cognition requires a non-representational form of content, and sense-making is just that.
Drawing from the latest literature, I show that even if the FEP by itself doesn't say much about life or mind specifically, it can be used to model the sense-making dynamics of organisms as described by the enactivists. The point is not to conflate operational, cognitive, and statistical boundaries.
New paper: I explore the possibility of integrating enactivism and the Free Energy Principle to address life and mind. I examine some of the arguments in favour and against their integration, and claim that something close to it is possible.
link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...
#philosophy #philsky
It’s so heartbreaking when you’re reading a manuscript you are reviewing that at first shows a lot of promise, but then starts falling apart when the authors are developing their own proposal
📣Calling all enactivists and critics!
Russell Meyer, Marilyn Stendera and myself are guest editing a special issue for Adaptive Behaviour called "Prospects for the science of Enaction" and are looking for contributions!
You can read more about our call here: listserv.liv.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa?A...
