The Hand and Cognition… and Intersubjectivity, Agency, Culture, and More. A review of The Hand, an Organ of the Mind: What the Manual Tells the Mental

Abstract

The Hand, an Organ of the Mind, edited by Zdravko Radman, consists of seventeen essays by an impressive array of philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists, as well as a foreword by Jesse Prinz and a postscript by haptic artist Rosalyn Driscoll.62 As the title suggests, this collection concerns the role of the hand in cognition and consciousness, and aims to occupy a novel middle space in the polarized world of philosophy of mind and consciousness studies.As Radman points out, there has since Descartes been a methodological dualism in studying the mind, with variations of the mind-body binarism taking form in the contrasts of "organic versus inorganic, mind versus matter, 'I' (or self) versus 'it' (brain), cognitive versus motor, internal versus external, subjective versus objective"… the list goes on (Radman: xix).The place and function of the hand, however, does not fit well on either side of such a schema, and it is because of this fact that handedness has been neglected and under-researched in theories of mind and cognition.Indeed, as the authors of this collection demonstrate time after time, the hand serves as a unique theoretical vehicle that, if not entirely bypassing such traditional dualisms, at least complicates them insofar as it often shows itself to play a mediating role in the 62 I would like to thank Georg Theiner for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this review.