Hi!
A review of Shaun Gallagher's last book, 'How the Body Shapes the Mind'?
will appear in Trends in Cognitive Sciences in the August 2005 issue.
If you're interested, this book-review is already available on TICS
web-site (article in press, corrected proof)
or just email me...
Enjoy,
Dorothée.
At 11:47 23/05/2005 +0100, you wrote:
>Hi,
>has anyone read Shaun Gallagher's new book, 'How the Body Shapes the
>Mind'? I've only seen the web description - copied below - but would
>welcome any comments on this or Gallagher's work in general.
>
> From http://www.oup.co.uk/:
>
>"How the Body Shapes the Mind is an interdisciplinary work that addresses
>philosophical questions by appealing to evidence found in experimental
>psychology, neuroscience, studies of pathologies, and developmental
>psychology. There is a growing consensus across these disciplines that the
>contribution of embodiment to cognition is inescapable. Because this
>insight has been developed across a variety of disciplines, however, there
>is still a need to develop a common vocabulary that is capable of
>integrating discussions of brain mechanisms in neuroscience, behavioural
>expressions in psychology, design concerns in artificial intelligence and
>robotics, and debates about embodied experience in the phenomenology and
>philosophy of mind. Shaun Gallagher's book aims to contribute to the
>formulation of that common vocabulary and to develop a conceptual framework
>that will avoid both the overly reductionistic approaches that explain
>everything in terms of bottom-up neuronal mechanisms, and inflationistic
>approaches that explain everything in terms of Cartesian, top-down
>cognitive states.
>
>Gallagher pursues two basic sets of questions. The first set consists of
>questions about the phenomenal aspects of the structure of experience, and
>specifically the relatively regular and constant features that we find in
>the content of our experience. If throughout conscious experience there is
>a constant reference to one's own body, even if this is a recessive or
>marginal awareness, then that reference constitutes a structural feature of
>the phenomenal field of consciousness, part of a framework that is likely
>to determine or influence all other aspects of experience. The second set
>of questions concerns aspects of the structure of experience that are more
>hidden, those that may be more difficult to get at because they happen
>before we know it. They do not normally enter into the content of
>experience in an explicit way, and are often inaccessible to reflective
>consciousness. To what extent, and in what ways, are consciousness and
>cognitive processes, which include experiences related to perception,
>memory, imagination, belief, judgement, and so forth, shaped or structured
>by the fact that they are embodied in this way?
>
>Price: £35.00 (Hardback)
>0-19-927194-1
>Publication date: 27 January 2005
>Clarendon Press 294 pages, 5 tables and numerous figures, 234mm x 156mm
>
>Best wishes,
>Adrian
Dr. Dorothée LEGRAND: [log in to unmask]
CEPERC - Département de Philosophie
Université de Provence
29 Avenue Robert Schuman
13621, Aix-en-Provence Cedex
France.
http://www.up.univ-mrs.fr/wceperc/sem-epist-perm/Legrand_D/dorotheelegrand.htm
http://www.up.univ-mrs.fr/wcnia/title.htm
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