Christoph Durt, Thomas Fuchs, and Christian Tewes (eds): Embodiment, enaction and culture: investigating the constitutio
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Christoph Durt, Thomas Fuchs, and Christian Tewes (eds): Embodiment, enaction and culture: investigating the constitution of the shared world MIT Press, 2017 David Carr1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The following is a review of Embodiment, Enaction and Culture. Investigating the Constitution of the Shared World. Edited by Christoph Durt, Thomas Fuchs, and Christian Tewes. MIT Press, 2017. Keywords Enactment · Embodiment · Culture · Phenomenology The late Hubert L. Dreyfus was known for claiming that computers can’t think, not because they don’t have minds or souls, but because they don’t have bodies. The paradigm of the “ghost in the machine” (which Ryle attributed to Descartes) might have worked if the activities of the “ghost” were limited to making extremely rapid calculations, but some of the simplest things we do, like shaking hands and smiling at the appropriate times, require bodies, and not just machine-like bodies. If we are capable of things like perception, recognition, and social interaction, as we clearly are, and if these require the body, then the body must be conceived and understood in a way that makes these activities possible. Dreyfus was drawing on the phenomenological tradition of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, in which the idea of the embodied subject had been developed unencumbered by the metaphysical correctness of reductive materialism that had prevailed in the English-speaking world. Whether influenced by phenomenology or simply by following the requirements of research, the study of cognition and perception has gradually liberated itself from the constraints of traditional cognitive science and epistemology and has charted new territory of its own. This new territory, which by now has itself developed into a tradition, is abbreviated helpfully * David Carr [email protected] 1
Atlanta, USA
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by the authors of one of the studies in this collection as “4EA”: embodied, embedded, enactive, extended and affective cognitive science (353). Since the 1991 publication of The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, the landmark study by Varela, Thompson and Rosch, a vast literature has developed, and this extensive collection gives us an impressive sampler of some of the best and most recent work. Most of the contributors to this volume, we are told, have collaborated for years in the interdisciplinary European research network Towards an Embodied Science of Intersubjectivity (TESIS). This volume represents the “final outcome” of their work in the TESIS network. Together with other contributors assembled here, the authors “share phenomenological commitments.” But “the underlying explanatory approach is interdisciplinary, bringing together fields such as philosophy, neuroscience, anthropology, psychology and psychopathology” (10). The collection simultaneously serves several purposes. For this reviewer, coming from the phenomenological side, it provided an opportunity to catch up on work by “4EA” theorists and get a panoramic
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