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.