My talk at Brooklyn College

Sorry to report this after the fact. I attended the conference "Resisting the Divides: Contemporary Philosophy of Art" at Brooklyn College, CUNY and gave a talk there. Thank you for all those who asked me a lot of questions after the talk. I was happy to answer all of them.

My talk title was:

Shogo Tanaka

"The enactive approach meets art:The phenomenology of one-time performances"

Here I put my abstract.

The enactive approach meets art: The phenomenology of one-time performances

In recent years, phenomenological research has been expanding its horizon into the realm of performance, including music, dance, and theater (Gallagher 2021, Krueger 2014, Zarrilli 2020). This move was partly made possible by integrating the enactive approach, which emphasizes the ideas that perception is for action and that action orientation shapes cognitive processes. Combined with a phenomenological description of experiences with its emphasis on the first-person perspective, the enactive approach attempts to explicate what really occurs in unrepeatable performative and aesthetic experiences. In this talk, I introduce three enactive-phenomenological notions: (1) intercorporeality (Merleau-Ponty 1961): a potential intersubjective relationship between self and other that manifests through a perception-action loop of each other’s body; (2) enactive intersubjectivity (Fuchs & De Jaegher 2009): embodied interactions between two participants, including nonverbal signals, which create a dyadic system through which intersubjectivity develops; and (3) aida (Kimura 2005): the “in-between” of interactants starts to have its own autonomy as an intersubjectively shared mood, outside of which each participant would act differently. All these notions share the view that the key to understanding one-time performances is in the emergent process among participants. An intersubjectively shared mood emerges through embodied interactions, and the common sense-making process develops as performance. Based on this theoretical underpinning, I take up two examples. One is an observational study on the process of spontaneous drawing that I conducted as a psychological experiment in past research. The other one is a performative artwork called “Heat-Touch Therapy” proposed and practiced by the Japanese artist Mew Imashuku (2024). In both cases, performance proceeds in an unpredictable manner, but the participants experience shared processes of sense-making.

my talk at "Aware & Alive" symposium

Two weeks ago I participated in "Aware & Alive" which was organized as a ASSC satellite symposium. 

Aware & Alive (8-10th July 2024, Hokkaido University, Japan)

Here I share the talk I gave there, titled "From an implicit sense of self to an explicit self-consciousness." 

Enjoy!

Roundtable in ISTP 2024

20th Conference of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology will be held soon in Belgrade. I am going to give a talk there in the roundtable titled "Phenomenology and Psychology of Performance" organized by Dr. Tetsuya Kono. Other speakers are Dr. Shoji Nagataki from Chukyo University and Dr. Martin Nitsche from Czech Academy of Sciences. Here is the abstract.

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Performance is an important theme with great potential for the development of philosophy, psychology, and the cognitive science of embodiment. The methodology to study performances should be the basis for the studies of arts, sports, education, and clinical psychology. However, in order to understand the phenomenon of one-time performance, conventional hard science methodology is disqualified since it places reproducibility as the basis of research. In contrast, phenomenology has the potential to provide the basis for a science of performance to analyze the structure and the meaning of performance experiences. In recent years, phenomenology and related cognitive studies of embodiment (4E cognition) have begun to pay more attention to skilled performance and tact in performance (Fuchs & De Jaegher 2009, Gallagher 2021, Grant et al. 2019; Hutto 2012; Welch 2019). 

So far, we have been conducting phenomenological and qualitative research on intercorporeal interactions. Kono will talk about how children have a dialogue in the practice of philosophy for/with children. Nagataki will focus on certain typical scenes in a soccer game and the linguistic expressions of the leaders who analyze and describe these images. Nitsche will speak on sonic performances (not only music), how they create sound-spaces, and immersion within the sonic in-between. Tanaka will talk about an experiment in which a pair of people drew in improvisation to confirm the process of “participatory sense-making” that emerges “in-between”. 

In this roundtable, we discuss the fundamental questions, “Are the scientific studies of one-time performance possible?”, “What contribution can digital humanities make to research in this field?”, and “What are the relations between skills and performance” from the interdisciplinary and phenomenological viewpoints.

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The conference website is here;

https://www.istp2024.f.bg.ac.rs/

I look forward to sharing my ideas in ISTP.

Hand to Face (Tanaka 2024)

My new paper was published on Japanese Psychological Research.

Tanaka, S. (2024). Hand to Face: A Phenomenological View of Body Image Development in Infants. Japanese Psychological Research. 

https://doi.org/10.1111/jpr.12517

You can read the full text online by clicking the DOI above. This paper is an attempt to reconsider body image development from a phenomenological perspective. In it, I proposed that hands are the first organ and the face the last organ to be incorporated into one's body image. If you are interested in knowing why and how of this proposal, please refer to the full text. You will enjoy the argument.

Best,

S

Co-authored paper with Dr. Iriki

 A paper co-authored with Dr. Atsushi Iriki has just been published in Global Perspectives. 

Iriki, A., & Tanaka, S. (2024). Potential of the path integral and quantum computing for the study of humanities: An underlying principle of human evolution and the function of consciousness. Global Perspectives, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2024.115651

You can read the full text by clicking the DOI above. This is my first paper that deals with quantum computing and its implications in humanities. As we emphasized in it, we can expect to obtain insights into new humanities based on quantum computation, including the fields such as linguistics, psychopathology, and diverse states of consciousness. Here is the abstract of our paper.

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The “(classical) scientific view of the world” that characterizes the modern history of human civilization has been successful by objectifying nature, humans, and society, for reductive analysis into (approximate) linear causation to allow prediction and control. However, because of its growing maturity and complexity, our modern society now confronts the complexity of multilayered causal structures underlying the real phenomena, which classical science has abstracted through reductive approximation, and consequently, modern scientists are perplexed by the limitations on  comprehension, predictability, and controllability. The “uncertainty principle” of quantum physics, discovered a century ago, has overthrown this classical mechanistic and deterministic worldview, but the “(quantum) scientific worldview” remained confined at the level of microscopic science and has to date never extended onward to the life-size human world. However, as practical applications of the quantum computer are now becoming realistic, it might provide us with an innovative way to manipulate such complex causal structures and open up a new era in the history of civilization. In this paper, we build ideas on our earlier research findings in the context of the evolutionary patterns of human cognition, so as to extrapolate them to advance speculations on the mechanism of the phase transition of worldviews from classical to quantum causal structure-based ones, expecting to obtain insights into practical ways of computation to realize such a transition. The paper begins with a section examining the origin of the linear approximation adopted in classical science, back casting from the evolutionary history of the (linguistic) consciousness of our human ancestors. In the next section, we show how human intelligence and civilization have in fact evolved as analog with quantum laws, and review the limitations of modern science in finding an expression of these laws in Eastern philosophy. This section proceeds to show the potential of quantum computation to not only realize a fusion of Eastern and Western approaches but also integrate the humanities and natural sciences. The final section concludes that this new framework can expand and develop the structure and function of human “consciousness” and build a bridgehead against recent “anti-scientism” that is rooted in skepticism concerning the (classical) scientific view of the world and humanity.

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Enjoy the paper!

Workshop in Shanghai

There will be a workshop on social cognition next week in Shanghai, organized by Eastern China Normal University.

"Cultural Embedding of Social Cognition"

 

I am going to give a talk as one of the speakers. My talk is titled, "Hand to Face: Body image development embedded in social interactions." Focusing on the developmental course of infants, I will try to explicate the order of body image development, which starts with hands and ends up with face.

Look forward to sharing my argument.

author's manuscript of Miyahara & Tanaka (2023)

As a lot of colleagues have asked me to share the article, here I share the author's manuscript of Miyahara and Tanaka (2023).

Katsunori Miyahara and Shogo Tanaka (2023) "Narrative self-constitution as embodied practice" Philosophical Psychology, Online First.

Enjoy it!

New article on Philosophical Psychology

Shortly before, our new article was published on Philosophical Psychology.

 

Katsunori Miyahara and Shogo Tanaka (2023) "Narrative self-constitution as embodied practice" Philosophical Psychology, Online First.

https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2023.2286281

Here is the abstract. 

Narrative views of the self argue that we constitute our self in self-narratives. Embodied views hold that our self is shaped through embodied experiences. In that case, what is the relation between embodiment and narrativity in the process of self-constitution? The question demands a clear definition of embodiment, but existing studies remains unclear on this point (section 2). We offer a correction to this situation by drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the body that highlights its habituality. On this account, the body has an inherent tendency to cultivate an organization of habits through its history of engagement with the world (section 3). Next, we explore its role in narrative self-constitution by distinguishing between two aspects of the narrative self, the narrated I and the narrating I (section 4). We argue on phenomenological grounds that self-narratives are informed by bodily perspectives in both respects. Furthermore, a focus on the habituality of the body allows for a better explanation of self-constitution than those based on implicit self-narratives (section 5). For these phenomenological and theoretical reasons, we conclude that narrative self-constitution is an embodied and embedded practice (section 6).

 

It was a nice experience for me to write together with Katsunori Miyahara, who is also a Merleau-Ponty scholar. Collaborating with him, I tried to extend Merleau-Ponty's ideas on embodiment into the realm of narrativity.

Enjoy reading it.

Happy 2024!

Happy new year, everybody! 

Greetings from Tokyo.

 

Here is a picture of IHSRC 2023 in Tokai University last year.