The Embodied Mind provides a unique, sophisticated treatment of the spontaneous and reflective dimension of human experience. The authors argue that only by having a sense of common ground between mind in Science and mind in experience can our understanding of cognition be more complete. Toward that end, they develop a dialogue between cognitive science and Buddhist meditative psychology and situate it in relation to other traditions such as phenomenology and psychoanalysis.
The enactive naturalization of normativity: from self-maintenance to situated interactions
The autopoietic enactive account of cognition explains the emergence of normativity in nature as the norm of self-maintenance of life. The autonomous nature of living agents implies that they can differentiate events and regulate their responses in terms of what is better or worse to maintain their own precarious identity. Thus, normative behavior emerges from living organisms. Under this basic understanding of normativity as self-maintenance, autopoietic enactivism defends a continuity between biological, cognitive, and social norms. The self-maintenance of an agent’s sensorimotor identity establishes the cognitive norms that regulate its behavior, and the self-maintenance of its social identity determines the social norms. However, there is no clear explanation of how individuals, who by their very constitution are primarily moved to interact with the world under the norm of self-maintenance, could interact with the world driven by non-individual norms. Furthermore, understanding all normativity as self-maintenance makes it unclear how agents establish genuine social interactions and acquire habits that have no implication for their constitution as individuals. So, to face these challenges, I propose an alternative notion of normativity grounded on a Wittgensteinian, action-oriented, and pragmatic conception of meaning that distinguishes between an agent with a normative point of view and external normative criteria. I defend that a normative phenomenon is an interaction that is established by an individual point of view as defined by autopoietic enactivism and that is part of a self-maintaining system. The latter establishes the external normative criteria to evaluate the interaction, and it may or may not coincide with the identity of the interacting agent. Separating external normative criteria from the self-constitution of the interactant agent not only solves the challenge but potentially explains the situated and relational character of agency.
Es are Good. Cognition as enacted, embodied, embedded, affective and extended
We present a specific elaboration and partial defense of the claims that cognition is enactive, embodied, embedded, affective and (potentially) extended. According to the view we will defend, the enactivist claim that perception and cognition essentially depend upon the cognizer’s interactions with their environment is fundamental. If a particular instance of this kind of dependence obtains, we will argue, then it follows that cognition is essentially embodied and embedded, that the underpinnings of cognition are inextricable from those of affect, that the phenomenon of cognition itself is essentially bound up with affect, and that the possibility of cognitive extension depends upon the instantiation of a specific mode of skillful interrelation between cognizer and environment. Thus, if cognition is enactive then it is also embodied, embedded, affective and potentially extended.
Principle Ethics, Particularism, and Another Possibility
One of the most striking contributions of particularism to moral philosophy has been its emphasis on the relative opacity of the moral scene to the tools of rational analysis traditionally used by philosophers. Particularism changes the place of the philosopher in relation to the moral life, pointing up the limits to what philosophy can do here. The modern moral philosopher who takes particularism seriously no longer has the luxury, endemic in our tradition, of imagining that moral philosophy can be done with only passing illustrative reference to experience, or that the truth about the whole of our moral life may be read of a list of a priori moral principles, whose rationality is underwritten by the mechanistic account of what it is to follow a rule that pre-Wittgensteinian philosophers took for granted.
Aristotle on Necessities and Needs
Aristotle’s account of human needs is valuable because it describes the connections between logical, metaphysical, physical, human and ethical necessities. But Aristotle does not fully draw out the implications of the account of necessity for needs and virtue. The proper Aristotelian conclusion is that, far from being an inferior activity fit only for slaves, meeting needs is the first part of Aristotelian virtue.
Making Pacifism Plausible
The ethics of war is a minefield. It is a morass of conceptual unclarity, contentious assumptions, impassioned arguments, unexploded myths, and the injured defenders of indistinct positions. My aim is to help to make the minefield (conceptually) safe, and to assist that most vulnerable party to the dispute, the pacifist. In this paper I explore the possibility that, farfrom being naive or outlandish, pacifism might follow from a widely-held and fundamental intuition about the moral status of persons [hereafter MSP]. In Section 1 I describe MSP, and suggest how we might draw implications from it about the ethics of war. In Section 2, I argue that a ‘presumption of war-ism’ has distorted debate in the ethics of war: to arrive at a balanced view, we need distinguish two sets of moral questions. First, can the development and maintenance of the means to make war be justified? Second, can the use of those means ever be justified? I sketch some strategies which might be developed in addressing the first question, concentrating on what MSP suggests might be wrong with setting up a war-machine, and with being or employing a soldier. In Section 3, I argue that even if considerations from Section 2 are insufficient to establish that we must dismantle our war-machines, facts about war which conflict with MSP do establish that we must never use them.
Needs-Centred Ethical Theory
Our aims in this paper are: (1) to indicate some of the many ways in which needs are an important part of the moral landscape, (2) to show that the dominant contemporary moral theories cannot adequately capture the moral significance of needs, indeed, that the dominant theories are inadequate to the extent that they cannot accommodate the insights which attention to needs yield, (3) to offer some sketches that should be helpful to future cartographers charting the domain of morally significant needs, and (4) to consider some anticipated objections to our project and offer some replies.
Does a Basic Needs Approach Require Capabilities?
In this article I consider criticisms of the basic needs approach (BNA) made by capability theorists, and argue that BNA can meet them all. I conclude that BNA has been unfairlycriticised and too hastily displaced by the capability approach (CA). This raises a further question: whatshould be done? My hope is that defenders of BNA will be encouraged to revivetheir approach by these arguments, and that defenders of CA will be encouragedto reconsider and modify or withdraw their criticisms.
“The feel of not to feel it”: Lucretius’ remedy for death anxiety
Do Lucretius’ vivid evocations of pain and suffering render impotent his therapy for fear of death? Lucretius’ readers have long noted the discord between his avowed aim to provide a rational foundation for cool detachment from death and his impassioned and acute attention to nature’s often cruel brutality. I argue that Lucretius does have a viable remedy for death anxiety but that this remedy significantly departs from Epicurus’ original counsel. Lucretius’ remedy confesses its origins in a heightened, rather than benumbed, sensitivity to the affective and somatic features of human experience, culminating in “the feel of not to feel it.”