The Forgotten Phenomenology: “Enactive Perception” in the Eyes of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty

Phenomenology is not dead yet, at least not from the viewpoint of the “phenomenology-friendly”approach to the mind that has recently emerged in cognitive science: the “enactive approach” or “enactivism.” This approach takes the mental capacities, such as perception, consciousness and cognition, to be the result of the interaction between the brain, the body and the environment. In this, it offers an alternative to reductionist explanations of the mental in terms of brain activities, like cognitivism, especially computationalism, while overcoming the Cartesian dualism mind-world. What makes this approach so fruitful for a renewed philosophical consideration is its ongoing reference to Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenologies. It was said to be “consistent with Husserl and Merleau-Ponty on virtually every point,” to be the “revival” of phenomenology, even a “Kuhnian revolution.” Evan Thompson argues that this approach “uses phenomenology to explicate mind science and mind science to explicate phenomenology. Concepts such as lived body, organism, bodily selfhood and autonomous agency, the intentional arc and dynamic sensorimotor dependencies, can thus become mutually illuminating rather than merely correlational concepts.” The phenomenological works seem to strike a chord with the enactive theorists. Are we witnessing the dawn of “The new Science of the Mind”?