Acts, Normativity, Personhood - Outline of a Theory of Embodied Rationality

Phenomenology is experiencing a new flourishing by its powerful contributions to the embodied / enactive approach to consciousness and cognition, which seems nowadays a leading paradigm in consciousness studies. The embodied-enactive perspective definitely puts the perceiving subject back into the world, stressing the actual dynamic reciprocity between embodied agents and the environments with which they interact. Yet there is one crucial aspect of perceptual experience that this approach tends to neglect, namely its normative dimension. Now incapability to give account of normativity was the main target of Husserl’s (and Merleau-Ponty’s) classical criticism of scientific naturalism of old. So, I take it to be an urgent task to provide for a phenomenological account of normativity, and one compatible with the embodied-enactive approach. Going the proposed path will end up to bridging the explanatory gap between embodied subjectivity and personhood, i.e. the nature of a rational agent.