Philosophisches Seminar

Let me begin by focusing on the long list of agreements between the Dan Zahavi and me. As he is such a careful and scholarly author, there are almost no misunderstandings to get out of the way first. At the beginning of section 2, there is a conflation of different concepts of possibility. If we grant that imaginability is conceivability (in the sense of being describable without any logical contradictions), if we pass over “practical ” possibility as a non-defined term, and grant that by “physically ” possible Zahavi very likely means “nomologically ” possible, it still would present a major step to say that something is conceptually or (my emphasis) metaphysically possible. Not everything that is logically or conceptually possible is metaphysically possible as well—metaphysically possible worlds (just like nomologically possible worlds) have to be interpreted as a subset of logically possible worlds. How this can be done is a subject of intense and highly technical debates in current philosophy of mind. We cannot possibly enter this debate here, but let me just point out how, for instance, Zahavi’s remarks in the second paragraph of page 4 rest on a conflation between nomological and logical possibility. A second misunderstanding, traditionally and typically reiterated by phenomenologists, is the rhetorical question of whether pathology can actually reveal something fundamental about the deep structure of normal experience. Neurophenomenological case studies are simply instruments in the search for a functionalist theory of mind. The aim is not to make sweeping claims about the structure of non-pathological experience, but to isolate distinct causal roles, to find double dissociations—to investigate which forms of phenomenal content are independent of eac