A growing number of theorists have looked to the enactivist approach in philosophy of mind or the affordance-based approach from ecological psychology to make sense of a wide variety of phenomena; some theorists believe that these theoretical accounts can offer rich insights about the nature of mental disorders, their etiology, and their characteristic symptoms. I argue that theorists who adopt...
Some theorists have argued that elements of the surrounding world play a crucial role in sustaining and amplifying both cognition and emotion. Such insights raise an interesting question about the relationship between cognitive and affective scaffolding: in addition to enabling the realization of specific affective states, can an affective niche also enable the realization of certain cognitive...
Many philosophers of mind and mainstream neuroscientists remain committed to the broadly Cartesian notion that there is a ‘thing’ inside us which allows us to think and feel and is responsible for the wide range of conscious states we experience. While Descartes identifies this ‘thing’ as a non-material substance that exists independently of the body, most contemporary theorists maintain that...
This book has explored the connection between emotion, cognition, and the essentially embodied nature of consciousness. Its central aim has been to bring together important work being done in philosophy of mind, philosophy of emotion, and philosophical psychology so as to move toward a new theoretical framework in which all of our conscious experience and cognition can be understood as...