ABSTRACT
According to a prevalent but mistaken view, whatever valuable insights phenomenology might possibly offer to an understanding of the mind, an account of social cognition is not part of its repertoire. As Dennett argues, for instance, traditional phenomenology is committed to a form of methodological solipsism; rather than investigating the mental life of others, the classical phenomenologist is concerned only with his or her own mental life, and thus engaged in a process of autophenomenologizing (1987, pp. 153-154). As we shall see in the following, however, no one familiar with the phenomenological tradition can endorse the claim that phenomenology has failed to analyse the minds of others. But let us take a look at the standard options in the contemporary debate, before turning to what phenomenology has to offer.
