Bücher der Reihe New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science

This book aims to enrich our understanding of the role the environment plays in processes of life and cognition, from the perspective of enactive cognitive science. Miguel A. Sepúlveda-Pedro offers an unprecedented interpretation of the central claims of the enactive approach to cognition, supported by contemporary works of ecological psychology and phenomenology. The enactive approach conceives cognition as sense-making, a phenomenon emerging from the organizational nature of the living body that evolves in human beings through sensorimotor, intercorporeal, and linguistic interactions with the environment. From this standpoint, Sepúlveda-Pedro suggests incorporating three new theses into the theoretical body of the enactive approach: sense-making and cognition fundamentally consist of processes of norm development; the environment, cognitive agents actually interact with, is an active ecological field enacted in their historical past; and sense-making occurs in a domain consistingof multiple normative dimensions that the author names enactive place.

This book is an analysis and discussion of the soul as a psychophysical process and its role in mental representation, meaning, understanding and agency. Grant Gillett and Walter Glannon combine contemporary neuroscience and philosophy to address fundamental issues about human existence and living and acting in the world. Based in part on Aristotle's hylomorphism and model of the psyche, their approach is informed by a neuroscientific model of the brain as a dynamic organ in which patterns of neural oscillation and synchronization are shaped by biological, social and cultural factors inside and outside of it. The authors provide a richer and more robust account of the soul, or mind, than other accounts by framing it in neuroscientific and philosophical terms that do not explain it away but explain it as something that is shaped by how it responds to the natural and social environment in enabling flexible and adaptive behavior.

This book is an empirically informed investigation of the philosophical problem of mental causation, and a philosophical investigation of the status of cognitive scientific generalisations. If there are mental causes which can be classified in a way useful for predicting and explaining, then they are natural kinds. First. we develop an account of natural kinds that accommodates the cognitive. Second, we show how statements using these are not reducible to statements about physical kinds, involving biological and social facts. Finally, Virtual Machine Functionalism is defended as the correct account of the relationship between cognition and the material world.

This book argues that conscious experience is sometimes extended outside the brain and body into certain kinds of environmental interaction and tool use. It shows that if one accepts that cognitive states can extend, one must also accept that consciousness can extend. The proponents of Extended Mind defend the former claim, but usually oppose the latter claim. The most important undertaking of this book is to show that this partition is not possible on pain of inconsistency.Pii Telakivi presents three arguments for the hypothesis of Extended Conscious Mind, examines and answers the most common counterarguments, and introduces a novel means to interpret and apply the concept of constitution. She also addresses the tensions between analytic philosophy of mind and enactivism, and builds a bridge between two different traditions: on the one hand, extended mind, and on the other, enactivism and embodied mind¿and maintains that a unifying approach is necessary for atheory about extended consciousness.

Proponents of Extended Mind insist that internal representations are always needed to explain the human mind. STEEM brings together Enacted Mind and Extended Mind in a way that rejects all talk of internal representations.

The book is the first formulation of a meta-philosophical scheme rooted in the embodied cognition paradigm. On the other hand, the emergence of experimental philosophy has given rise to a new context in which philosophers have begun to search for a more thorough definition of philosophical competence.

This book presents a unified account of the self, based on a network of knowledge sourced from several scientific accounts of selfhood.

This book presents a detailed analysis of what it means to be absorbed in playing music. Based on interviews with one of the world¿s leading classical ensembles, ¿The Danish String Quartet¿ (DSQ), it debunks the myth that experts cannot reflect while performing, but also shows that intense absorption is not something that can be achieved through will, intention, prediction or planning ¿ it remains something individuals have to be receptive to. Based in the phenomenological tradition of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty as well as of Dan Zahavi and Shaun Gallagher, it lays out the conditions and essential structures of musical absorption. Employing the lived experience of the DSQ members, it also engages and challenges core ideas in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, enactivism, expertise studies, musical psychology, flow theory, aesthetics, dream and sleep studies, psychopathology and social ontology, and proposes a method that integrates phenomenology and cognitive science.

This book presents a study of the various feelings of awe and wonder experienced by astronauts during space flight. It summarizes the results of two experimental, interdisciplinary studies that employ methods from neuroscience, psychology, phenomenology and simulation technology, and it argues for a non-reductionist approach to cognitive science.

Using e-readers, such as the Kindle and iPad, as a case study, Hayler argues that the use of technology is both more complicated and more human than public discussion often gives it credit for, forcing us to consider its impacts on perception, cognition, and what it means to know anything at all.

Drawing on a wide range of resources, including the history of philosophy, her role as director of a cognitive neuroscience group, and her Wittgensteinian training at Oxford, Jacobson provides fresh views on representation, concepts, perception, action, emotion and belief.

Going beyond the hype of recent fMRI 'findings', thisinterdisciplinary collection examines such questions as: Do women and men have significantly different brains? Do women empathize, while men systematize? Is there a 'feminine' ethics? What does brain research on intersex conditions tell us about sex and gender?

Beginning with the view that human consciousness is essentially embodied and that the way we consciously experience the world is structured by our bodily dynamics and surroundings, the book argues that emotions are a fundamental manifestation of our embodiment, and play a crucial role in self-consciousness, moral evaluation, and social cognition.

This book offers arguments against the view that interpersonal understanding involves a 'folk' or 'commonsense' psychology, a view which Ratcliffe suggests is a theoretically motivated abstraction. His alternative account draws on phenomenology, neuroscience and developmental psychology, exploring patterned interactions in shared social situations.

Employing the lived experience of the DSQ members, it also engages and challenges core ideas in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, enactivism, expertise studies, musical psychology, flow theory, aesthetics, dream and sleep studies, psychopathology and social ontology, and proposes a method that integrates phenomenology and cognitive science.

This book argues that thinking is bounded by neither the brain nor the skin of an organism. Cognitive systems function through integration of neural and bodily functions with the functions of representational vehicles. The integrationist position offers a fresh contribution to the emerging embodied and embedded approach to the study of mind.

The enactive approach replaces the classical computer metaphor of mind with emphasis on embodiment and social interaction as the sources of our goals and concerns. Researchers from a range of disciplines unite to address the challenge of how to account for the more uniquely human aspects of cognition, including the abstract and the nonsensical.

A volume devoted explicitly to the subtle and multidimensional phenomenon of background knowing that has to be recognized as an important element of the triad mind-body-world. The essays are inspired by seminal works on the topic by Searle and Dreyfus, but also make significant contribution in bringing the discussion beyond the classical confines.