Shaun Gallagher @ UCF
Research Interests
  • Phenomenology (especially Husserl and Merleau-Ponty)
  • Philosophy of Mind, Personal Identity
  • Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Psychology and Neuroscience
  • Embodiment
  • Philosophy of Time
  • Hermeneutics (Theory of Interpretation)

    • Philosophical Background and Current Research Program

    My high-school Latin teacher was a frustrated philosopher. Once every semester he would declare a "philosopher's holiday" and we would put our Latin vocabulary to the test discussing Aquinas or Descartes. I thought these discussions were interesting but nothing more. In college, however, I found philosophy to be the most interesting of subjects and I started to read beyond my course requirements. My undergraduate training was mainly Thomistic and systematic, and perhaps for that reason I was more interested in understanding the existentialists and the history of philosophy.

    Bryn Mawr College
    Bryn Mawr College
    		 In graduate school at Bryn Mawr College, the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie at Louvain in Belgium, and also at Villanova University, I focused on 20th-century European philosophy, especially the works of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. My interest in the history of philosophy was nourished even more by my reading of Heidegger, who was constantly sending me back to the Greeks. As a way of developing my understanding of the history of thought, I ended up taking more graduate courses than anyone I know. I also attended several of the early meetings of the Collegium Phaenomenologicum (Perugia, Italy) on Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. When it came to writing, however, I focused on specific problems. My masters thesis was on the problem of time-consciousness in Husserl.

    With respect to the problem of time, I studied thinkers like James, McTaggart, Broad, and Whitehead. My Ph.D. dissertation was an attempt to answer certain questions posed by Merleau-Ponty about the relationship between embodiment and the experience of time. Much in the spirit of Merleau-Ponty, who was trained in both philosophy and psychology, my dissertation was based on a phenomenological approach, but I also read extensively in the psychological and neuroscience literatures and attended graduate seminars in neurophysiology and physiological psychology at Bryn Mawr.

    I continued these studies after graduate school. My interest in these other disciplines reflects the way I think about philosophy. I have a pragmatic interest in seeing how philosophy can address issues that are not purely philosophical (at least not as purely philosophical as found in what is, in my opinion, the overly technical and narrow sense of philosophy that characterizes most of the 20th century). I prefer to think of philosophy in a very wide and comprehensive sense, going back to its original meaning as an all-encompassing term for the pursuit of knowledge. Prior to the 20th century philosophy by its very nature was trans-disciplinary. It was practiced in that way by people like Descartes, Newton, and Locke in the 17th century. They were thinkers who were philosophers and scientists at the same time. Even through the 18th and the late 19th centuries the lines were not clearly drawn between philosophy and psychology, philosophy and economics, philosophy and physics. Scientific experimentation was considered natural philosophy. In this spirit I like to measure my success as a philosopher by the extent to which my own theoretical investigations find application in other disciplines.

    Embodiment: Phenomenology and Cognitive Science

    One area in which I work involves thinking about issues that pertain to the nature of embodiment. In 1986 I published a paper that attempted to clarify the concepts of body image and body schema, concepts that were (and still are) quite commonly confused in the scientific literature (1986). Tony Marcel, a psychologist at Cambridge, read the paper and invited me to participate at a week-long workshop on perception at Kings College, Cambridge University in 1992 (see 1995a).

    Until that time I had thought of myself as working within the phenomenological tradition, and especially as following the lead of Merleau-Ponty. At the Cambridge workshop I was introduced to a group of people who were approaching similar topics from different perspectives. They were working in the fields of analytic philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences, and although their approaches are defined by very different traditions, I found the discussions closely related to the kinds of issues that I was interested in exploring from a phenomenological perspective. Since that time I have collaborated with a number of the people I met at the workshop, including the developmental psychologist Andrew Meltzoff (University of Washington), well-known for his experimental work on neonate imitation (Gallagher & Meltzoff 1996). We used the concepts of body schema and body image to explain the phenomenon of neonate imitation, and we also raised some questions about the issue of phantom limbs in cases of congenital absence of limbs.

    I've also collaborated on several projects with the neurophysiologist Jonathan Cole (Universities of Southampton and Bournsmouth), who has worked on deafferentation, especially in his patient IW. IW lost proprioception and touch from the neck down and has profound problems with movement. To some extent it can be said that IW has no body-schematic control of movement and, as an alternative, must use visual and cognitive methods that depend on an enhanced body image (Gallagher & Cole 1995).

    Tony Marcel invited me back to Cambridge for a term as Visiting Scientist at the Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (formerly the Applied Psychology Unit). During my tenure there I read extensively in both philosophy of mind and neuropsychology. I recently published a book-length manuscript entitled How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford University Press, 2005), which carries forward the research I did at Cambridge. Tony Marcel and I published a paper on the self and action (Gallagher and Marcel, 1999). The paper is based on his research in neuropsychology and my work on the concept of self.

    I have continued to collaborate with Jonathan Cole on a number of projects. One involves the study of gesture in IW. Together with David McNeill, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, and an expert on gestures (see his Hand and Mind, 1992) we conducted experiments on IW's ability to gesture, and we have explored the philosophical implications of the difference between instrumental movement and gesture (Cole, et al. 1998; Cole, Gallagher, and McNeill 2002). This work has led me to think of how movement works in the context of social cognition and interaction. Jonathan Cole, Natalie Depraz, and I presented a workshop on many of these topics at the ASSC Conference in Brussels (2000).

    My paper with Meltzoff concerned not only neonate imitation but also phantom limbs in cases of congenital absence of limbs (aplasia). We argued that the literature on this phenomenon was confused insofar as it failed to distinguish between body image and body schema (theorists claim that the body schema is innate, but their evidence really pertains to the body image). Subsequent to publication of that paper, the late George Butterworth, a developmental psychologist from Sussex contacted me and suggested a possible extension of this discussion. Together with Dina Lew and Jonathan Cole, we published a solution that worked out the innate (body schematic) basis for the aplasic phantom (Gallagher, Butterworth, Lew, and Cole, 1998).

    Temporality

    Still very much inspired by Merleau-Ponty, I now think of myself as working at the intersection of the phenomenological tradition and the cognitive sciences. This is reflected in my book most recent book The Phenomenological Mind (Routledge 2008), written with Dan Zahavi from the University of Copenhagen, as well as in How the Body Shapes the Mind and, The Inordinance of Time (1998b).

    Working on phenomenological interventions in the cognitive sciences also brought me into contact with the late Francisco Varela, and his work on neurophenomenology. With Varela, and after his death in 2001, with other colleagues, Evan Thompson (University of Toronto), Dan Zahavi (University of Copenhagen) and Natalie Depraz (University of Rouen) I have been engaged in several projects that involve organizing colloquia, publications, and the formation of a scholarly association (see Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences for a summary of these projects). Francisco Varela, Natalie Depraz and I also launched a journal entitled Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, published by Springer.

    In the few months before he died, Varela and I wrote a paper for a volume on the future of phenomenology (Gallagher and Varela 2001; 2003). We focused on the link to the cognitive sciences, and then provided an analysis of time-consciousness that combined Husserlian phenomenology with a dynamic systems analysis.

    My approach to the philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences, then, is neither reductionistic nor internalistic, although I'm interested in the relation between subpersonal processes and personal/intentional experience. I'm attracted more to psychology and the neurosciences than to the computational and artificial intelligence side of cognitive science, but I have recently become interested in robots, and one now "lives" in my house.

    Self, agency, and intersubjectivity

    I also like to think about issues that pertain to personal identity and psychopathology. I participated in an NEH Summer Institute at Cornell (1998) on the topic Psychopathology, Mind, and Self. Since then I've been writing on autism (Gallagher, 2001, 2004b) schizophrenia (2000a, 2000b, 2003, 2004a) and on problems connected with personal identity and self-consciousness in ways that lead to various ethical issues. In my paper with Tony Marcel we argue that standard approaches to the problem of personal identity, usually worked out within traditional epistemological frameworks, and often resulting in counter-intuitive and perplexing conclusions, are systematically wrong. For reasons that are related to Marcel's work in neuropsychology, we propose that self-identity is best explained on the pragmatic and ethical level of action and is generated in what we call embedded or situated reflection. Thus, in contrast to much of the Lockean and analytic tradition, we argue that the ethical realm is the place to begin theoretical reflection on personal identity rather than simply the place to sort out implications derived from epistemological or metaphysical approaches. This conclusion resonates well with the work of John MacMurray, Ernst Tugendhat, Christine Korsgaard and Richard Moran, although in contrast to them we arrive at this perspective through the work in neuropsychology.

    My latest project in regard to studies of the self is editing the Oxford Handbook of the Self, which should be published in 2010.

    In thinking about the self and personal identity one can hardly avoid thinking about our relations and interactions with others. I've been working on an interactionist approach that challenges the standard "theory of mind" and "simulation" approaches to questions about how we understand other people (Gallagher, 2001b;2004b). Here I appeal to evidence from developmental psychology, neuroscience and phenomenology; in addition, to provide a more complete account of social cognition and intersubjective relations I introduced considerations about narrative competency, and in this way I've linked up with the work of Dan Hutto at the University of Hertfordshire (see e.g., Gallagher and Hutto 2008). I've been honored in recent years to be invited to present this work at a variety of lectures and conferences, mainly in Europe.

  • March 2007, I presented a series of lectures entitled Body, Agency, and Intersubjectivity at the Philosophisches Seminar. Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany.

  • September 2006, I presented a lecture series, Phenomenology and embodied cognitive science at the University of Jyväskylä , Finland.

  • Februrary 2006, at the Collège de France, I presented La perception d'autrui en action, as one of a series of public lectures on Fondements cognitifs de l'interaction avec autrui.

  • June 2004, at UniversitŽ PanthŽon-Sorbonne (in the amazing AmphithŽ‰tre Richelieu) a paper on autism and social cognition at a conference in honor of Francisco Varela, De l'Autopoise ˆ la NeurophŽnomŽnologie - From Autopoiesis to Neurophenomenology.

  • May 2003, I presented The Hebdomades Lectures at the Univerzita PalackŽho v Olomouci, Czech Republic.

  • September 2002, I presented a paper critical of simulation theory at the Symposium on Movement, Action and Consciousness: Toward a Physiology of Intentionality, a conference in honor of Marc Jeannerod at the Institut des sciences cognitives, Lyon.

    •

    An essay I wrote for Trends in Cognitive Science (2000a) motivated an interesting response from Jonathan Cole and his friends Oliver Sacks and Ian Waterman (2000). They had participated in experiments on virtual robotic embodiment at NASA's Houston Space Center -- real experiments that approximated some of the unusual thought experiments found in empiricist-analytic thinkers like Sidney Shoemaker. In response to Cole, Sacks, and Waterman, I defended Shoemaker's principle of immunity to error through misidentification (2000c). In the summer of 2000 I attended a week-long symposium at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Cincia, Lisbon, Portugal and presented an extended version of this essay. A number of neuroscientists have cited or used a distinction I made in that essay between a sense of agency and a sense of ownership, in some of their theoretical, experimental, or brain imaging studies, including Marc Jeannerod and members of his group in Lyon, Frederique de Vignemont; Jean Decety, Chloe Farrer, Christopher Frith, Patrick Haggard and Manos Tsakiris. A number of others have thought the article useful, including Joseph LeDoux in his book Synaptic Self: How our brains become who we are; John Taylor (2002 a, b, and c); Kai Vogeley (et al. 2001), writing on theory of mind, Vogeley and Fink (2003), writing on the neural correlates of the first-person perspective.

    I also highlighted the distinction between the minimal self and the narrative self in that article. This is a distinction that has been made by a number of others, sometimes using different terminology. This distinction helped to set the framework for a successful grant project termed BASIC in the European Science Foundation's Consciousness in a Natural and Cultural Context (CNCC) project that involves a number of labs in Europe and the United States.

    Much of the work that I've done in the area of phenomenology, cognitive sciences, intersubjectivity, self, time, etc. has been helped along by various institutions. I've mentioned my stay in Cambridge, but more recently I have been on-and-off Visiting Professor at the University of Copenhagen where Dan Zahavi directs the Center for Subjectivity Research (2004-06). My visits were supported by a University wide research project on Mind and Body. I've also been Visiting Professor of Cognitive Science at the Ecole Normale Supériure in Lyon (2007). These institutions, together with the University of Central Florida and, more recently, the University of Hertfordshire, have greatly supported my research in these areas.

    Hermeneutics

    The very week I attended the 1992 Cambridge workshop on perception, my book Hermeneutics and Education was published. This is also a book that crosses disciplines. It has been used in graduate courses in education and social communication, as well as philosophy. Currently this book is being translated into Chinese. For a debate with Robert Young, on education and critical theory, motivated by my book (see Young 1996 and Gallagher 1996).

    I have come to see important connections between 20th-century European philosophy (especially Gadamerian hermeneutics) and cognitive science. I've suggested that philosophical hermeneutics is quite compatible with recent work in the cognitive neurosciences -- and I hope to do further work on this idea. For the most part, however, my work in hermeneutics has been geared to framing a neo-Aristotelian response to Habermasian critical theory and the political implications of post-structuralist thought. In several papers I have argued that an approach based on the concept of phronesis is less idealistic than certain elements of Habermas's discourse ethics, and more faithful to the contextual nature of action than the postmodern concept of quick imagination (which one finds in Lyotard, and which I equate with Aristotle's concept of cleverness). (see, 1993 and 1997)

    As I've tried to indicate I view philosophy, not as a narrow discipline, but as an interdisciplinary enterprise. My research in cognitive science has led me to study in the fields of psychology and neuroscience, entering into projects with people in developmental psychology, neuropsychology, and neurophysiology. My work in critical theory is informed by my study of economics. In my teaching too, I've taught and designed courses with faculty from the departments of mathematics and computer science. I find these various collaborative projects exciting and extremely useful for both my research and my teaching.

    References

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    Campbell, John. 1995. The body image and self-consciousness, inJ. Bermœdez, A. Marcel, & N. Eilan (Eds) The Body and the Self. pp. 29-42 (Cambridge, MA, MIT/Bradford Press).

    Cassam, Quassim. 1995. Introspection and bodily self-ascription. In J. Bermœdez, A. J. Marcel, & N. Eilan (Eds.), The body and the self (311-36). Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Chaminade, T. and Decety, J. 2002. Leader or follower? Involvement of the inferior parietal lobule in agency. Neuroreport, (In press).

    Cole, J. Gallagher, S., and McNeill, D. 2002. Gesture following deafferentation: A phenomenologically informed experimental study, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1 (1): 49-67.

    Cole, J., Gallagher, S., McNeill, D., Duncan S., Furuyama, N. and McCullough, K-E. 1998. Gestures after total deafferentation of the bodily and spatial senses. 1998. OralitŽ et gestualitŽ: Communication multi-modale, interaction. Eds. Santi et al, Paris: L. Harmattan: pp. 65-69.

    Cole, Jonathan, Oliver Sacks, and Ian Waterman. 2000. "On the immunity principle: A view from a robot." Trends in Cognitive Science 4 (5): 167.

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    de Vignemont, Frederique. 2000. When the " I think does not accompany my thoughts. Paper presented at the ASSC Conference, Brussels.

    Depraz, N. (2001). Lucidite Du Corps: De l'empirisme transcendantal en phenomenologie. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

    Farrer, C. and Frith, C.D. 2002. Experiencing oneself vs another person as being the cause of action: The neural correlates of the experience of agency. NeuroImage 15: 596-603.

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    Gallagher, S. 1992. Hermeneutics and Education.. Albany: State University of New York Press.

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