Pub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474442244.003.0009
A. Roberts, Eleanore Widger
This chapter considers enactivist theories of cognition and perception in relation to aspects of Romantic and Modernist literature, in particular how walking relates to visual perception and the representation of the visual field (sensorimotor enactivism); and how movement and visuality inflect ideas of subjectivity, identity and consciousness (autopoietic enactivism). It draws on Alva Noë’s account of sensorimotor enactivism in Action in Perception (2004), on Evan Thompson’s account of autopoietic enactivism in Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of Mind (2007), and on Varela, Thompson and Rosch’s The Embodied Mind (1993), to argue that, while Romantic poetry tends to an affirmative account of unconstrained walking in a rural environment, facilitating identity-enhancing interaction, Modernist literature shows a marked duality in its representation of urban walking. In T.S. Eliot’s poetry, walking constrained by an oppressive urban environment threatens to fragment identity, implying dysfunctional forms of distributed cognition. However, although women’s urban walking in the Modernist period has often been seen to be constrained by gendered power structures, Virginia Woolf’s writing at times celebrates the aesthetic and sensory pleasures of urban walking, leading to more affirmative versions of dispersed identity.
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Pub Date : 2018-11-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474442282.003.0001
Miranda Anderson, M. Wheeler, Mark D. Sprevak
The general introduction, which is replicated across all four volumes, aims to orientate readers unfamiliar with this area of research. It provides an overview of the different approaches within the distributed cognition framework and discussion of the value of a distributed cognitive approach to the humanities. A distributed cognitive approach recognises that cognition is brain, body and world based. Distributed cognition is a methodological approach and a way of understanding the actual nature of cognition. The first section provides an overview of the various competing and sometimes conflicting theories that make up the distributed cognition framework and which are also collectively known as 4E cognition: embodied, embedded, extended and enactive cognition. The second section examines the ways in which humanities topics and methodologies are compatible with, placed in question or revitalised by new insights from philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences on the distributed nature of cognition, and considers what the arts and humanities, in turn, offer to philosophy and cognitive science.
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