Cognitive A Priori and Amodal Perception in the Focus of Experimental Philosophy

Abstract

The article discusses the prospects of neurophenomenology as a substantiative theory with respect to the results of neurocognitive research. Some relevant ideas and theoretical findings of the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, which are of great importance for the interpretation of experimental data from neuroscience, are consistently presented and analyzed. In particular, the emphasis is made on the procedure of analogizing apperception (appresentation), based on an even deeper pairing mechanism. In so doing, I consider and trace the evolution of these ideas in Husserl's works of different years and periods. As an example, that clearly demonstrates the universal a priori rock-bottom role of appresentation in cognition and perception, the procedure of amodal completion is chosen. Amodal completion is the process of perception by which an object is apprehended as a whole while some parts of it are occluded by other objects. These research seems to open up wide opportunities for neurophenomenology as the theoretical basis of the sciences of consciousness, mind and brain.