Husserlian cognitive phenomenology

Abstract The term “cognitive phenomenology” may be understood as referring to the idea that there is something it is like to entertain thoughts. One of the main problems in the debates on cognitive phenomenology is the question of how it should be construed, for instance in terms of being in a particular phenomenal state. In order to give a concise idea of what cognitive phenomenology is, I elicit the help of the philosophical doctrine of phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, whose approach allows us to clearly distinguish between the act of thinking and what is thereby thought. With this distinction in hand, I discuss the following three problems: What is the individuative phenomenology of thought? Is there a cognitive horizon in which thoughts stand to one another in virtue of their phenomenology? What is the relation between sensory and cognitive phenomenology? In particular, I consider how a suitably modified interpretation of Husserl’s noetic-noematic distinction helps to elucidate the cognitive phenomenology of acts of thinking.