Conference | Paper

Phenomenology, science, and metaphysics of mind in nature: developing neurophenomenology

Andrea Pace Giannotta

Tuesday 13th September 2022

15:30 - 16:15

Palazzo del Capitanio-Aula 5

Husserl's diagnosis of the crisis of European sciences is as relevant as ever if we look especially at the contemporary sciences of mind and brain, which threaten to eliminate subjectivity from our conception of reality. How to reconcile these scientific achievements with the phenomenological account of subjectivity? Varela proposed neurophenomenology as a “methodological remedy” to the “hard problem” of the place of consciousness in nature, investigating the correlation between empirical analyses of the brain and phenomenological analyses of experience, at the same time renouncing to search for a metaphysical foundation of one on the other. According to Varela, the “grasping attitude” that seeks such a metaphysical foundation is the cause of the problem itself. I argue that Varela’s proposal is unsatisfactory and that we must search for a metaphysical development of neurophenomenology, which I find in a combination of process ontology and neutral monism. I argue that the neutral-processual metaphysics is a coherent development of Husserlian phenomenology that looks at the metaphysical ground of the subject-object correlation.