Dan Zahavi Research Articles

On shame and voice-hearing

Hearing voices in the absence of another speaker—what psychiatry terms an auditory verbal hallucination—is often associated with a wide range of negative emotions. Mainstream clinical research addressing the emotional dimensions...

Mirror Neurons, Husserl, and Enactivism: An Analysis of Phenomenological Compatibility

AbstractThe potential for mirror neuron research to explain various aspects of social cognition has received considerable attention over the past two decades. Initially, mirror neuron research may seem in accordance with a phenomenological understanding of intersubjectivity, but the work of Dan Zahavi will be used to highlight significant incompatibilities between the two. Likewise, the enactivists Thomas Fuchs and Hanne De Jaegher identify significant issues with current interpretations of mirror neuron research and provide an alternative description of intersubjectivity. This article will assess whether the enactivists are able to provide a more phenomenologically consistent alternative to mirror neuron research alone, eventually determining that their enactive account overcomes Zahavi’s incompatibilities. Consequently, Fuchs and De Jaegher should acknowledge their relation to Husserlian descriptions of empathy in their account, and mirror neuron research should be contextualised within a broader, phenomenologically-compatible framework, as that of the enactivists.

Narrative identity and phenomenology

Narrative identity theory in some of its influential variants (A. MacIntyre or P. Ricœur) makes three fundamental assumptions. First, it focuses on personal identity primarily in terms of selfhood. Second, it argues that personal identity is to be understood as the unity of one’s life as it develops over time. And finally, it states that the unity of a life is articulated, by the very person itself, in the form of a story, be it explicit or implicit. The article focuses on different contemporary phenomenological appraisals of the narrative account (in the works of David Carr, Dan Zahavi and Laszlo Tengelyi). The survey of this partly critical debate is followed by concluding observations concerning a possible phenomenological theory of personal identity.

Self, No Self? Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, and Indian Traditions. Edited by Mark Siderits, Evan Thompson, and Dan Zahavi

<i>Self, No Self? Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, and Indian Traditions</i>. Edited by Mark Siderits, Evan Thompson, and Dan Zahavi

Attending to emotions is sharing of emotions - A multidisciplinary perspective to social attention and emotional sharing. Comment on Zahavi and Rochat (2015).

Attending to bodily expression of emotions plays an important role in the human social world. It provides subjects with valuable information, constructs opportunities to act, and importantly, as Daniel Stern pointed out, it is involved in the constitution of the direct experience of others. Whether mutual or one-sided, these direct experiences, in which the subject can share the perspectives and attitudes of other subjects, always comprise one person's bodily expression of emotions that is available to another person. In this article I suggest that attending to other subjects' expressed emotions involves a special (social) mode of attention and emotional sharing. This suggestion challenges Dan Zahavi's view that confines the sharing of emotions solely to reciprocal experiences.

Communicative Ethics and the Claims of Transcendental Phenomenology: Exploring the Foundations of Intersubjectivity

The Communicative ethics theories developed by Jurgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel supports models of deliberative democracy that are broadly influential in many fields. A central claim of these theories is that the foundations of knowledge can be deduced from a transcendental analysis of the intersubjective exchange that occurs in logico-linguistic pragmatic discourse. For that reason, they have each been critical of the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and his followers (especially Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty), who look for foundations of knowledge in the pre- and extra-linguistic aspects of lived experiences. For Habermas and Apel, the phenomenological project is solipsistic. Nonetheless, Dan Zahavi’s interpretation of Husserl’s theory of transcendental intersubjectivity suggests that Husserlian phenomenology and communicative ethics are similar in that they agree that knowledge and meaning emerge in intersubjectivity (i.e., in interactions among individuals). They differ, however, in their claims about how intersubjectivity occurs. Zahavi shows how Husserl anticipated and defended against the claims of Habermas and Apel. For phenomenology, the lived experience of one person by another is a precondition to language and objective knowledge. This essay draws from several works in which Zahavi develops his reading of Husserl. It describes the epidemiological commitments of communicative ethics and Husserl’s defense of the phenomenological approach. This is a significant argument that holds implications for revising theories of deliberative democracy.

Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame, written by Dan Zahavi

Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame, written by Dan Zahavi

Dan Zahavi: Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame

Dan Zahavi: Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame

Contemporary Phenomenology at Its Best: Interview With Professor Dan Zahavi

This time around, we have the chance of getting to know Prof. Dan Zahavi of the University of Copenhagen, one of phenomenology's top researchers, whose thought expresses a particular voice in the philosophy of mind and interdisciplinary cognitive research. Today, we shall explore topics regarding phenomenology in our present scientific context, Edmund Husserl's takes on phenomenology, the influence of the history of philosophy on shaping contemporary cognitive research and the links and possibilities between phenomenology and psychology, in both method and practice.

Contemporary Phenomenology at Its Best: Interview With Professor Dan Zahavi

Contemporary Phenomenology at Its Best: Interview With Professor Dan Zahavi

Does the Reversibility Thesis Deliver All That Merleau‐Ponty Claims It Can?

AbstractMerleau‐Ponty's reversibility thesis argues that self, other and world are inherently relational, interdependent at the level of ontology. What is at stake in the reversibility thesis is whether it overcomes skeptical objections in both assuring real communication and avoiding solipsism in assuring real difference; the Other must be a genuine, irreducible Other. It is objected that across the domains of reversibility, symmetry and reciprocity are not guaranteed. I argue that this is a non‐problem; rather the potentialities for asymmetry and non reciprocity in fact guarantee the irreducibility of the Other; reversibility needs to be appreciated as dialectical or aesthetic, not as a literal or ‘mechanistic’ reversal. A further criticism targets the viability of ontology itself, whether alterity is ever compatible with ontology. This paper considers these objections from two of Merleau‐Ponty's contemporaries—Claude Lefort and Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas developed a philosophy which while intersecting with Merleau‐Ponty's at important junctures, nonetheless arrived at an entirely different destination. I argue alongside Martin Dillon against the objections of Lefort, and alongside Dan Zahavi against the objections of Levinas. Both of these interpreters, I propose remain faithful to the core directions and spirit of Merleau‐Ponty's endeavours without becoming diverted by the less significant inconsistencies.

Developing open intersubjectivity: On the interpersonal shaping of experience

The aim of this paper is to motivate the need for and then present the outline of an alternative explanation of what Dan Zahavi has dubbed “open intersubjectivity,” which captures the basic interpersonal character of perceptual experience as such. This is a notion whose roots lay in Husserl’s phenomenology. Accordingly, the paper begins by situating the notion of open intersubjectivity – as well as the broader idea of constituting intersubjectivity to which it belongs – within Husserl’s phenomenology as an approach distinct from his more well-known account of empathy (Einfühlung) in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation. I then recapitulate and criticize Zahavi’s phenomenological explanation of open intersubjectivity, arguing that his account hinges on a flawed phenomenology of perceptual experience. In the wake of that criticism, I supply an alternative phenomenological framework for explaining open intersubjectivity, appealing to the methodological principles of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology and his theory of developmentally primitive affect. Those principles are put to work using the resources of recent studies of cognitive developmental and social cognition. From that literature, I discuss how infants learn about the world from others in secondary intersubjectivity through natural pedagogy. Lastly, the paper closes by showing how the discussion of infant development explains the phenomenon of open intersubjectivity and by highlighting the relatively moderate nature of this account compared to Zahavi’s.

Intentionality: Some Lessons from the History of the Problem from Brentano to the Present

Intentionality (‘directedness’, ‘aboutness’) is both a central topic in contemporary philosophy of mind, phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, and one of the themes with which both analytic and Continental philosophers have separately engaged starting from Brentano and Edmund Husserl’s ground-breaking Logical Investigations (1901) through Roderick M. Chisholm, Daniel C. Dennett’s The Intentional Stance, John Searle’s Intentionality, to the recent work of Tim Crane, Robert Brandom, Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, among many others. In this paper, I shall review recent discussions of intentionality, including some recent explorations of the history of the concept (paying particular attention to Anselm), and suggest some ways the phenomenological approach of Husserl and Heidegger can still offer insights for contemporary philosophy of mind and consciousness.

Husserl, the Absolute Flow, and Temporal Experience

Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of internal time consciousness has a reputation for being complex, occasionally to the point of approaching impenetrability. The latter applies in particular to his remarks about what he calls the ‘absolute time-constituting flow’,1 some of which Husserl himself describes as ‘‘shocking (when not initially even absurd)’’ (Husserl, 1991, p. 84). [...]

Perceiving subject and social cognition. Remarks from Adolf Reinach, Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi

This paper deals with what Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi call “the social cognition” from the chapter How we know others in their book The Phenomenological Mind (Gallagher, Zahavi 2008), and what Adolf Reinach calls the “extraneous perception” in his university course Einleitung in die Philosophie (Reinach 1913) – that is, the possibility of intersubjectivity, according to these authors. My objective is to show how Gallagher and Zahavi’s analyses could profit from that of Reinach. I find that Reinach’s study could provide a particular heuristic value to Gallagher and Zahavi’s work, by furnishing it with a useful tool to clear up some issues which, in my opinion, remain rather vague. The first part of this article is devoted to outlining Gallagher and Zahavi’s thesis about how we know others, clarifying which points of their analyses could be cleared up by Reinach’s study; the second part presents Reinach’s arguments concerning the perception of the other subject; and finally, I will explain how Reinach’s analysis contributes to that of Gallagher and Zahavi’s work and remark on what accessing to others’ mental state from the second-person perspective by combining the two positions means.

“The Most Difficult of all Phenomenological Problems”

I argue in this essay that Edmund Husserl distinguishes three levels within time-consciousness: an absolute time-constituting flow of consciousness, the immanent acts of consciousness the flow constitutes, and the transcendent objects the acts intend. The immediate occasion for this claim is Neal DeRoo’s discussion of Dan Zahavi’s reservations about the notion of an absolute flow and DeRoo’s own efforts to mediate between Zahavi’s view and the position Robert Sokolowski and I have advanced. I argue that the flow and the tripartite distinction it introduces into consciousness is firmly grounded in Husserl’s texts and is philosophically defensible. The absolute flow is distinct but inseparable from what it constitutes. It is intentional in a nonobjectivating way, and accounts for the awareness I have of my individual acts of consciousness and of the unity and continuity of my conscious life. In its absence, consciousness would become an incoherent stream of episodic acts. There is nothing mysterious about the flow. What would be mysterious is consciousness without the flow.

Revisiting the Zahavi–Brough/Sokolowski Debate

In 1999, Dan Zahavi’s Self Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation initiated a critique of the standard interpretation of the distinction between the second and third levels of Husserl’s analysis of time-constituting consciousness. At stake was the possibility of a coherent account of self-awareness (Zahavi’s concern), but also the possibility of prereflectively distinguishing the acts of consciousness (Brough and Sokolowski’s rebuttal of Zahavi’s critique). Using insights gained from Husserl’s Analyses Concerning Passive Synthesis rather than the work on time-consciousness, this paper provides a new, more precise vocabulary in which to carry on the debate, in the hopes of bringing it to a mutually satisfactory resolution. After briefly laying out the terms of the Zahavi–Brough/Sokolowski debate (Sect. 2), I then elaborate a three-fold distinction in consciousness from the Analyses (Sect. 3) and relate that back to the issue of objectivity in the debate (Sect. 4). I end by suggesting how this three-fold model from the Analyses helps us preserve the essentially tripartite structure (as Brough and Sokolowski insist we do) while not making one of these levels the object of another (in keeping with Zahavi’s critique) (Sect. 5).

Teaching Dance Spaciously

Abstract This article focuses on and discusses the concept of space as a theoretical tool in connection with dance pedagogy. The author suggests that to look at the dance class as spacious contributes to the dance teacher’s awareness of the fact that she operates in, and also creates, many different spaces as she teaches. This awareness might support the teacher in broadening the dance space in order to embrace differences among dancers, thereby providing the word spacious with a second meaning: generous. The author’s interest in the concept of space as a theoretical device to help understand what goes on in a dance class was born during the analysis of the video material collected for her PhD in dance (Østern, 2009). The practical investigation of the study dealt with formulating an approach to dance pedagogy with a group of mixed-ability dancers based on an understanding of the meaning-making processes among the different dancers in the project. Dialoguing with scholars like Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962/2002), Valerie Briginshaw (2001), Shaun Gallagher, Dan Zahavi (2008) and Leena Rouhiainen (2007), the author distinguished different spaces in the dance improvisation classes she was teaching, video recording and analysing. Through this process, she developed a theory on the fact that in a dance improvisation class with differently bodied dancers meaning was made in different ways, touching on and producing different spaces. The author concludes that one main advantage of regarding a dance class as spacious is that it allows for an understanding that in class meaning-making can happen in different ways, within different spaces. Together with the dancers, the dance teacher moves in and out of these spaces as she teaches. Tone Pernille Østern (Doctor of Arts in dance) is a dance artist, teacher and researcher based in Trondheim, Norway. She is the artistic leader of the Inclusive Dance Company (www.dance-company.no) which is a small independent contemporary dance company. She has developed the Dance Laboratory (www.danselaboratoriet.no) which is a performing group with differently bodied dancers. The Dance Laboratory also formed the basis of her field work in relation to her PhD in Dance at the Theatre Academy in Helsinki (Østern, 2009). Østern is also the leader of the MultiPlié Dance and Diversity Festival, a biennial in Trondheim since 2004. The festival tries to stretch and discuss ideas about what dancing is and who can be a dancer. From 2009 she also takes up the position as assistant professor at the Program for Teacher Education at the NTNU University where she teaches and carries out research. E-mail: inclusive@dance-company.no / tone.pernille.ostern@plu.ntnu.no

Neural resonance: Between implicit simulation and social perception

Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi have recently argued against a simulationist interpretation of neural resonance. Recognizing intentions and emotions in the facial expressions and gestures of others may be subserved by e.g. mirror neuron activity, but this does not mean that we first experience an intention or emotion and then project it onto the other. Mirror neurons subserve social cognition, according to Gallagher and Zahavi, by being integral parts of processes of enactive social perception. I argue that the notion of enactive social perception does not yet explain why social perception is subserved by mirroring. I also argue that this problem cannot be avoided by means of an appeal to multiple realization. Instead, I propose a holistic model of neural resonance-based social cognition that does give an explanatory role to mirroring by allowing for a partial experiential overlap between experiencing and recognizing emotions and intentions. This account avoids the simulationist step-wise conception of social cognition and recognizes the qualitative difference between first- and third-person emotion and intention attribution. It does capture too much of the simulationist intuitions, however, to warrant the label ‘social perception’.

Consciousness: From Perception to Reflection in the History of Philosophy (review)

Reviewed by: Consciousness: From Perception to Reflection in the History of Philosophy Stephan Blatti Sara Heinämaa, Vili Lähteenmäki, and Pauliina Remes, editors. Consciousness: From Perception to Reflection in the History of Philosophy. Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind, 4. Dordrecht: Springer2007. Pp. xii + 366. Cloth, $199.00. Anthologies themselves rarely advance substantive theses, but according to its editors, this wide-ranging collection "argues that, even though our predecessors did not formulate their philosophical queries in terms of consciousness, they have much to offer to our current disputes concerning its central features," and "demonstrates that consciousness is not just an issue in the philosophy of mind, but is bound to ontology, epistemology, and moral theory" (1; emphasis added). While some of the fourteen papers included here bear out these aims better than others, it must be admitted that their cumulative effect makes for a pretty convincing case. In their substantial introduction, the editors begin by articulating the volume's guiding methodology. The concept of consciousness, they write, is neither "diachronically fixed [nor] synchronically clear-cut," and yet "the diversity of terms and multiplicity of usages should not be taken to imply that the concept is useless or merely a transient cultural formation" (5–6). Consequently, we must "reach beyond the terms to what they name," and the phenomena named include "phenomenality, aboutness, reflexivity, reflection, unconsciousness, attention, selfhood, ownness, subjectivity and objectivity, and synchronic and diachronic unity" (ibid.). Following an etymological discussion of the word 'consciousness'—while being the first to use the English term in a technical philosophical sense, Ralph Cudworth seems to have appropriated the Greek 'sunaisthêsis' from Plotinus—the remainder of the introduction offers a thematic overview of the volume's contents in terms of the three most prominent aspects of conscious experience: intentionality, subjectivity, and reflexivity (10). Given this set-up—a topical introduction to a volume whose raison d'être is to illuminate contemporary discussions of the problems of consciousness—it is puzzling to find the papers themselves organized not thematically, but chronologically. Part one, "Ancient and Arabic Philosophy," includes contributions from Amber Carpenter ("On Plato's Lack of Consciousness"), Juha Sihvola ("The Problem of Consciousness in Aristotle's Psychology"), Pauliina Remes ("Ownness of Conscious Experience in Ancient Philosophy"), and Jari Kaukua and Taneli Kukkonen ("Sense-Perception and Self-Awareness: Before and After Avicenna"). Part two, "Medieval Philosophy and Early Modern Thought," consists of articles by Joël Biard ("Intention and Presence: The Notion of Presentialitas in the Fourteenth Century"), Mikko Yrjönsuuri ("The Structure of Self-Consciousness: A Fourteenth-Century Debate"), Deborah Brown ("Augustine and Descartes on the Function of Attention in Perceptual Awareness"), Vili Lähteenmäki ("Orders of Consciousness and Forms of Reflexivity in Descartes"), and Jon Miller ("The Status of Consciousness in Spinoza's Concept of Mind"). The third and final part, "From Kant to Contemporary Discussions," features the work of Kenneth Westphal ("Human Consciousness and its Transcendental Conditions: Kant's Anti-Cartesian Revolt"), Susanna Lindberg ("The Living Consciousness of the German Idealists"), Dan Zahavi ("The Heidelberg School and the Limits of Reflection"), Neil Manson ("Contemporary Naturalism and the Concept of Consciousness"), and Sara Heinämaa ("Selfhood, Consciousness, and Embodiment: A Husserlian Approach"). The volume concludes with a bibliography of primary and secondary sources, as well as name and subject indices. [End Page 463] As will be apparent from the titles listed above, the contributions to this volume vary considerably in scope, with some focused on single figures, others concerned with pairs and groups of figures, and still others taking on whole periods and schools. While the scholarship in all cases is impeccable, on the whole, I found this last group of contributions the most philosophically stimulating. At least in part, this is because several of the articles dedicated to single figures emphasize what divides their subjects from contemporary concerns. Carpenter, for instance, concludes that Plato's commitment to the soul "creates a great barrier for us in adopting" his lessons on the nature of perception (48). And Miller defends the view that "Spinoza lacked robust views on the nature of consciousness and its relationship to mind" (219). By contrast, for example, Remes' masterly survey of ancient...