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International Journal of
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Handbook of Phenomenology
and Cognitive Science
a
Junichi Murata
a
Rissho University , Tokyo
Published online: 15 Oct 2012.

To cite this article: Junichi Murata (2012) Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive
Science, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 20:4, 579-584

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 International Journal of Philosophical Studies Vol. 20(4), 579601

Book Reviews

Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science

Edited by Shaun Gallagher and Daniel Schmicking
Springer, 2010. Pp. vi +688. ISBN 978-9-0481-2645-3. 224 (hbk).

Phenomenology seems to have reached a new stage of its development.

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Perhaps it would be better to say that philosophy has reached a new

stage of its development at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
This voluminous handbook, in which philosophers and scientists have
cooperated to analyse and explicate a wide range of topics belonging to
the philosophy of mind, shows concretely the present relationship
between phenomenology and cognitive science. It also shows symboli-
cally the present status of philosophy, which has a strong naturalistic ten-
dency, in which cooperation with the sciences is no longer exceptional
but rather is the norm.

Phenomenology and Naturalism

As Dan Zahavi, the author of the first article of the volume, indicates, at
the beginning of the twentieth century, the two important figures of Hus-
serl and Frege established and defended their philosophies by severely
criticizing psychologism and naturalism, which were dominant at that
time. That was a time when psychology separated itself from philosophy
and became an independent discipline. Confronting this situation, philos-
ophers had to defend their discipline and institutional status, claiming
that the aims and methods of their activities are principally different
from those of psychology. Since then, anti-psychologism and anti-
naturalism have been cliches of almost every philosophy, whether
belonging to analytic or phenomenological streams.
This situation gradually changed, particularly in the analytic tradition,
when the new stream of the philosophy of mind emerged and became
dominant in the 1970s. Corresponding to the development of cognitive
and brain science, philosophers began to propose various models of the
mind: at first, an orthodox computational model mainly based on com-
puter sciences, then a connectionist model mainly based on neurosci-
ences, and recently dynamical or even enactive and embodied models

International Journal of Philosophical Studies

ISSN 0967-2559 print 1466-4542 online
http://www.tandfonline.com
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

based on various research fields such as robotics or an ecological

approach. At the same time, philosophers no longer hesitate to discuss
various concrete themes discussed in the sciences, such as blind sight,
change blindness, and mirror neurons, and these themes are now recog-
nized as important clues to explicating philosophical problems in a con-
crete way. On the other hand, scientists were not satisfied with offering
various interesting discussion-themes to philosophers. They themselves
began to discuss philosophical problems, such as the nature and origin
of consciousness, emotion, self, intersubjectivity, or free will. Some scien-
tists even claimed that they had come to a position where they were able
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to solve philosophical problems that had for a long time been regarded
as insoluble by philosophers. In this way, an interplay between philoso-
phers and scientists has developed, and we have now reached a situation
where we sometimes find books with titles containing terms such as cog-
nitive philosophy or neurophilosophy.
In contrast to this situation in the analytic stream, phenomenologists
seemed at first to be reluctant to commit themselves to discussions
related to the philosophy of mind. However, when they found scientists
and philosophers were beginning to discuss concepts such as embodi-
ment and embeddedness and sometimes cite Heidegger or Merleau-
Ponty, they gradually recognized that they could not neglect the new
naturalizing tendency and began to break the spell of anti-psychologism
and anti-naturalism, and to leave the world of the texts of Husserl,
Heidegger, or Merleau-Ponty and follow their original slogan back to
the things themselves. It is now no longer exceptional in the field of
phenomenology to hear terms such as naturalized phenomenology,
neurophenomenology (F. Varela), or front-loading phenomenology
(S. Gallagher), in which cooperation between philosophy and science is
considered to be inevitable to analyse concrete phenomena in the
field of the philosophy of mind. And, as a result, we have now this
voluminous Handbook.

Naturalized Phenomenology
The Handbook consists of 32 articles, which are divided into eight parts.
The first part deals mainly with methodological problems, and the
remaining parts address concrete topics, such as consciousness, embodi-
ment, intersubjectivity, perception and action, language, experimenta-
tion, and pathologies.
In the first four chapters, D. Zahavi, S. Gallagher, D. Schmicking, and
E. Marbach establish a common methodological basis, on which various
themes in sciences are analysed and explicated from a phenomenological
point of view. Most of the authors, including these four philosophers,
are not so interested in differentiating various approaches within

580
 BOOK REVIEWS

phenomenology. When H. Dreyfus, the forerunner of the naturalizing

tendency in phenomenology, criticized the orthodox computational
approach of classic cognitive science, he mainly used insights based on
the phenomenology of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, but he seldom
mentioned Husserl. Rather, he severely criticized the Husserlian way of
phenomenology, because Dreyfus thought Husserls phenomenology is a
typical representationalist way of seeing cognition, and he even took
Husserl to be the father of classical cognitivism. In contrast, most of the
authors in this volume focus on the common method (descriptive analy-
sis of experiences from a first-person perspective) and characteristics of
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experiences that can be commonly found in various descriptive analyses

in phenomenology, such as intentionality, adumbration structure of per-
ceptual appearances, passive synthesis, kinesthetic experiences, embodi-
ment, and Being-in-the-world.
Even Husserls transcendental phenomenology is not interpreted as an
approach that contradicts the naturalizing tendency. Rather, as Husserl
himself emphasized, transcendental and naturalized phenomenology are
to be seen as two compatible approaches, which can develop in a paral-
lel way, although their ultimate aims remain different (pp. 8, 32).
In this way, the naturalism understood in this volume, is considered
mainly to play a methodological role. Perhaps, philosophers belonging to
the analytic tradition would be skeptical about this way of using the con-
cept, because in the analytic tradition the concept of naturalism has been
interpreted mostly as a concept, which plays a role in an ontological and
metaphysical dimension. According to this view, naturalism means
nothing but materialism. Accordingly, all phenomena belonging to mind
must be regarded as reducible to brain processes, or if they are not
reducible, they must be regarded as something that is to be ontologically
eliminated.
Within this precise context, the characteristics of phenomenology are
conspicuous. Most philosophers belonging to the phenomenological
tradition do not commit themselves to ontological or metaphysical
problems understood in the traditional sense. Rather, they suspend
metaphysical problems, which originate from a traditional mind-body
dualism, and concentrate on describing and analysing concrete phenom-
ena. Surely phenomenologists admit that the various phenomena we
experience are closely related to brain processes and explanations of
them in the brain sciences are helpful and sometimes give certain con-
straints to phenomenological descriptions of them, but they never
attempt to reduce the phenomena described to brain processes nor elimi-
nate them. I think this rather liberal attitude of naturalized phenome-
nology is not a deficit but rather is an advantage for developing a
fruitful interplay between philosophy and sciences.

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 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

Even if naturalized phenomenology has a relatively liberal attitude

toward an ontological problem, its view of mind sometimes comes into
conflict with the orthodox cognitive view of mind. One of the central
theses of the orthodox view of the mind is that the main role of the
mind is to represent a world, and this role is realized in various brain
processes. Against this representationalist view, phenomenology empha-
sizes the role of the bodily movement in a certain situation, through
which perception and action are realized. The locus of the mind is con-
sidered to be not in the brain but at the place where perceivers and
actors are interacting with the world, i.e., in the world. In this sense, it is
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natural to find similarities between the phenomenological view and the

view of the new trend of the philosophy of mind, where the embodied,
embedded, extended, and enactive character of mind is focused upon.
We can very clearly confirm this characteristic of the phenomenological
view in this Handbook.

Embodiment
Because the Handbook covers such a wide range of topics, it is impossi-
ble to touch on the concrete content of each article. Instead, to obtain
an overview of the Handbook, I select one key concept, namely embodi-
ment, which symbolically expresses the characteristic of naturalized phe-
nomenology.
When it comes to the concept of embodiment, one probably immedi-
ately thinks of bodily behaviors that constitute essential roles of percep-
tual and behavioral experiences. However, this concept can be
understood in a much wider and looser sense. M. Ratcliffe points out
the medium role of body, through which something else is experienced
with a certain feeling. Ratcliffe explicates this medium role on the basis
of Heideggers concept of existential feeling and A. Damasios neuro-
physiological concept of background feeling (p. 133f.).
Not only in the field of emotion but also in the field of high-level
thinking and language communication, we can find an embodiment
dimension. D. Lohmar indicates the necessary role of the non-linguistic
system of representation in our consciousness, which consists of images
and gestures (p. 168f.). M. Johnson emphasizes the central role of meta-
phor in abstract conceptualization and reasoning, indicating a possible
neural model, according to which metaphors are based on the activities
of a sensory-motor source domain (p. 411). In contrast, J. Zlatev criti-
cizes the mainstream of cognitive linguistics, to which Johnson belongs,
indicating that the view of embodiment adopted by the mainstream is
anti-representationalist, and in this sense not phenomenological (p. 430).
The discussion presented by Zlatev typically suggests a difficult and
fundamental question of how the relation between embodiment and

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 BOOK REVIEWS

representation should be understood: does the embodiment view impli-

cate an anti-representationalist view of cognition? Or, is representation
necessary to explain image consciousness and language understanding?
Is the phenomenological difference between Gegenwartigung (presenta-
tion) and Vergegenwartigung (re-presentation) that Husserl confirms to
be between perception and other types of experiences, such as imagina-
tion and recollection, related to the concept of representation that is
widely used in cognitive science? I think these questions are critical for
naturalized phenomenology, because, as M. Wheeler indicates, the prob-
lem of representation remains the central core of the problems of phe-
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nomenology as well as cognitive science (p. 319ff.).

Embodiment without movement or animation would be empty
(p. 219). This thesis of M. Sheets-Johnstone clearly points out the
character of our experiences of lived bodies in normal cases as well as in
abnormal cases. If animals and human beings cannot move, their survival
in the world is impossible. On the other hand, learning to move is
achieved in a certain socio-cultural situation, i.e., infants learn about
their bodies and learn to move themselves by imitating the gestures of
adults. Having ones own body and acquiring the ability to move ones
body is achieved in an intersubjective situation. This learning situation
of infants, according to B. Stawarska, can be construed as a social
attunement that is achieved by attention contact (p. 271f.). Because this
kind of embodied social interaction is to be regarded as the challenge
faced by autistic children, the difficulties of autistic children are to be
considered to lie at a cognitively lower level than has been assumed in
the theory of mind model (p. 273). T. Fuchs, a psychiatrist, confirms this
embodiment thesis, emphasizing that what autistic children lack is
not the ability to have a theory of mind but rather more primitive
(primary and secondary) intersubjectivity (p. 563). Fuchs, like other
phenomenology-oriented psychiatrists, also emphasizes that the origin of
schizophrenia lies not in disturbances of the cognitive process such as
theory of mind, as many current neuropsychological theories present,
but rather in a disembodiment in the dimensions of both perception and
action. In the case of schizophrenic patients, they cannot live and enjoy
each perceptual and behavioral experience but become alienated from it.
Their attentions do not focus on each object but on the acts of percep-
tion themselves and each process of bodily movement. They can no
longer act automatically and in the end are led to delusions of alien
control (p. 552). When we use the concepts proposed by Gallagher,
schizophrenic patients retain a sense of ownership of bodily movements
but lose the sense of agency (p. 554).
According to Gallagher, while the sense of ownership is associated
with sensory feedback (e.g., proprioception) that results from bodily
movement, the sense of agency is associated with pre-action efferent

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control process (e.g., motor commands, efference copy) activated in vol-

untary action (p. 28). However, as Gallagher himself admits, the sense of
agency involves a sense of accomplishing some effect in the world, so
that the sense of agency must be considered to be closely connected with
the perceptual fulfillment of an anticipated goal, and hence a very com-
plex process. According to T. Grunbaum,

the sense of agency or control grows out of a continuous interplay

between awareness of goal, awareness of corresponding sensory expec-
tancy patterns, awareness of initiating ones bodily activity, perception
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of pertinent features or objects in ones surrounding selected by ones

goal or intention, and the continuous sensory fulfillment of sensory
expectations.
(p. 348)

This insightful confirmation brought by naturalized phenomenology is

very important. First, the traditional view of contrasting perception and
action cannot be retained. Perception and action must be considered to
be inseparable. In this sense, embodiment character and enactive charac-
ter are closely connected. And second, it is clear that the search for a
qualia and its neural correlate corresponding to the sense of agency is
meaningless, because the sense of agency consists of such a complex pro-
cess and various factors. This clearly shows how nave the popular view
of consciousness is, which is still dominant in consciousness studies.
This is only a very restricted and rough sketch of the voluminous Hand-
book. There are many interesting discussions I could not touch upon here.
However, even from the overview above, I hope readers can understand
how insightful and how provocative the discussions in this Handbook are.
I also hope that on the basis of this result naturalized phenomenology
brings about not only the peaceful coexistence of various views and disci-
plines but also intense controversy, the beginnings of which we can already
detect in various sections of this Handbook. Only through intense contro-
versial discussions can philosophy accomplish a new breakthrough. Phe-
nomenology is, as Husserl emphasized, an Arbeitsphilosophie.

Rissho University, Tokyo Junichi Murata

2012, Junichi Murata
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2012.714260

Murray Rothbard: Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers series,

Volume 15
By Gerard Casey
Continuum, 2010. Pp. xii + 169. ISBN 978-1-4411-4209-2. $130 (hbk).

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