•  645
    The Open Body
    with Dorothée Legrand
    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
  •  1860
    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
  •  935
  •  1882
    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
  •  709
    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
  •  668
    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