Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind
Jul 2017 · Oxford University Press
Ebook
240
Pages
family_home
Eligible
info
reportRatings and reviews aren’t verified Learn More
About this ebook
Enactivist Interventions is an interdisciplinary work that explores how theories of embodied cognition illuminate many aspects of the mind, including intentionality, representation, the affect, perception, action and free will, higher-order cognition, and intersubjectivity. Gallagher argues for a rethinking of the concept of mind, drawing on pragmatism, phenomenology and cognitive science. Enactivism is presented as a philosophy of nature that has significant methodological and theoretical implications for the scientific investigation of the mind. Gallagher argues that, like the basic phenomena of perception and action, sophisticated cognitive phenomena like reflection, imagining, and mathematical reasoning are best explained in terms of an affordance-based skilled coping. He offers an account of the continuity that runs between basic action, affectivity, and a rationality that in every case remains embodied. Gallagher's analysis also addresses recent predictive models of brain function and outlines an alternative, enactivist interpretation that emphasizes the close coupling of brain, body and environment rather than a strong boundary that isolates the brain in its internal processes. The extensive relational dynamics that integrates the brain with the extra-neural body opens into an environment that is physical, social and cultural and that recycles back into the enactive process. Cognitive processes are in-the-world rather than in-the-head; they are situated in affordance spaces defined across evolutionary, developmental and individual histories, and are constrained by affective processes and normative dimensions of social and cultural practices.
About the author
Shaun Gallagher is the Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Excellence in Philosophy at the University of Memphis, and Professorial Fellow at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He has had visiting positions in Cambridge, Copenhagen, Paris, Lyon, Berlin, and most recently Oxford. His research areas include phenomenology and philosophy of mind, embodied cognition, theories of self, intersubjectivity and social cognition. Professor Gallagher holds the Humboldt Foundation's Anneliese Maier Research Award (2012-18). His previous publications include How the Body Shapes the Mind (2005) and The Phenomenological Mind (2012).
Rate this ebook
Tell us what you think.
Reading information
Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.
