Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Embodied Cognition in Boston Globe

I came across this article in The Boston Globe from January on embodied cognition. I have a broad interest in this topic in part because I want to get clear about how Fichte held an embodied view of the mind, something I mention here. Granted he was doing a kind of speculative philosophy of mind, but I do think he hit upon some ideas that are detailed in the work of some contemporary figures.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

For someone interested in continental philosophy, what have you found to be the most helpful work in the science of embodied cognition? I have a long-standing interest in Merleau-Ponty, but am woefully under-educated about the state of the science on these matters, having only brushed up against some of it in some of the better scholarly work on Merleau-Ponty.

By the way, I read the abstract you posted on Fichte and the embodied mind, and it sounds interesting (although my knowledge of Fichte is pretty much limited to my knowing his name).

Gabriel Gottlieb said...

Hi Manuel,

I'm certainly not an expert in the area, but a few books that come to mind are: The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience by Franisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch; Action in Perception by Alva Noe; and How the Body Shapes the Mind by Shaun Gallagher, who was interviewed for the Boston Globe article.

-gabe

Gabriel Gottlieb said...

I should mention also that the books by Gallagher and Noe take up Merleau-Ponty's ideas. Gallagher actually has a book on Merleau-Ponty. I really like some of the work by Sean Kelly on Merleau-Ponty, the body, and embodied coping.