Gurwitsch's Relevancy for Cognitive Science

Findings about the central nervous system obtained with new technology, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET), being too subtle to correlate with the crude results of many decades of behavioristic psychology, some psychologists were now turning to descriptions of subjective phenomena in William James, Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and even Buddhism, so why not also Aron Gurwitsch? After all, he regularly reflected on the basic concepts and methods of psychology, worked with Adhemar Gelb and Kurt Goldstein to research brain-injured veterans at Frankfurt in the 1920s, conspicuously employed Gestalt theory to revise central phenomenological doctrines, and taught Merleau-Ponty a thing or two. He died before cognitive science came together in the 1970s, but his positions on many issues - the self, the other, practical action in situations, the lived body, marginal consciousness, contexts of objects, reflection, naturalistic and cultural science, etc. - are shown by the essays in this volume to be quite relevant for that multidiscipline.