•  671
    Philosophical work exploring the relation between cognition and the Internet is now an active area of research. Some adopt an externalist framework, arguing that the Internet should be seen as environmental scaffolding that drives and shapes cognition. However, despite growing interest in this topic, little attention has been paid to how the Internet influences our affective life — our moods, emotions, and our ability to regulate these and other feeling states. We argue that the Internet scaffol…Read more
  •  568
    This paper pursues two main aims. First, it distinguishes two kinds of improvisation: expert and inexpert. Expert improvisation is a (usually artistic) practice that the agent consciously sets as their goal and is evaluated according to (usually artistic) standards of improvisation. Inexpert improvisation, by contrast, supports and structures the agent’s action as it moves them towards their (usually everyday life) goals and is evaluated on its success leading the agent to the achievement of tho…Read more
  •  716
    Much of the characteristic symptomatology of schizophrenia can be understood as resulting from a pervasive sense of disembodiment. The body is experienced as an external machine that needs to be controlled with explicit intentional commands, which in turn leads to severe difficulties in interacting with the world in a fluid and intuitive manner. In consequence, there is a characteristic dissociality: Others become problems to be solved by intellectual effort and no longer present opportunities f…Read more
  •  1740
    Out of our heads: Addiction and psychiatric externalism
    Behavioral Brain Research 398 1-8. 2021.
    In addiction, apparently causally significant phenomena occur at a huge number of levels; addiction is affected by biomedical, neurological, pharmacological, clinical, social, and politico-legal factors, among many others. In such a complex, multifaceted field of inquiry, it seems very unlikely that all the many layers of explanation will prove amenable to any simple or straightforward, reductive analysis; if we are to unify the many different sciences of addiction while respecting their causal …Read more
  •  1229
    Loneliness and the Emotional Experience of Absence
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 59 (2): 185-204. 2020.
    In this paper, we develop an analysis of the structure and content of loneliness. We argue that this is an emotion of absence-an affective state in which certain social goods are regarded as out of reach for the subject of experience. By surveying the range of social goods that appear to be missing from the lonely person's perspective, we see what it is that can make this emotional condition so subjectively awful for those who undergo it, including the profound sense of being unable to realise o…Read more
  •  860
    Watsuji, Intentionality, and Psychopathology
    Philosophy East and West 70 (3): 757-780. 2020.
    Despite increasing interest in the work of Tetsuro Watsuji, his discussion of intentionality remains underexplored. I here develop an interpretation and application of his view. First, I unpack Watsuji’s arguments for the inherently social character of intentionality, consider how they connect with his more general discussion of embodiment and betweenness, and then situate his view alongside phenomenologists like Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Next, I argue that Watsuji’s characterizatio…Read more
  •  606
    We argue that the notion of "mental institutions"-discussed in recent debates about extended cognition-can help better understand the origin and character of social impairments in autism, and also help illuminate the extent to which some mechanisms of autistic dysfunction extend across both internal and external factors (i.e., they do not just reside within an individual's head). After providing some conceptual background, we discuss the connection between mental institutions and embodied habits…Read more
  •  944
    Enactivism, other minds, and mental disorders
    Synthese 198 (Suppl 1): 365-389. 2019.
    Although enactive approaches to cognition vary in terms of their character and scope, all endorse several core claims. The first is that cognition is tied to action. The second is that cognition is composed of more than just in-the-head processes; cognitive activities are externalized via features of our embodiment and in our ecological dealings with the people and things around us. I appeal to these two enactive claims to consider a view called “direct social perception” : the idea that we can …Read more
  •  1168
    Externalist theories hold that a comprehensive understanding of mental disorder cannot be achieved unless we attend to factors that lie outside of the head: neural explanations alone will not fully capture the complex dependencies that exist between an individual’s psychiatric condition and her social, cultural, and material environment. Here, we firstly offer a taxonomy of ways in which the externalist viewpoint can be understood, and unpack its commitments concerning the nature and physical re…Read more
  •  557
    From Wide Cognition to Mechanisms: A Silent Revolution
    with Marcin Miłkowski, Robert Clowes, Zuzanna Rucińska, Aleksandra Przegalińska, Tadeusz Zawidzki, Adam Gies, Marek McGann, Łukasz Afeltowicz, Witold Wachowski, Fredrik Stjernberg, Victor Loughlin, and Mateusz Hohol
    Frontiers in Psychology 9. 2018.
    In this paper, we argue that several recent ‘wide’ perspectives on cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, and distributed) are only partially relevant to the study of cognition. While these wide accounts override traditional methodological individualism, the study of cognition has already progressed beyond these proposed perspectives towards building integrated explanations of the mechanisms involved, including not only internal submechanisms but also interactions with others, groups…Read more
  •  2092
    Affective affordances and psychopathology
    Discipline Filosofiche 2 (18): 221-247. 2018.
    Self-disorders in depression and schizophrenia have been the focus of much recent work in phenomenological psychopathology. But little has been said about the role the material environment plays in shaping the affective character of these disorders. In this paper, we argue that enjoying reliable (i.e., trustworthy) access to the things and spaces around us — the constituents of our material environment — is crucial for our ability to stabilize and regulate our affective life on a day-today basis…Read more
  •  45
    Music-animated body. Interview with Joel Krueger
    Avant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies 2 (1): 211-216. 2011.
  •  1525
    I discuss Watsuji’s characterization of aidagara or “betweenness”. First, I develop a phenomenological reading of aidagara. I argue that the notion can help illuminate aspects of our embodied subjectivity and its interrelation with the world and others. Along the way, I also indicate how the notion can be fruitfully supplemented by different sources of empirical research. Second, I put aidagara to work in the context of psychopathology. I show how disruptions of aidagara in schizophrenia not onl…Read more
  •  511
    Musical Worlds and the Extended Mind
    Proceedings of A Body of Knowledge - Embodied Cognition and the Arts Conference CTSA UCI, 8-10 Dec 2016. 2018.
    “4E” approaches in cognitive science see mind as embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. They observe that we routinely “offload” part of our thinking onto body and world. Recently, 4E theorists have turned to music cognition: from work on music perception and musical emotions, to improvisation and music education. I continue this trend. I argue that music — like other tools and technologies — is a beyond-the-head resource that affords offloading. And via this offloading, music can (at least …Read more
  •  406
    Why is listening to sad music pleasurable? Eerola et al. convincingly argue that we should adopt an integrative framework — encompassing biological, psycho-social, and cultural levels of explanation — to answer this question. I agree. The authors have done a great service in providing the outline of such an integrative account. But in their otherwise rich discussion of the psycho-social level of engagements with sad music, they say little about the phenomenology of such experiences — including f…Read more
  •  1174
    Schizophrenia and the Scaffolded Self
    Topoi 39 (3): 597-609. 2020.
    A family of recent externalist approaches in philosophy of mind argues that our psychological capacities are synchronically and diachronically “scaffolded” by external resources. I consider how these “scaffolded” approaches might inform debates in phenomenological psychopathology. I first introduce the idea of “affective scaffolding” and make some taxonomic distinctions. Next, I use schizophrenia as a case study to argue—along with others in phenomenological psychopathology—that schizophrenia is…Read more
  •  1187
    Music as Affective Scaffolding
    In Clarke David, Herbert Ruth & Clarke Eric (eds.), Music and Consciousness II, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    For 4E cognitive science, minds are embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. Proponents observe that we regularly ‘offload’ our thinking onto body and world: we use gestures and calculators to augment mathematical reasoning, and smartphones and search engines as memory aids. I argue that music is a beyond-the-head resource that affords offloading. Via this offloading, music scaffolds access to new forms of thought, experience, and behaviour. I focus on music’s capacity to scaffold emotional co…Read more
  •  543
    The Open Body
    In Antonella Carassa, Francesca Morganti & Guiseppa Riva (eds.), Enacting Intersubjectivity: Paving the Way for a Dialogue Between Cognitive Science, Social Cognition, and Neuroscience, Universita Della Svizzera Italiana. pp. 109-128. 2009.
    In this paper we characterize the body as constitutively open. We fi rst consider the notion of bodily openness at the basic level of its organic constitution. This will provide us a framework relevant for the understanding of the body open to its intersubjective world. We argue that the notion of “bodily openness” captures a constitutive dimension of intersubjectivity. Generally speaking, there are two families of theories intending to characterize the constitutive relation between subjectivity…Read more
  •  643
    Musicing, Materiality, and the Emotional Niche
    Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 14 (3): 43-62. 2015.
    Building on Elliot and SilvermanÕs (2015) embodied and enactive approach to musicing, I argue for an extended approach: namely, the idea that music can function as an environmental scaffolding supporting the development of various experiences and embodied practices that would otherwise remain inaccessible. I focus especially on the materiality of music. I argue that one of the central ways we use music, as a material resource, is to manipulate social spaceÑand in so doing, manipulate our emoti…Read more
  •  949
  •  1879
    Extended emotions
    Philosophy Compass 11 (12): 863-878. 2016.
    Until recently, philosophers and psychologists conceived of emotions as brain- and body-bound affairs. But researchers have started to challenge this internalist and individualist orthodoxy. A rapidly growing body of work suggests that some emotions incorporate external resources and thus extend beyond the neurophysiological confines of organisms; some even argue that emotions can be socially extended and shared by multiple agents. Call this the extended emotions thesis. In this article, we cons…Read more
  •  717
    James on Experience and the Extended Mind
    Contemporary Pragmatism 3 (1): 165-176. 2006.
    William James’s characterization of consciousness as a selecting agency can be used to develop and defend an externalist view of mind. The mind – including the content of phenomenal consciousness – is in an important sense distributed beyond the skin and skull of the subject, out into the world of people and things. Moreover, conscious experience is an action, and not simply something that happens to us. Consciousness, perception, and experience are activities – in other words, things that we do…Read more
  •  1888
    At home in and beyond our skin: Posthuman embodiment in film and television
    In Hauskeller Michael, Carbonell Curtis D. & Philbeck Thomas D. (eds.), Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 172-181. 2015.
    Film and television portrayals of posthuman cyborgs melding biology and technology, simultaneously “animal and machine” abound. Most of us immediately think of iconic characters like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s relentless cyborg assassin in the Terminator series or Peter Weller’s crime-fighting cyborg police officer in Robocop (1987). Or perhaps we recall the many cyborgs populating the Dr. Who, Star Trek, and Star Wars television series and films—including Darth Vader, surely the most famous cinema…Read more
  •  677
    The affective 'we': Self-regulation and shared emotions
    In Thomas Szanto & Dermot Moran (eds.), Phenomenology of Sociality: Discovering the ‘We’, Routledge. pp. 263-277. 2015.
    What does it mean to say that an emotion can be shared? I consider this question, focusing on the relation between the phenomenology of emotion experience and self-regulation. I explore the idea that a numerically single emotion can be given to more than one subject. I term this a “collective emotion”. First, I consider different forms of emotion regulation. I distinguish between embodied forms of self-regulation, which use subject-centered features of our embodiment, and distributed forms of se…Read more
  •  142
    Varieties of extended emotions
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 13 (4): 533-555. 2014.
    I offer a preliminary defense of the hypothesis of extended emotions (HEE). After discussing some taxonomic considerations, I specify two ways of parsing HEE: the hypothesis of bodily extended emotions (HEBE), and the hypothesis of environmentally extended emotions (HEEE). I argue that, while both HEBE and HEEE are empirically plausible, only HEEE covers instances of genuinely extended emotions. After introducing some further distinctions, I support one form of HEEE by appealing to different str…Read more