The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology

Mark Rowlands

Agu 2010 · MIT Press

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An investigation into the conceptual foundations of a new way of thinking about the mind that does not locate all cognition "in the head."

There is a new way of thinking about the mind that does not locate mental processes exclusively "in the head." Some think that this expanded conception of the mind will be the basis of a new science of the mind. In this book, leading philosopher Mark Rowlands investigates the conceptual foundations of this new science of the mind. The new way of thinking about the mind emphasizes the ways in which mental processes are embodied (made up partly of extraneural bodily structures and processes), embedded (designed to function in tandem with the environment), enacted (constituted in part by action), and extended (located in the environment).

The new way of thinking about the mind, Rowlands writes, is actually an old way of thinking that has taken on new form. Rowlands describes a conception of mind that had its clearest expression in phenomenology—in the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. He builds on these views, clarifies and renders consistent the ideas of embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended mind, and develops a unified philosophical treatment of the novel conception of the mind that underlies the new science of the mind.

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Mark Rowlands is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami. He is the author of The Body in Mind: Understanding Cognitive Processes, Body Language: Representation in Action (MIT Press, 2006), The Philosopher and the Wolf, and other books.