Philosophical Psychology

Philosophical Psychology is an international journal devoted to developing and strengthening the links between philosophy and the psychological sciences, both as basic sciences and as employed in applied settings, by publishing original, peer-refereed contributions to this expanding field of study and research.

Published articles deal with issues that arise in the cognitive and brain sciences, and in areas of applied psychology. Emphasis is placed on articles concerned with cognitive and perceptual processes, models of psychological processing, including neural network and dynamical systems models, and relations between psychological theories and accounts of neural underpinnnings or environmental context. The journal also publishes theoretical articles concerned with the nature and history of psychology, the philosophy of science as applied to psychology, and explorations of the underlying issues — theoretical and ethical — in contemporary educational, clinical, occupational and health psychology.

As well as psychologists and philosophers, the journal's readers and contributors include neuroscientists, linguistics, computer scientists, biologists, and sociologists — reporting experimental, theoretical, and clinical work which relates to underlying philosophical interests.

an article:
What is it like to be conscious? The ontogenesis of consciousness
Abstract
In recent years, numerous studies have tried to highlight, from a naturalistic point of view, the apparent mysteries of consciousness. Many authors concentrated their efforts on explaining the phylogenetic origins of consciousness. Paradoxically, comments on the ontogenesis of consciousness are almost nonexistent. By crossing the results of psychology of development with a philosophical analysis, this paper aims to make up for this omission. After having characterized the different conceptual aspects of consciousness, we combine these, with observations made by developmental psychologists, to trace the empirical development of consciousness during the first months of life. This combination leads to a theoretical proposal: the intentional characteristics of consciousness, namely, aboutness and purposefulness, depend on the phenomenal properties of conscious states. From this perspective, the phenomenal aspect of conscious states (the "what it is like" effect) is therefore far from being an epiphenomenon.