Description
Book SynopsisThis book is written for students, scholars and anyone with an interest in embodied cognition – the claim that the human mind cannot be understood without regard for the actions and capacities of the body. It offers a novel way of combining psychology, neuroscience and anthropology to yield a unified theory.
Trade Review'This great work, beautifully written, is a masterpiece that any scientist or layperson interested in what makes us human - brain, mind, sociality, culture - should read. The author integrates an embodied approach with a focus on the exchange of symbols in a material culture, setting the agenda for embodied cognitive (neuro)science in the future.' Anna Borghi, University of Bologna, Italy
'Ellis skilfully navigates a plethora of research to formulate a way for symbolic accounts of the mind to incorporate recent advances in embodied cognition. By grounding a philosophical approach in empirical observations and scientific data, Bodies and Other Objects offers an exciting and revolutionary theory of mind.' Jonathan Silas, Middlesex University London
'Timely, comprehensive, and provocative: a must-read for anybody interested in how the body shapes the mind.' Simone Schnall, University of Cambridge
'Indeed, the book is a model of interdisciplinary synthesis and about as far from glib, silly psychology as it is possible to get.' Louise Barrett, BioScience
'This book will challenge cherished philosophical positions. Not just commitment to representational cognition, but also prior conceptions of agency. As you read it you will begin to realise that perhaps the greatest challenge to our discipline is not the replication crisis, but instead a collective failure to inspect our core theoretical assumptions.' Tom Dickins, The Pyschologist
Table of ContentsIntroduction; 1. Reframing cognition; 2. Vision and action; 3. Tool use and tool incorporation; 4. Agency, objects and others; 5. Material cultures; 6. Language; 7. A synthesis: networks of human agents as physical symbol systems.
