Despite the relevance of silence in several psychopathologies, first-person perspectives on silence have been largely neglected in the phenomenological scholarship on those conditions. This paper proposes a phenomenological framework for addressing this neglect and demonstrates its usefulness through a case study of empty silence, an experience which can be found in many first-person accounts of depression. The paper begins by surveying research on silence in depression in mental health research and phenomenological psychopathology. Drawing on the thought of Merleau-Ponty, it then outlines a phenomenological framework for explicating the structure of silence experiences in psychopathology. Finally, it applies this framework to articulate the experiential structure and implications of empty silence, with a particular emphasis on the bodily doubt that can flow from repeated experiences of empty silence.

Recent research has begun treating the perennial philosophical question, "what makes a person the same over time?" as an empirical question. A long tradition in philosophy holds that psychological continuity and connectedness of memories are at the heart of personal identity. More recent experimental work, however, has suggested that persistence of moral character, more than memories, is perceived as essential for personal identity. While there is a growing body of evidence supporting these findings, a recent critique suggests that this research program conflates personal identity with mere similarity. To address this criticism, we explore how loss of someone's morality or memories influences perceptions of identity change and perceptions of moral duties toward the target of the change. We present participants with a classic "body switch" thought experiment and after assessing perceptions of identity persistence, we present a moral dilemma, asking participants to imagine that one of the patients must die (Study 1) or be left alone in a care home for the rest of their life (Study 2). Our results highlight the importance of the continuity of moral character, suggesting that lay intuitions are tracking (something like) personal identity, not just mere similarity.

The studies we report indicate that it is possible to manipulate explicit ascriptions of consciousness by manipulating whether an agent's behavior is deterministically caused. In addition, we explore whether this impact of determinism on consciousness is direct, or whether it is mediated by notions linked to agency - notions like moral responsibility, free will, deliberate choice, and sensitivity to moral reasons. We provide evidence of mediation. This result extends work on attributions of consciousness and their connection to attributions of agency by Adam Arico, Brian Fiala, and Shaun Nichols and supports it against recent criticisms.

Experimental philosophy brings empirical methods to philosophy. These methods are used to probe how people think about philosophically interesting things such as knowledge, morality, and freedom. This paper explores the contribution that qualitative methods have to make in this enterprise. I argue that qualitative methods have the potential to make a much greater contribution than they have so far. Along the way, I acknowledge a few types of resistance that proponents of qualitative methods in experimental philosophy might encounter, and provide reasons to think they are ill-founded.

In this paper, I offer evidence that folk views of free will and moral responsibility accord a central place to consciousness. In sections 2 and 3, I contrast action production via conscious states and processes with action in concordance with an agent's long-standing and endorsed motivations, values, and character traits. Results indicate that conscious action production is considered much more important for free will than is concordance with motivations, values, and character traits. In section 4, I contrast the absence of consciousness with the presence of consciousness in behaviorally identical agents. Most participants attribute free will to conscious agents, but not to nonconscious agents. Focusing in particular on two leading views of free will and moral responsibility, namely, Deep Self and Reasons-Responsive Views, I argue that these results present philosophers of mind and action with the following explanatory burden: develop a substantive theory of the connection between consciousness on the one hand and free will and moral responsibility on the other that takes folk views on this connection seriously.

The recent debate over the moral responsibility of psychopaths has centered on whether, or in what sense, they understand moral requirements. In this paper, I argue that even if they do understand what morality requires, the content of their actions is not of the right kind to justify full-blown blame. I advance two independent justifications of this claim. First, I argue that if the psychopath comes to know what morality requires via a route that does not involve a proper appreciation of what it means to cause another harm or distress, the content of violations of rules against harm will be of a lower grade than the content of similar actions by normal individuals. Second, I argue that in order to intend a harm to a person-that is, to intend the distinctive kind of harm that can only befall a person-it is necessary to understand what personhood is and what makes it valuable. The psychopath's deficits with regard to mental time travel ensure that s/he cannot intend this kind of harm.

Scientific psychology involves both identifying and classifying phenomena of interest (description) and revealing the causes and mechanisms that contribute towards these phenomena arising (explanation). Within personality psychology, some propose that aspects of behavior and cognition can be explained with reference to personality traits. However, certain conceptual and logical issues cast doubt upon the adequacy of traits as coherent explanatory constructs. This paper discusses "explanation" in psychology and the problems of circularity and reification. An analysis of relations and intrinsic properties is then developed to address the logical requirements necessary for circumventing these problems. An examination of McCrae and Costa's defense of traits as explanatory constructs, in terms of "tendencies" and "dispositions" highlights logical issues that prevent traits, so defined, from explaining trait-like behaviors and cognitions. The logical requirements for a coherent trait-explanatory account are outlined and possible explanatory directions in trait-approaches are discussed. The ongoing tendency towards fallacious reasoning in psychology and suggestions for preventing this are further examined.

Humans possess two nonverbal systems capable of representing numbers, both limited in their representational power: the first one represents numbers in an approximate fashion, and the second one conveys information about small numbers only. Conception of exact large numbers has therefore been thought to arise from the manipulation of exact numerical symbols. Here, we focus on two fundamental properties of the exact numbers as prerequisites to the concept of exact numbers: the fact that all numbers can be generated by a successor function, and the fact that equality between numbers can be defined in an exact fashion. We discuss some recent findings assessing how speakers of Mundurucu (an Amazonian language), and young western children (3-4 years old) understand these fundamental properties of numbers.

The more carefully we look, the more impressive the repertoire of infant concepts seems to be. Across a wide range of tasks, infants seem to be using concepts corresponding to surprisingly high-level and abstract categories and relations. It is tempting to try to explain these abilities in terms of a core capacity in spatial cognition that emerges very early in development and then gets extended beyond reasoning about direct spatial arrays and events. Although such a spatial cognitive capacity may indeed form one valuable basis for later cognitive growth, it seems unlikely that it can be the sole or even primary explanation for either the impressive conceptual capacities of infants or the ways in which concepts develop.

Recent studies in developmental psychology have found evidence to suggest that there exists an innate system that accounts for the possibilities of early infant imitation and the existence of phantom limbs in cases of congenital absence of limbs. These results challenge traditional assumptions about the status and development of the body schema and body image, and about the nature of the translation process between perceptual experience and motor ability. Merleau-Ponty, who was greatly influenced by his study of developmental psychology, and whose phenomenology of perception was closely tied to the concept of the body schema, accepted these traditional assumptions. They also informed his philosophical conclusions concerning the experience of self and others. We re-examine issues involved in understanding self and others in light of the more recent research in developmental psychology. More specifically our re-examination challenges a number of Merleau-Ponty's conclusions and suggests, in contrast, that the newborn infant is capable of a rudimentary differentiation between self and non-self.

Time-consciousness has long been a focus of research in phenomenology and phenomenological psychology. We advance and extend this tradition of research by focusing on the character of temporal experience under conditions of mania. Symptom scales and diagnostic criteria for mania are peppered with temporally inflected language: increased rate of speech, racing thoughts, flight-of-ideas, hyperactivity. But what is the underlying structure of temporal experience in manic episodes? We tackle this question using a strategically hybrid approach. We recover and reconstruct three hypotheses regarding manic temporality that were advanced and modeled by two pioneers of clinical phenomenology: Eugène Minkowski (1885-1972) and Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966). We then test, critique, and refine these hypotheses using heterophenomenological methods in an interview-based study of persons with a history of bipolar and a current diagnosis of acute mania. Our conclusions support a central hypothesis due to Minkowski and Binswanger, namely, that disturbance in the formal structure of temporal experience is a core feature of mania. We argue that a suitably refined variant of Binswanger's model of disturbance in manic protention helps to explain a striking pattern of impaired insight and impaired reasoning in manic episodes.

We propose a fundamental challenge to the feasibility of moral progress: most extant theories of progress, we will argue, assume an unrealistic level of cognitive control people must have over their moral judgments for moral progress to occur. Moral progress depends at least in part on the possibility of individual people improving their moral cognition to eliminate the pernicious influence of various epistemically defective biases and other distorting factors. Since the degree of control people can exert over their moral cognition tends to be significantly overestimated, the prospects of moral progress face a formidable problem, the force of which has thus far been underappreciated. In the paper, we will provide both conceptual and empirical arguments for this thesis, and explain its most important implications.

Some stories of moral exemplars motivate us to emulate their admirable attitudes and behaviors, but why do some exemplars motivate us more than others? We systematically studied how motivation to emulate is influenced by the similarity between a reader and an exemplar in social or cultural background () and how personally costly or demanding the exemplar's actions are (). Study 1 found that university students reported more inspiration and related feelings after reading true stories about the good deeds of a recent fellow alum, compared to a famous moral exemplar from decades past. Study 2A developed a battery of short moral exemplar stories that more systematically varied Relatability and Attainability, along with a set of non-moral exemplar stories for comparison. Studies 2B and 2C examined the path from the story type to relatively low stakes altruism (donating to charity and intentions to volunteer) through perceived attainability and relatability, as well as elevation and pleasantness. Together, our studies suggest that it is primarily the relatability of the moral exemplars, not the attainability of their actions, that inspires more prosocial motivation, at least regarding acts that help others at a relatively low cost to oneself.

The rich literature in phenomenological psychopathology regards the communicative difficulties accompanying psychiatric illness as a product of 'unworlding': the experience of a drastic change in one's habitual field of experience. This paper argues that the relationship between speech expression and unworlding in psychiatric illness is more complex than previously assumed. Not only does unworlding cause a breakdown in speech expression, but a breakdown in speech expression can perpetuate, and even exacerbate, the experience of unworlding characteristic of psychiatric illness. In other words, I identify a two-way relationship between unworlding and the communication breakdown in psychiatric illness. Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of speech expression is drawn upon to demonstrate how hermeneutical injustice in psychiatric healthcare can elicit unworlding for the person with a psychiatric illness.