Topoi
October 22, 2026
Paul Richard Smart
Abstract Debates about the extended mind and extended cognition typically focus on the boundaries of cognitive processes and the mechanisms responsible for their realization. This paper develops a different perspective, one that foregrounds the role of dispositional properties such as beliefs, capacities, and abilities. According to the dispositional hypothesis, cases of cognitive extension...
Topoi
June 30, 2026
Benjamin Birkenstock, Gregory S. Moss
Abstract By introducing the concept of atheistic theism, we mean to reconcile monotheism with Brook Ziporn’s concept of mystical atheism. We demonstrate that Ziporyn’s own principle of intersubsumption, the principle according to which any determinate content is indistinct from any and all other contents, engenders this very result. In atheistic theism, both atheism and monotheism take on a...
Topoi
June 25, 2026
Drew Chastain
Abstract In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Albert Camus critiques mysticism for its attempt to escape the absurdity or meaninglessness of reality through a leap of faith (which Camus calls “philosophical suicide”). This critique does not so obviously apply to the atheistic mysticism endorsed by Brook Ziporyn in his Experiments in Mystical Atheism (2024). According to Ziporyn, the mystic atheist...
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June 9, 2026
Samuel T. X. Khoo
This paper develops a mystical atheist political theology drawing on Brook Ziporyn’s work, particularly his interpretation of Tiantai Buddhist metaphysics. Mainstream political theology rests on the idea that political concepts are secularized theological concepts. If true, this poses a challenge for mystical atheism, since this means that atheism is effectively barred from the political...
Topoi
May 3, 2026
Daniel D. Hutto, Benedetta Cogo
Abstract Narrative practices appear to matter to psychological well-being, yet dominant frameworks generally sideline narrative practices in mental health contexts, treating them, at best, as marginal. We argue that if we are to give narrative practices their due in mental health contexts, we must set aside certain misleading imaginative frames that dominate our thinking in this domain. To...
Topoi
April 4, 2026
Jessica Xiaomin Zu
Abstract This study takes seriously Octavia Butler’s Parable series as an unfinished treatise of processual social philosophy. My analysis highlights Butler’s skillful weaving of a wide range of processual traditions, from the mystical atheism in the Chinese classic Daodejing , to the kinship worldview in Africana processual-relational ontologies, to the practice of relational nondomination...
Topoi
March 18, 2026
Scott Ryan Maybell
Abstract This article aims to accomplish two goals, one miniscule and one gargantuan. As a footnote to Brook Ziporyn’s Experiments in Mystical Atheism (2024), I show how his brief discussion about Mormonism can be expanded to read Mormonism as a part of the mystical atheist tradition Ziporyn constructs. By examining the ways Latter-day Saint thought understands divine persons as embodied, and...
Topoi
February 12, 2026
Christian U. Krägeloh, Kevin Berryman
Abstract As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become increasingly sophisticated in engaging with complex philosophical concepts, a fundamental challenge emerges between technological accessibility of profound nondualist instructions and explanations on one hand and contemplative transformation in nondualist inquiry on the other. Developing nondualist understanding presents unique...
Topoi
February 1, 2026
Stefania Achella
Abstract This article argues that enactivism, integrated with feminist and posthumanist perspectives, provides a unified framework for addressing both the ecological crisis and the ethical challenges posed by artificial intelligence. Current debates—from the Anthropocene to human-centered AI—call for a critical redefinition of the human, yet they often evolve in parallel, producing a “split...
Topoi
December 3, 2025
Gaia Mizzon, Jennifer Windt
The concept of narrative is widespread in the philosophical literature on dreams. Although several works have examined the putative narrative character of dreams by drawing on narratology, literary theory, and semiotics, there has been virtually no investigation of how preconceptions about the resemblance between fictional narratives and retrospective dream reports have shaped the philosophical...
Topoi
November 12, 2025
M. Heras-Escribano
Neo-pragmatists claim that individual intelligence derives from socio-normative practices and not the other way round. However, this leads to the neo-pragmatist problem of the origins of content, which can be summarized as follows: if intentionality only derives from social practices, how is it possible that the capacities needed to explain participation in those social practices could be in...
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October 23, 2025
Andrea Gambarotto, T. van Es
This paper examines the relation between embodiment and sociality within the enactive approach, highlighting the continuity between biological autonomy and social normativity. The central claim is that, while enactivism offers the conceptual resources to address the complexity of social cognition, doing so requires the integration of dialectical tools into the theory of the embodied mind. For...
Topoi
December 6, 2024
Lucy Osler
The narratives we have about ourselves are important for our sense of who we are. However, our narratives are influenced, even manipulated, by the people and environments we interact with, impacting our self-understanding. This can lead to narratives that are limited, even harmful. In this paper, I explore how our narrative agency is constrained, to greater and lesser degrees, through a process...
Topoi
August 22, 2024
Janna Van Grunsven
8 citations
A growing body of literature in the field of embodied situated cognition is drawing attention to the hostile ways in which our environments can be constructed, with detrimental effects on people's ability to flourish as environmentally situated beings. This paper contributes to this body of research, focusing on a specific area of concern. Specifically, I argue that a very particular...
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October 20, 2023
Julian Kiverstein, Giuseppe Flavio Artese
7 citations
Abstract Our paper is concerned with theories of direct perception in ecological psychology that first emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. Ecological psychology continues to be influential among philosophers and cognitive scientists today who defend a 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) approach to the scientific study of cognition. Ecological psychologists have...
Topoi
April 1, 2022
Janna Van Grunsven
13 citations
AbstractIn this paper I home in on an ethical phenomenon that is powerfully elucidated by means of enactive resources but that has, to my knowledge, not yet been explicitly addressed in the literature. The phenomenon in question concerns what I will term the paradox of moral perception, which, to be clear, does not refer to a logical but to a phenomenological-practical paradoxicality....
Topoi
2022
Fredrik Svenaeus
24 citations
In this paper I explore health and illness through the lens of enactivism, which is understood and developed as a bodily-based worldly-engaged phenomenology. Various health theories - biomedical, ability-based, biopsychosocial - are introduced and scrutinized from the point of view of enactivism and phenomenology. Health is ultimately argued to consist in a central world-disclosing aspect of...
Topoi
May 31, 2021
K. Werner, Magdalena Kiełkowicz-werner
15 citations
Two major philosophical movements have sought to fundamentally rethink the relationship between humans and their environment(s): environmental ethics and enactivism. Surprisingly, they virtually never refer to or seek inspiration from each other. The goal of this analysis is to bridge the gap. Our main purpose, then, is to address, from the enactivist angle, the conceptual backbone of...
Topoi
October 19, 2018
Philip Goff
9 citations
Revelation is roughly the thesis that we have introspective access to the essential nature of our conscious states. This thesis is appealed to in arguments against physicalism. Little attention has been given to the problem that Revelation is a source of pressure in the direction of epiphenomenalism, as introspection does not seem to reveal our conscious states as being essentially causal. I...
Topoi
April 12, 2018
Julian Kiverstein
57 citations
According to the free energy principle all living systems aim to minimise free energy in their sensory exchanges with the environment. Processes of free energy minimisation are thus ubiquitous in the biological world. Indeed it has been argued that even plants engage in free energy minimisation. Not all living things however feel alive. How then did the feeling of being alive get started? In...
Topoi
March 8, 2018
Joel Krueger
81 citations
A family of recent externalist approaches in philosophy of mind argues that our psychological capacities are synchronically and diachronically “scaffolded” by external (i.e., beyond-the-brain) resources. I consider how these “scaffolded” approaches might inform debates in phenomenological psychopathology. I first introduce the idea of “affective scaffolding” and make some taxonomic...
Topoi
September 1, 2017
Xabier E. Barandiaran
126 citations
Abstract The concept of “autonomy”, once at the core of the original enactivist proposal in The Embodied Mind (Varela et al. in The embodied mind: cognitive science and human experience. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1991), is nowadays ignored or neglected by some of the most prominent contemporary enactivists approaches. Theories of autonomy, however, come to fill a theoretical gap that sensorimotor...
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August 9, 2017
Nicholas Humphrey
20 citations
In English we use the word “invention” in two ways. First, to mean a new device or process developed by experimentation, and designed to fulfill a practical goal. Second, to mean a mental fabrication, especially a falsehood, designed to please or persuade. In this paper I argue that human consciousness is an invention in both respects. First, it is a cognitive faculty, evolved by natural...
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June 1, 2017
Jérôme Dokic, Jean-Rémy Martin
We investigate the nature of the sense of presence that usually accompanies perceptual experience. We show that the notion of a sense of presence can be interpreted in two ways, corresponding to the sense that we are acquainted with an object, and the sense that the object is real. In this essay, we focus on the sense of reality. Drawing on several case studies such as derealization disorder,...