The notion of a self-pattern, as developed in the pattern theory of self (Gallagher, 2013), which holds that the self is best explained in terms of the kind of reality that pertains to a dynamical pattern, acknowledges the importance of neural dynamics, but also expands the account of self to extra-neural (embodied and enactive) dynamics. The pattern theory of self, however, has been criticized for failing to explicate the dynamical relations among elements of the self-pattern (e.g., Kyselo, 2014; Beni, 2016; de Haan et al., 2017); as such, it seems to be nothing more than a mere list of elements. We’ll argue that the dynamics of a self-pattern are reflected in three significant and interrelated ways that allow for investigation. First, a self-pattern is reflectively reiterated in its narrative component. Second, studies of psychiatric or neurological disorders can help us understand the precise nature of the dynamical relations in a self-pattern, and how they can fail. Third, referencing predictive processing accounts, neuroscience can also help to explicate the dynamical relations that constitute the self-pattern.

The central hypothesis of this paper is that the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty offers significant philosophical groundwork for an ethics that honours key feminist commitments -embodiment, situatedness, diversity and the intrinsic sociality of subjectivity. Part 1 evaluates feminist criticisms of Merleau-Ponty. Part 2 defends the claim that Merleau-Ponty's non-dualist ontology underwrites leading approaches in feminist ethics, notably Care Ethics and the Ethics of Vulnerability. Part 3 examines Merleau-Ponty's analyses of embodied percipience, arguing that these offer a powerful critique of the view from nowhere, a totalizing God's-eye-view with pretensions to objectivity. By revealing the normative structure of perceptual gestalts in the intersubjective domain, he establishes the view from everywhere. Normativity is no longer deferred to higher authorities such as duty, utility or the valorised virtue, but through the perceptual gestalt it is returned to the perceiving embodied subject. This subject, defined by inherent intersubjectivity, is thereby vulnerable to others and has the capacity for care.1 Thanks go to the anonymous reviewers who gave extremely cogent feedback on this paper. Thanks also go to various other persons for commentary on earlier versions of this paper; notably, Katherine O'Donnell (University College Dublin), Adam Loughnane and other philosophers who attended the invited lecture on this paper at University College Cork (November 2017), and also participants of the SWIPI

Categorization-based diagnosis, which endeavors to be consistent with the third-person, objective measures of science, is not always adequate with respect to problems concerning diagnostic accuracy, demarcation problems when there are comorbidities, well-documented problems of symptom amplification, and complications of stigmatization and looping effects. While psychiatric categories have proved useful and convenient for clinicians in identifying a recognizable constellation of symptoms typical for a particular disorder for the purposes of communication and eligibility for treatment regimes, the reification of these categories has without doubt had negative consequences for the patient and also for the general understanding of psychiatric disorders. We argue that a complementary, integrated framework that focuses on descriptive symptom-based classifications (drawing on phenomenological interview methods and narrative) combined with a more comprehensive conception of the human subject (found in the pattern theory of self), can not only offer a solution to some of the vexed issues of psychiatric diagnosis but also support more efficacious therapeutic interventions.

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