EMBODIED COGNITION AROUND 1800: INTRODUCTION

Abstract

The period around 1800 offers sophisticated, diverse accounts of how the body shapes thought and knowledge.1 Yet, according to George Lakoff, in 2001:for over two thousand years, philosophers have mostly viewed the mind as disembodied.[...] But over the last two decades [...] [a] new understanding of the mind has emerged, empirically based and freed from age-old philosophical baggage.The new view of mind changes everything, in an almost shocking way. 2 Although it is particularly strong in its tone, this claim is not uncommon in the theory of embodied mind, of which Lakoff is one of the most eminent proponents.Certainly, the last few decades have brought some remarkable developments in our understanding of the relation between mind and body, developments which would have been unthinkable without the aid of modern medical technology.Yet to claim that, prior to this, the dominant paradigm was a 'disembodied' one is -even with the caveat 'mostly'too much of a generalisation.There has been increasing recognition of this distortion in respect of Descartes, namely that Cartesian psychology and theory of mind 'has been caricatured in recent times, abetting a 1 The conference Embodied Cognition and the Goethezeit took place on 14 and 15 September 2015 at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, in cooperation with the Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule für literaturwissenschaftliche Studien, Freie Universität Berlin.We thank all the sponsors who enabled the fruitful discussion from which this volume emerges: the German Department of the University of Cambridge (Schröder and Tiarks Fund), the Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule,