Papers
Phenomenology as a Form of Empathy
Draft of a paper scheduled for publication in the journal Inquiry.
This paper proposes that adopting a ‘phenomenological stance’ enables a distinctive kind of empathy, which is required in order to understand forms of experience that occur in psychiatric illness and elsewhere. For the most part, we interpret other people’s experiences against the backdrop of a shared world. Hence our attempts to appreciate interpersonal differences do not call into question a deeper level of commonality. A phenomenological stance involves suspending our habitual acceptance of that world. It thus allows us to contemplate the possibility of structurally different ways of ‘finding oneself in the world’. Such a stance, I suggest, can be incorporated into an empathetic appreciation of others’ experiences, amounting to what we might call ‘radical empathy’.
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Download (.pdf) Phenomenology, Naturalism and the Sense of Reality
Draft of a paper forthcoming in a special issue of the journal Philosophy.
Phenomenologists such as Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty reject the kind of scientific naturalism or ‘scientism’ that takes empirical science to be epistemologically and metaphysically privileged over all other forms of enquiry. In this paper, I will consider one of their principal complaints against naturalism, that scientific accounts of things are oblivious to a ‘world’ that is presupposed by the intelligibility of science. Focusing principally upon Husserl’s work, I attempt to clarify the nature of this complaint and state it in the form of an argument. I conclude that the argument is effective in exposing naturalism’s reliance upon impoverished conceptions of human experience, and that it also weakens the more general case for naturalism.
What is it to Lose Hope?
Draft of a paper forthcoming in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.
This paper addresses the phenomenology of hopelessness. I distinguish two broad kinds of predicament that are easily confused: ‘loss of hopes’ and ‘loss of hope’. I argue that not all hope can be characterised as an intentional state of the form ‘I hope that p’. It is possible to lose all hopes of that kind and yet retain another kind of hope. The hope that remains is not an intentional state or a non-intentional bodily feeling. Rather, it is a ‘pre-intentional’ orientation or ‘existential feeling’, by which I mean something in the context of which certain kinds of intentional state, including intentional hope, are intelligible. I go on to discuss severe depression, lack of aspiration, demoralisation and loss of trust in the world, in order to distinguish some qualitatively different forms that loss of hope can take.
Varieties of Temporal Experience in Depression
Draft of a paper forthcoming in the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy
People with depression often report alterations in their experience of time, a common complaint being that time has slowed down or stopped. In this paper, I argue that depression can involve a range of qualitatively different changes in the structure of temporal experience, some of which I proceed to describe. In addition, I suggest that current diagnostic categories such as ‘major depression’ are insensitive to the differences between these changes. I conclude by briefly considering whether the kinds of temporal experience associated with depression are specific to depression.
The Phenomenology of Existential Feeling
Draft of a paper forthcoming in Marienberg, S. and Fingerhut, J. eds. The Feeling of Being Alive. Berlin: de Gruyter
This chapter sketches a phenomenological account of what I call ‘existential feeling’ (Ratcliffe, 2005, 2008). Since I introduced the term, it has also been adopted by several others (e.g. Slaby and Stephan, 2008; McLaughlin, 2009, Stephan, forthcoming), sometimes in ways that differ slightly from my own usage. Hence one aim of the chapter is to offer an overview of my understanding of ‘existential feeling’, so that it can be distinguished from others. To do so, I start by suggesting that there is a distinctive form of affective experience that cannot be fitted into established categories. Use of the term ‘existential feeling’, I propose, allows us to focus our enquiries on a neglected and phenomenologically unified group of affective phenomena that would otherwise be split up and assigned to familiar categories such as ‘emotion’, ‘feeling’ and ‘mood’. Following this, I sketch a two-part phenomenological analysis of existential feeling. First of all, I suggest that the notion of ‘experienced possibility’ is central. Then I argue that something can be both a bodily feeling and, at the same time, an experience of worldly possibilities. A further aim of the chapter is to complicate my analysis in two respects: I sketch an account of affective ‘depth’ that applies to existential feeling, after which I raise (but do not fully resolve) some issues concerning the relationship between existential feeling and conceptual thought.
Realism, Biologism and the Background
John Searle has argued on numerous occasions that intentional states function in relation to a set of non-intentional background capacities. He insists that this Background should be construed naturalistically, in terms of the causal properties of biological brains. This paper examines the relationship between Searle’s conception of the Background and his commitment to biological naturalism. I first observe that the arguments Searle ventures in support of the Background’s existence do not entail a naturalistic interpretation; naturalism is asserted rather than argued. I then address Searle’s claim that external realism is a product of Background capacities, as opposed to a belief that is implicitly or explicitly held. It is argued that his formulation of this claim implies an implicit understanding of reality that is, in an important sense, more basic than or prior to any objective, scientific conceptualisation. As a consequence, Searle’s account of the Background is incompatible with his insistence that it can be comprehensively characterised as a collection of biological capacities. I conclude by showing that, if the tension is resolved by rejecting biological naturalism, Searle’s position takes a substantial step in the direction of Heideggerian phenomenology, a move Searle has emphatically resisted in his various exchanges with Hubert Dreyfus.
Belonging to the World through the Feeling Body
Proof version of a response to commentaries on my paper 'Existential Feeling and Psychopathology'. Published in Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology (2009).
The Problem with the Problem of Consciousness
This paper proposes that the ‘problem of consciousness’, in its most popular formulation, is based upon a misinterpretation of the structure of experience. A contrast between my subjective perspective (A) and the shared world in which I take up that perspective (B) is part of my experience. However, descriptions of experience upon which the problem of consciousness is founded tend to emphasise only the former, remaining strangely oblivious to the fact that experience involves a sense of belonging to a world in which one occupies a contingent subjective perspective. The next step in formulating the problem is to muse over how this abstraction (A) can be integrated into the scientifically described world (C). I argue that the scientifically described world itself takes for granted the experientially constituted sense of a shared reality. Hence the problem of consciousness involves abstracting A from B, denying B and then trying to insert A into C, when C itself presupposes B. The problem in this form is symptomatic of serious phenomenological confusion. No wonder then that consciousness remains a mystery.
Touch and the Sense of Reality
Draft version. Final version will be published in The Hand: an Organ of the Mind (MIT Press), edited by Zdravko Radman.
Why Mood Matters
Penultimate draft of my contribution to the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Being and Time
Depression and the Phenomenology of Free Will
Draft of my contribution to the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Psychiatry
This chapter sketches a phenomenological account of impaired agency in depression. Depression, I suggest, can involve what we might call a diminished experience of free will. Although it is often assumed that we have such an experience, it is far from clear what it consists of. I argue that this lack of clarity is symptomatic of looking in the wrong place. Drawing on themes in Sartre‟s Being and Nothingness, I propose that the sense of freedom associated with action is not - first and foremost – an episodic „quale‟ or „feeling‟ that is experienced as internal to the agent. Rather, it is embedded in the experienced world; my freedom appears in the guise of my surroundings. This makes better sense of what people with depression consistently describe: a diminished ability to act that is inextricable from a transformation of the experienced world.
As well as illuminating an aspect of the experience of depression, I also seek to illustrate something more general: how phenomenology and psychiatry can interact in a fruitful way. Phenomenology supplies us with an interpretive framework through which to make sense of first-person reports of altered experience in psychiatric illness. In so far as it facilitates plausible interpretations of otherwise elusive phenomena, in a way that has potential repercussions for classification and treatment, it is vindicated in the process. In addition, the commerce between phenomenology and psychiatry can lead to further refinement of the former, rather than simply its uncritical application (Ratcliffe, 2008; Ratcliffe and Broome, forthcoming).
The Phenomenology of Mood and the Meaning of Life
Proof. The final version appeared in the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion, edited by Peter Goldie.
In his book The Passions, Robert Solomon proposed that emotions are ‘the meaning of life’. By this, he meant that they constitute the meanings in a life, frameworks of value and significance that are incorporated into the experienced world. I think there is something importantly right about his claim, and my aim in this chapter is to defend a somewhat revised version of it. I begin by outlining Solomon’s conception of emotion, focusing on the phenomenological role assigned to emotion, the distinction drawn between emotions and feelings, and the claim that moods are generalised emotions. I go on to argue that Solomon, like many others who have written on the emotions, misconstrues the phenomenology of mood. It is a background of feeling more often referred to as a ‘mood’ than as ‘emotion’ that plays the meaning-giving role emphasised by Solomon. Moods are not, as is often claimed, generalised emotions (intentional states that have the whole world or a substantial chunk of it as their object). In fact, they are not intentional states at all. Instead, they are part of the background structure of intentionality and are presupposed by the possibility of intentionally directed emotions. To illustrate this, I turn to Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis of boredom and then to descriptions of altered mood in depression. In so doing, I draw a distinction between the intensity or strength of an emotional state and its depth. An emotion can be quite intense but at the same time shallow, whereas a phenomenologically inconspicuous mood can be deep precisely in virtue of its inconspicuousness. The greater depth of the mood, I suggest, consists its being responsible for a space of possibilities that object-directed emotions, however intense, presuppose. For example, to be able to experience fear, one must already find oneself in the world in such a way that being ‘endangered’ or ‘under threat’ are possibilities.
Having described the phenomenological role of moods, I go on to consider their nature. I argue that we experience the world through our feeling bodies, and that distinctions between internally directed bodily feelings and externally directed intentional states should be rejected. I distinguish between intentional and pre-intentional feelings, suggesting that most of those phenomena referred to as ‘emotions’ are comprised at least partly of the former, whereas those moods that constitute the experienced meaningfulness of the world consist entirely of pre-intentional feeling.
Depression, Guilt and Emotional Depth
Proof version of a paper published in Inquiry (2010)
It is generally maintained that emotions consist of intentional states and/or bodily feelings. This paper offers a phenomenological analysis of guilt in severe depression, in order to illustrate how such conceptions fail to adequately accommodate a way in which some emotional experiences are said to be deeper than others. Many emotions are intentional states. However, I propose that the deepest emotions are not intentional but ‘pre-intentional’, meaning that they determine which kinds of intentional state are possible. I go on to suggest that pre-intentional emotions are at the same time feelings. In so doing, I reject the distinction that is often made between bodily feelings and the world-oriented aspects of emotion.
The Phenomenological Role of Affect in the Capgras Delusion
This paper draws on studies of the Capgras delusion in order to illuminate the phenomenological role of affect in interpersonal recognition. People with this delusion maintain that familiars, such as spouses, have been replaced by impostors. It is generally agreed that the delusion involves an anomalous experience, arising due to loss of affect. However, quite what this experience consists of remains unclear. I argue that recent accounts of the Capgras delusion incorporate an impoverished conception of experience, which fails to accommodate the role played by ‘affective relatedness’ in constituting (a) a sense of who a particular person is and (b) a sense of others as people rather than impersonal objects. I draw on the phenomenological concept of a horizon to offer an interpretation of the Capgras experience that shows how the content ‘this entity is not my spouse but an impostor’ can be part of the experience, rather than something that is inferred from a strange experience.
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The Feeling of Being
This paper was published in the Journal of Consciuousness Studies in 2005. It's where I introduce the term "existential feeling", the topic of my 2008 book Feelings of Being.
There has been much recent philosophical discussion concerning the relationship between emotion and feeling. However, everyday talk of ‘feeling’ is not restricted to emotional feeling and the current emphasis on emotions has led to a neglect of other kinds of feeling. These include feelings of homeliness, belonging, separation, unfamiliarity, power, control, being part of something, being at one with nature and ‘being there’. Such feelings are perhaps not ‘emotional’. However, I suggest here that they do form a distinctive group; all of them are ways of ‘finding ourselves in the world’. Indeed, our sense that there is a world and that we are ‘in it’ is, I suggest, constituted by feeling. I offer an analysis of what such ‘existential feelings’ consist of, showing how they can be both ‘bodily feelings’ and, at the same time, part of the structure of intentionality.
Heidegger's Attunement and the Neuropsychology of Emotion
I outline the early Heidegger’s views on mood and emotion, and then relate his central claims to some recent finding in neuropsychology. These findings complement Heidegger in a number of important ways. More specifically, I suggest that, in order to make sense of certain neurological conditions that traditional assumptions concerning the mind are constitutionally incapable of accommodating, something very like Heidegger’s account of mood and emotion needs to be adopted as an interpretive framework. I conclude by supporting Heidegger’s insistence that the sciences constitute a derivative means of disclosing the world and our place within it, as opposed to an ontologically and epistemologically privileged domain of inquiry.
Interpreting Delusions
This paper explores the phenomenology of the Capgras and Cotard delusions. The former is generally characterised as the belief that relatives or friends have been replaced by impostors, and the latter as the conviction that one is dead or has ceased to exist. A commonly reported feature of these delusions is an experienced ‘defamiliarisation’ or even ‘derealisation’ of things, which is associated with an absence or distortion of affect. I suggest that the importance attributed to affect by current explanations of delusional experience can serve to make explicit the manner in which we ordinarily experience the world under a taken-for-granted aspect of affective familiarity. This implicit feeling is, I argue, partly constitutive of our sense of reality. However, so-called ‘folk psychology’, which is generally adopted by philosophers as an initial interpretive backdrop for delusional beliefs and for beliefs more generally, fails to accommodate it. As a consequence, some pervasive philosophical assumptions concerning the manner in which we experience and understand the world, ourselves and each other are called into question.
William James on Emotion and Intentionality
William James’s theory of emotion is often criticised for placing too much emphasis on bodily feelings and neglecting the cognitive aspects of emotion. This paper suggests that such criticisms are misplaced. Interpreting James’s account of emotion in the light of his later philosophical writings, I argue that James does not emphasise bodily feelings at the expense of cognition. Rather, his view is that bodily feelings are part of the structure of intentionality. In re-conceptualising the relationship between cognition and affect, James rejects a number of commonplace assumptions concerning the nature of our cognitive relationship with the world, assumptions that many of his critics take for granted.
An elaborated and improved version of my account of William James on emotion and feeling can be found in Chapters 8 and 9 of my book Feelings of Being (OUP, 2008).
Folk Psychology'is Not Folk Psychology
This paper disputes the claim that our understanding of others is enabled by a commonsense or ‘folk’ psychology, whose ‘core’ involves the attribution of intentional states in order to predict and explain behaviour. I argue that interpersonal understanding is seldom, if ever, a matter of two people assigning intentional states to each other but emerges out of a context of interaction between them. Self and other form a coupled system rather than two wholly separate entities equipped with an internalised capacity to assign mental states to the other. This applies even in those instances where one might seem to adopt a ‘detached’ perspective towards others. Thus ‘folk psychology’, as commonly construed, is not folk psychology.
Understanding Existential Changes In Psychiatric Illness: The Indispensability of Phenomenology
This chapter makes a case for the view that phenomenological reflection is indispensable when it comes to interpreting at least some psychiatric conditions. It then goes on to show how phenomenological and neurobiological perspectives can be mutually informative. I begin by distinguishing ‘phenomenological’ from ‘psychological’ and ‘personal’ understanding. For the phenomenologist, a background sense of reality that is presupposed by both psychological and personal understanding is itself an object of enquiry. Given that many of the experiential changes reported in psychiatric illness involve alterations in the sense of reality, a ‘phenomenological stance’ is required in order to understand them. To illustrate this point, I sketch some of the existential changes (by which I mean alterations in the sense of reality and belonging) that can occur in depressive illness. In addition to arguing for the utility of a phenomenological stance, I suggest that some of the phenomenological analyses that are offered by Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and others can aid us in interpreting these changes.
Following this, I turn to the relationship between phenomenology and neuroscience. Any attempt to explore the neural correlates of a kind of experience will presuppose at least some appreciation of what the relevant experience involves, and misleading conceptions of experience can obfuscate scientific studies in a number of ways. I suggest that phenomenology can inform scientific enquiry by offering detailed accounts of the structure of experience that avoid certain commonplace confusions. I go on to argue that scientific work can also play a valuable role in clarifying and refining phenomenological claims. Amongst other things, scientific studies can generate conceptual distinctions that have the potential to inform phenomenological reflection. I conclude that, although interaction between these disciplines is mutually illuminating, the goal of ‘naturalising’ phenomenology through neurobiology is an untenable one. Neurobiology presupposes the experientially constituted sense of reality that phenomenology seeks to describe. So the fruits of phenomenological research cannot all be integrated into an objective, scientific account of neurobiological processes.
Husserl and Nagel on Subjectivity and the Limits of Physical Objectivity
Thomas Nagel argues that the subjective character of mind inevitably eludes philosophical efforts to incorporate the mental into a single, complete, ‘physically objective’ view of the world. Nagel sees contemporary philosophy as caught on the horns of a dilemma - one either follows phenomenology in making all objective phenomena subjective, or one follows physicalism in making all subjective phenomena objective. He contends that both approaches lead to different but equally untenable forms of idealism and suggests that we currently lack the forms of understanding required to tackle the question of how to relate the subjective and objective aspects of experience. This paper draws a number of positive comparisons between Nagel’s position on subjectivity and that of the later Husserl. It is argued that Nagel is wrong to dismiss phenomenology as ‘idealist’, thus clearing the way for a plausible Husserlian interpretation of his position. Husserl’s more developed treatment of the relationships between subjectivity and objectivity can be employed to clarify, strengthen and elaborate Nagel’s claims in a number of ways. However, the comparison also serves to show that Nagel does not go far enough in his critique of physical objectivism. The paper concludes by remarking on the continuing relevance of some central Husserlian themes as a critique of and positive alternative to deeply sedimented objectivist assumptions currently prevalent in Anglo-American philosophy.
Neurotheology: A Science of What?
Penultimate draft. Published in Volume 2 of Where God and Science Meet (ed. Patrick McNamara, Greenwood, 2006). This paper is an unsparing and occasionally tongue-in-cheek critique of so-called 'neurotheology'.
Existential Feeling and Psychopathology
Proof version of a paper published in Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology (2009).
Bodily feelings are often construed as reports of internal bodily states. However, references to such feelings, both in everyday life and in the context of psychiatry, suggest that they also make a significant contribution to how things other than the body are experienced. This paper focuses on a class of feelings that I call ‘existential feelings’. They have neither the body nor an object or state of affairs outside of the body as their sole object. Rather, they are structures of relatedness between self and world, which comprise a changeable sense of ‘reality’, ‘situatedness’, ‘locatedness’, ‘connectedness’, ‘significance’ and so forth. I suggest that reflection upon the phenomenology of touch can serve to illuminate how something can be both a bodily feeling and a way of experiencing the world. In so doing, I criticise the sharp body-world distinction that permeates discussion of feeling. I appeal to descriptions of various pathological and non-pathological experiences to suggest that we should be wary of double-counting when it comes to feelings of the body and experiences of things outside of the body. In the case of existential feelings at least, the two are not distinct from each other but inextricable aspects of the same unitary experiential structure. Some ‘bodily feelings’ just are, I claim, ‘ways in which the world appears’.
There Are No Folk Psychological Narratives
Proof. Final version appeared in the Journal of Consciousness Studies (2009)
I argue that the task of describing our so-called ‘folk psychology’ requires difficult philosophical work. Consequently, any statement of the folk view is actually a debatable philosophical position, rather than an uncontroversial description of pre-philosophical commonsense. The problem with the current folk psychology debate, I suggest, is that the relevant philosophical work has not been done. Consequently, the orthodox account of folk psychology is an uninformative caricature of an understanding that is implicit in everyday discourse and social interaction, and also in literary narratives. I conclude by considering two recent departures from it, so-called ‘experimental philosophy’ and Daniel Hutto’s ‘narrative practice hypothesis’. Both, I claim, take steps in the right direction but retain unhelpful assumptions that they inherit from the orthodox view.
Stance, Feeling and Phenomenology
Proof. Final version published in Synthese (2011)
This paper addresses Bas van Fraassen’s claim that empiricism is a ‘stance’. I begin by distinguishing two different kinds of stance; an explicit epistemic policy and an implicit way of ‘finding oneself in a world’. At least some of van Fraassen’s claims, I suggest, refer to the latter. In explicating his ordinarily implicit ‘empirical stance’, he assumes the stance of the phenomenologist, describing the structure of his commitment to empiricism, without committing to it in the process. This latter stance does not incorporate the attitude that van Fraassen takes to be characteristic of empiricism. Thus its possibility serves to illustrate that empiricism as an all-encompassing philosophical orientation is untenable. Indeed, I suggest that van Fraassen’s empiricism starts to look somewhat ‘pre-philosophical’, when compared to the phenomenological stance. I conclude by discussing the part played by feelings in philosophical stances and propose that they contribute to philosophical conviction, commitment and critique.
Scientific Naturalism and the Neurology of Religious Experience
In this paper, I consider V. S. Ramachandran's in principle agnosticism concerning whether neurological studies of religious experience can be taken as support for the claim that God really does communicate with people during religious experiences. Contra Ramachandran, I argue that it is by no means obvious that agnosticism is the proper scientific attitude to adopt in relation to this claim. I go on to show how the questions of whether it is (a) a scientifically testable claim and (b) a plausible hypothesis serve to open up some important philosophical issues concerning interpretive backgrounds that are presupposed in the assessment of scientific hypotheses. More specifically, I argue that 'naturalism' or 'scientific objectivism' in its various forms is not simply a neutral or default methodological backdrop for empirical inquiry but involves acceptance of a specific ontology, which functions as an implicit and unargued constitutive commitment. Hence these neurological studies can be employed as a lever with which to disclose something of the ways in which different frameworks of interpretation, both theistic and atheistic, serve to differently structure and give meaning to empirical findings.
An Epistemological Problem for Evolutionary Psychology
Appeared in International Studies in the Philosophy of Science (2005)
This paper draws out an epistemological tension implicit in Cosmides and Tooby’s conception of evolutionary psychology. Cosmides and Tooby think of the mind as a collection of functionally individuated, domain-specific modules. Although they do not explicitly deny the existence of domain-general processes, it will be shown that their methodology commits them to the assumption that only domain-specific cognitive processes are capable of producing useful outputs. The resultant view limits the scope of biologically possible cognitive accomplishments and these limitations, it will be argued, are such as to deny us epistemic capacities that evolutionary psychology presupposes in its pursuit of an objective, comprehensive account of human nature.
Delusional Atmosphere and Delusional Belief
Proof. Final version appeared in the Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science (Springer, 2010)
The Structure of Interpersonal Experience
Penultimate draft. To be published in Phenomenology of Embodied Subjectivity, edited by Rasmus Jensen and Dermot Moran (Springer)
This paper sketches a phenomenological account of what it is to encounter someone as a person. I take, as a starting point, Sartre‟s view in Being and Nothingness that our sense of others involves a bodily response that is inextricable from a distinctive way of experiencing possibilities. I concede that Sartre‟s emphasis on the loss of possibilities is too restrictive, but defend this more general claim. In so doing, I consider alterations in the structure of interpersonal experience that can occur in psychiatric illness. These, I propose, are best interpreted as changes in a felt sense of possibility that is constitutive of our sense of others as persons.
The Phenomenology and Neurobiology of Moods and Emotions
Proof version. Published in the Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science (Springer, 2010)
