17 Comments

  6. I’m thinking: may take a little time…certainly thought your final question was the only point at which it got interesting. Most of what he said could be got from Susan Blakemore and Les Lancaster’s work….he became more interesting as I say after you promted a new perspective. I was stunned by his total avoidance of the collective unconscious and Jung. The other initial observation is the extent to which a Cartesian view of object v subject dominated his view. i will try and be more thoughtful as time goes on and my self enacts a bit ! Tony.

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    1. Yes I think phenomenology is still somewhat Cartesian, though in Evan’s hands (following Merleau-Ponty) it has been given a more embodied twist than Husserl originally was able to give it.

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  7. Pingback: Evan Thompson: “Waking, Dreaming, Being.” at CIIS, California. | The Hug of Gaia

  8. I posted some crits on my blog http://www.hugofgaia. And my thanks for your letting me see this. Maybe you or your followers may want to see it. They would be welcome to visit as you say. I tried to include the laypeople who may not be philosophers or have even seen the presentation. And I think it was remiss I did not discuss “reenactment of self” but I had problems with “self” i guess. Would reenactment of “ego consciousness” be clearer. My view of “Self” is more Jungian than Evan’s I guess. This is hugely important I think.

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    1. It seems to me that Evan was rejecting the Chalmers/Strawson version of panpsychism, wherein “mental” and “physical” are still treated as “states”/”substances.” I also reject this non-process-relational version of panpsychism (https://footnotes2plato.com/2013/07/01/panpsychism-and-philosophy/).

      I see Whitehead’s process-relational approach to ontologizing experience as more akin to phenomenology than the sort of speculative philosophy Evan want’s to distance himself from. Whitehead’s whole project, after all, was to ground the abstractions of science in concrete experience. I think his approach is not only compatible with, but complementary to the enactive approach. It gives a cosmological ground to what otherwise remains stuck in a sort of purgatory of phenomenological bracketing. Lars Marstaller has written a fascinating paper that shows point by point how Whitehead’s and Husserl’s analyses of experience line up, making the case for a “Whiteheadian neurophenomenology”: http://concrescence.org/index.php/ajpt/article/download/74/38

      Evan hasn’t yet taken the time to explore what Whitehead’s approach has to offer to ontologically rounding out the enactive approach, so far as I can tell. But in conversation about it he certainly seems open to this possibility. He falls back upon “neutral monism” for now, which to my mind still remains too caught up in how the world appears to human consciousness, how we represent reality (as either physical or mental), and is in that sense not speculative enough. Though again, I think Whitehead’s form of experientially grounded speculative philosophy (where the idea is to find the most basic features of human experience and then ruthlessly generalize them) breaks us out of the suffocating correlationist bubble.

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