No abstract

No abstract

This paper distinguishes between two senses of the term "phenomenology": a narrow sense (drawn from Nagel) and a broader sense (drawn from Husserl). It claims, with particular reference to the moral sphere, that the narrow meaning of moral phenomenology cannot stand alone, that is, that moral phenomenology in the narrow sense entails moral intentionality. The paper proceeds by examining different examples of the axiological and volitional experiences of both virtuous and dutiful agents, and it notes the correlation between the phenomenal and intentional differences belonging to these experiences. The paper concludes with some reflections on how the focus on the broader sense of "phenomenology" serves to provide a more precise sense of what we might mean by "moral phenomenology."On a narrow construal, the phenomenology of conscious experience concerns those subjective, introspectively available features of an experience by means of which one can characterize what it is like for the conscious organism to be the organism having that experience (Nagel 1974, 436). On this view, the phenomenology of conscious experience tells us something about the lived, first-personal, experiential characteristics of the experiencing organism, something about the self-awareness of that organism.On a broader construal, the phenomenology of conscious experience is tied to at least three interconnected meanings of the word "consciousness" (Husserl 1984(Husserl , pp. 355-56, 1970: (1) consciousness as the interweavings of experience that

No abstract

Dennett's contrast between auto-and hetero-phenomenology is badly drawn, primarily because Dennett identifies phenomenologists as introspective psychologists. The contrast I draw between phenomenology and hetero-phenomenology is not in terms of the difference between a first-person, introspective perspective and a third-person perspective but rather in terms of the difference between two third-person accounts -a descriptive phenomenology and an explanatory psychology -both of which take the first-person perspective into account.Key words intentional stance . descriptive phenomenology . causal explanation . intentional object . phenomenology Daniel Dennett has over many years developed an approach to the study of consciousness that he calls "hetero-phenomenology." Hetero-phenomenology is a methodological approach whose practitioners adopt what Dennett calls the "intentional stance" in which they interpret the activities (gestures, speech acts, actions) of (experimental) subjects as expressive of rationality and thereby come to understand what that subject believes to be true about his or her own conscious experiences and the world as experienced by that subject -the hetero-phenomenological or subjective world, that is, not the real world (2003, 20). Heterophenomenology forms one part of a complete science of consciousness. The other part involves a causal account of the relations between surrounding environments and these expressive activities as well as a neurophysiological account of concurrent events in the brains of subjects (Dennett,