This review examines how the Phenomenology of Broken Habits (Routledge, 2025) organizes its diverse contributions around a central thesis — that habits become especially knowable through their breakdown. This review argues that many of the volume’s most valuable chapters in fact elide this frame, analyzing instead habits in their formation, rigidification, transformation, and unbreakability. The result is characterized here as unintended yet productive, as the volume collectively testifies to the epistemic relevance of habit well beyond breakdown. This emerges from a detailed engagement with the individual contributions of Wehrle, Čapek, Hewig, Crossley, Munch-Jurisic, Brincker, and Cavallaro. The review concludes by endorsing how such internal tensions within the volume promote a reading experience that is itself a transformative philosophical habit: namely of appreciating conceptual overdetermination without collapsing into reductive systematicity.
This paper develops a phenomenological account of hallucinations and delusions as disorders of temporal synthesis rather than as "positive symptoms" or simple perceptual-cognitive failures. Drawing on Henri Bergson's philosophy of memory-perception synthesis, I argue that psychotic phenomena represent specific breakdowns in the living processes through which consciousness ordinarily integrates past, present, and future into coherent temporal experience. Hallucinations emerge through ungrounded actualization of memorial content without proper temporal framing, while delusions represent false synthetic frameworks that restore apparent coherence while losing connection to shared reality. By retrieving Bergson's original insight that "there is no perception which is not full of memories," this analysis demonstrates how Eugène Minkowski's selective appropriation of Bergsonian concepts redirected phenomenological psychiatry away from memorial processes toward an exclusive focus on temporal flow and vital contact. Contemporary phenomenological psychiatry continues this "forward bias," emphasizing protention and desynchronization while underemphasizing the active, creative role of memory in temporal constitution. Through phenomenological analysis integrated with Merleau-Ponty's embodied phenomenology and Gadamer's hermeneutic insights, and grounded in first-person accounts of psychotic experience, the paper proposes understanding recovery as temporal reconstruction and suggests therapeutic approaches based on rebuilding memory-perception synthesis.
Building on the continuing bonds paradigm, the existential tradition, and deep ecological thought, we propose a participatory praxis of grief and hope, which challenges the clinical pathologisation of grief and reinscribes the grieving process as a meaningful mode of participatory sense-making, a collective space that fosters the emergence of hope-based action.Ecological homelessness provokes a condition of existential groundlessness, made universal under the climate crisis. By considering ecological homelessness, what becomes evident is the generative manner grief discloses our intimate relation with the more-than-human world, and in this way serves to foster hope and life-continuity. It is precisely in grieving for a place that is dying that some sort of hope can emerge. It is through the resurgence and maintenance of community-based grieving practices that facilitate our sense of emplaced memory and shared acknowledgement of our existential precarity that we foster a continuing bond that can facilitate collective action. We may move from dialogical suppression of grief in all its expressions to hope-based action.Consideration of the archetypal significance of “orphanhood” serves to illustrate the human capacity for reinvention despite existential “homelessness”, illuminating the hopeful and redemptive dimension of ecological homelessness we conceptualise as “tomorrow sense-making”. Tomorrow sense-making articulates our transgenerational responsibility in a way that is resonant with the felt experience of the ecological homelessness associated with forced migration. The kind of hope we describe is a powerful source of life-continuity, as it resides at the heart of participatory processes of making sense of a liveable tomorrow.
This paper reconstructs and defends Jean-Paul Sartre’s realism about consciousness as articulated in the Introduction to Being and Nothingness, situating his position within contemporary debates on illusionism and anti-realism in the philosophy of mind. While Sartre’s descriptions of consciousness as “nothingness” and his emphasis on the contingency of the subject–world relation may appear to support an illusionist reading, the paper argues that Sartre offers a systematic rejection of the view that consciousness merely seems to exist. The analysis focuses on two interconnected argumentative strategies implicit in Sartre’s text. The first, described as an ontological argument, challenges the coherence of drawing a constitutive distinction between the appearance and reality of consciousness. The second, a cosmological regress argument, shows that attempts to replace consciousness with successively weaker “consciousness-like” states generate an infinite and explanatorily vicious regress. Together, these strategies aim to establish that consciousness cannot be globally non-veridical without undermining the very notion of illusion. The paper further argues that Sartre’s position does not rely on claims of infallible introspection or a reified metaphysics of qualia. Instead, it articulates a minimal, non-separatist realism according to which phenomenal consciousness is inseparable from intentionality. Read against contemporary illusionist theories, Sartre emerges as a philosopher who anticipates central worries about appearance–reality distinctions and higher-order models of consciousness.
This article proposes a reconceptualization of action and cognition within Cognitive Linguistics (CL) by re-examining its foundational metaphorical models. While meaning in the field is often defined as embodied and usage-based, its dominant metaphors remain static, privileging stability over process. Methodologically, the research in this paper adopts the principles of the “Cognitive Science of Philosophy,” engaging in an analysis of the metaphors underlying CL. This involves a critical self-reflection on the static metaphors in CL and a proposal of a new, dynamic metaphorical model of activity is flow to better attune the field’s tools with its prevailing process-oriented modes of thought. The proposed model synthesizes major philosophical sources, notably phenomenology and pragmatism, alongside the work of Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour. This new framework models habit as a dynamic sedimentation shaping a “terrain,” choice as a modulation within it, and priming as the microgenetic link between them. As shown in this article, the model enables a reframing of various issues concerning metaphor theory, meaning construction, discourse analysis, and translation studies.
This commentary on Robert Hopkins’s The Profile of Imagining looks closely at the No Observation and No Unconscious Imagining principles that Hopkins uses to articulate key phenomenological and epistemic differences between imagination and perception. It explores an ambiguity in the claim that “every aspect of what is imagined is imagined consciously,” arguing that its most plausible clarifications leave imagining and perceiving on a par. Fortunately, it may be that Hopkins’s innovative “sensory profiling” model for learning from imagination does not require distinguishing perceiving from imagining in the specific phenomenological terms he pursues.
Ego-dissolution experiences are perhaps the most philosophically germane effect of psychedelic drugs. Psychedelic ego-dissolution self-reports, in varying expressions, often claim completely selfless episodes. Some have called the experiences referred to in these reports ‘total ego dissolution,’ arguing that they lack all self-awareness while being phenomenally conscious. I identify two recent strategies to make such arguments. One targets Zahavi’s well-known view on minimal self-awareness, which claims that self-awareness is constitutively necessary for phenomenal consciousness. It maintains that minimal self-awareness is indeed shown to be lost from some psychedelic reports. The other strategy denies Zahavi-style minimal self-awareness as a legitimate kind of self-awareness but insists that psychedelic reports show complete lack of self-awareness nonetheless. Both strategies rely on psychedelic reports. Without offering a positive account of ego-dissolution, I argue that psychedelic reports are ambiguous and therefore unreliable to support such arguments. Due to alternative, equally plausible interpretations, they do not clearly evidence total ego dissolution or lack of all self-awareness. Since we are not certain on what exact shifts in self-experience psychedelic drugs can cause and given that the reports – as I argue – do not help us conclude, I propose a terminological shift that is appropriately neutral. I suggest we approach this issue cautiously and call these kinds of experiences ‘psychedelic self-disruptions’.
This essay develops an account of aesthetic form. Aesthetic form is not a matter of genre, style, or presentation, but the organization of appearance in which ordinary orientation breaks down and becomes a claim on thought. It requires a discipline of preserving both resistance and surrender in the face of what disturbs sense. Written in celebration of the twentieth anniversary of Alva Noë’s Action in Perception, the essay develops this account by pursuing one of Noë’s longstanding convictions: that aesthetic experience is central to understanding mind. I bring this conviction into conversation with Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic negativity. For Noë, aesthetic form opens onto renewed orientation through practice and reconfiguration. For Adorno, it sustains contradiction through receptivity to what resists mastery. I turn to Simone Weil’s account of attention to show why this opposition should be preserved rather than resolved. I close by arguing that aesthetic judgment is not a private verdict, but the reflective practice by which thought becomes answerable to form. In this sense, aesthetics is not applied to philosophy of mind from outside; mind is already aesthetic in form.
This paper investigates whether the concept of “phenomenal consciousness” is an integral component of ordinary folk psychology or a theoretical construct devised within a specific epistemic community. Advocates of what I term the Folk- “Consciousness” Thesis argue that laypeople already possess such a concept, citing experimental findings in support of this view. In contrast, I draw on recent work in experimental philosophy and social psychology to develop the Constructivist Hypothesis of “Consciousness.” According to this view, “phenomenal consciousness” is not a pre-theoretical folk concept, but a post-theoretical construct shaped by the explanatory aims of cognitive scientists and, most prominently, philosophers of mind. This reconceptualization challenges the widespread assumption that “phenomenal consciousness” belongs to ordinary conceptual practice, situating it instead as a technical notion engineered to address specific theoretical and empirical problems.
Educational theory has often been organised by representational models that treat learning as the acquisition, storage, and manipulation of internal symbolic content. Recent work in radical enactive cognition, sensorimotor enactivism, and ecological psychology challenges this assumption by locating cognition in embodied, situated, and environmentally structured activity. This article synthesises these philosophical developments with empirical work in embodied design, multimodal learning, teacher noticing, and hybrid learning environments. Its central concern is the epistemic pivot through which coordinated bodily action becomes disciplinary discourse: how learners move from perceptual-motor engagement with tasks, artefacts, and others to forms of reasoning that can be named, justified, assessed, and institutionally recognised. We argue that non-representational pedagogy should not be understood as a rejection of language, symbolic artefacts, or explicit instruction. Rather, it reframes these as mediating practices that stabilise and transform embodied participation. The analysis clarifies implications for curriculum design, teacher education, assessment, inclusive pedagogy, and AI-supported hybrid learning environments, while cautioning against treating embodiment as a general pedagogical slogan. A viable non-representational pedagogy must explain how embodied activity is organised, redescribed, and authorised as knowledge within educational institutions.
This paper extends Oded Na’aman’s diachronic theory of emotional fittingness to explain how grief can fittingly diminish. Unlike anger, which can fittingly diminish through processes of moral repair, grief concerns an irreversible loss and cannot rely on reciprocal interaction. I argue that grief fittingly diminishes through processes of meaning-making in which the bereaved gradually transforms her relationship with the deceased to a form of symbolic attachment. Drawing on both philosophical and psychological work, I show that meaning-making in grief has not only psychological but also normative significance. Grief’s diminution is fitting not when comfort returns, but when meaning is re-established in a way that truthfully acknowledges loss. This account clarifies the normativity of emotional change and also extends the scope of the diachronic framework.
Phenomenological research on ipseity-disturbance in schizophrenia-spectrum disorders (SSD) has yielded strong empirical results. However, recent theoretical work has questioned how the ipseity-disturbance framework accommodates the world-embedded, intersubjective dynamics of SSD. Schizophrenic autism provides a helpful theoretical prism to grasp the interrelation of disturbed selfhood, worldhood and intersubjectivity in SSD. This paper develops a theory of schizophrenic autism grounded in what I term foundational common sense (FCS). Drawing primarily on Knudsen, Blankenburg, and Heidegger, FCS names an intersubjective dimension structurally immanent to subjectivity: our meaning-ascriptions are constitutively open to the indeterminate, inexhaustible surplus of meaning ascribable by others. FCS sustains ongoing triangulation between self, world, and other. Drawing on Sass, and via close analysis of two prototypical cases of schizophrenic autism described by Blankenburg and Minkowski, the article argues that schizophrenic autism consists in a disturbance of FCS, which may become hyperreflexively focalized. Thereby, triangulation risks collapse into a line - either a self-effacing line (self-world-other) marked by self-alienating perplexity in navigating the commonsensical world of others, or an own-worldly line (self-world-other) marked by idiosyncratic self-assurance. This account of schizophrenic autism situates ipseity-disturbance within a dynamic, relational architecture, that avoids excessively reifying and abstracting ipseity out of the intersubjective world it is situated in. It thus secures a) an appreciation of the depth and specificity of ipseity-disturbance in SSD, while b) providing an account of how this disturbance is modulable by intersubjective and worldly-contextual factors, without thereby being reducible to these factors. Finally, implications for recovery are briefly considered.
Some argue that we can and sometimes do perceptually experience meaning properties. Roughly, the idea is that when we listen to a speech or read a text in a language we know, our perceptual experience can present words as having certain meanings. One prominent support for this view is the argument from semantic satiation. When one excessively repeats a word by uttering, writing, or hearing it, it appears to “lose its meaning.” This familiar phenomenon is called semantic satiation. Semantic satiation seems to be a form of negative aftereffect, where excessive exposure to certain stimuli biases the subsequent experience in an opposing way. If so, the proponents argue that we can be perceptually aware of meaning properties because aftereffects are arguably perceptual phenomena. If experiences of meaning properties are subject to aftereffects, then they are perceptual. I argue that, unlike other putative forms of high-level aftereffects, semantic satiation does not provide the distinctive explanatory support needed for an inference to the thesis that perceptual experience presents meaning properties.
Colour constancy is standardly defined as the visual phenomenon in which an object’s colour tends to be perceived as (approximately) constant regardless of (drastic) variations in the illumination and other viewing conditions. But a closer look at our colour experience reveals that the colour initially held to be constant varies successively and simultaneously. If colour constancy is a genuine form of perceptual constancy, then there seems to be an ambiguity involved in it that needs to be explained. In this article, I explore Merleau-Ponty’s contributions to this ambiguity problem from his 1945 work, the Phenomenology of Perception. In the first part, I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of our colour experience expose the inadequacies of two lines of response to the ambiguity problem proposed by the computational approach to colour constancy, namely the “imperfection response” and the “other-aspect response”. In the second part, I reconstruct Merleau-Ponty’s theory of colour constancy, which contains three main theses: (i) the pluralist thesis, (ii) the normative thesis, and (iii) the holistic thesis. I suggest that each of these theses provides an explanation that can do justice to the ambiguity of colour constancy.
It is surprisingly difficult to provide an account of hallucination that captures all the cases that clinicians typically class as hallucinations, without at the same time admitting cases that would not typically be classed as such. Most attempts to specify exactly what a hallucination is supposed to be fails to meet at least one of these conditions, as we show in the first part of the paper. We then proceed to develop an account of hallucination that meets both conditions. Central to this account is a discussion of two key notions in much need of clarification: the notion that hallucinations have a ‘sense of reality’, and the notion that hallucinations are ‘perception-like’. Settling on the exact meaning of these two notions allows us to offer an account of hallucination that captures all cases typically classified as hallucination and only such cases.
