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682Affordances and the musically extended mindFrontiers in Psychology 4 1-12. 2013.I defend a model of the musically extended mind. I consider how acts of “musicking” grant access to novel emotional experiences otherwise inaccessible. First, I discuss the idea of “musical affordances” and specify both what musical affordances are and how they invite different forms of entrainment. Next, I argue that musical affordances – via soliciting different forms of entrainment – enhance the functionality of various endogenous, emotiongranting regulative processes, drawing novel experienc…Read more
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500Phenomenology of the social self in the prodrome of psychosis: From perceived negative attitude of others to heightened interpersonal sensitivityEuropean Psychiatry 26 (8): 532-533. 2011.
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862Ontogenesis of the socially extended mindCognitive Systems Research 25 40-46. 2013.I consider the developmental origins of the socially extended mind. First, I argue that, from birth, the physical interventions caregivers use to regulate infant attention and emotion (gestures, facial expressions, direction of gaze, body orientation, patterns of touch and vocalization, etc.) are part of the infant’s socially extended mind; they are external mechanisms that enable the infant to do things she could not otherwise do, cognitively speaking. Second, I argue that these physical interv…Read more
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288Training in compensatory strategies enhances rapport in interactions involving people with Möebius SyndromeFrontiers in Neurology 6 (213): 1-11. 2015.In the exploratory study reported here, we tested the efficacy of an intervention designed to train teenagers with Möbius syndrome (MS) to increase the use of alternative communication strategies (e.g., gestures) to compensate for their lack of facial expressivity. Specifically, we expected the intervention to increase the level of rapport experienced in social interactions by our participants. In addition, we aimed to identify the mechanisms responsible for any such increase in rapport. In the …Read more
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1389Enacting Musical ContentIn Riccardo Manzotti (ed.), Situated Aesthetics: Art Beyond the Skin, Imprint Academic. pp. 63-85. 2011.This chapter offers the beginning of an enactive account of auditory experience—particularly the experience of listening sensitively to music. It investigates how sensorimotor regularities grant perceptual access to music qua music. Two specific claims are defended: (1) music manifests experientially as having complex spatial content; (2) sensorimotor regularities constrain this content. Musical content is thus brought to phenomenal presence by bodily exploring structural features of music. We e…Read more
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428Levinasian reflections on somaticity and the ethical selfInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 51 (6). 2008.In this article, I attempt to bring some conceptual clarity to several key terms and foundational claims that make up Levinas's body-based conception of ethics. Additionally, I explore ways that Levinas's arguments about the somatic basis of subjectivity and ethical relatedness receive support from recent empirical research. The paper proceeds in this way: First, I clarify Levinas's use of the terms “sensibility”, “subjectivity”, and “proximity” in Otherwise than Being: or Beyond Essence . Next,…Read more
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1108Direct Social PerceptionIn Albert Newen, Leon De Bruin & Shaun Gallagher (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition, Oxford University Press. 2018.
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4991Emotions and Other MindsIn Rudiger Campe & Julia Weber (eds.), Interiority/Exteriority: Rethinking Emotion, Walter De Gruyter. pp. 324-350. 2014.
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550The space between us: embodiment and intersubjectivity in Watsuji and LevinasIn Leah Kalmanson, Frank Garrett & Sarah Mattice (eds.), Levinas and Asian Thought, Duquesne University Press. pp. 53-78. 2013.This essay brings Emmanuel Levinas and Watsuji Tetsurō into constructive philosophical engagement. Rather than focusing primarily on interpretation — admittedly an important dimension of comparative philosophical inquiry — my intention is to put their respective views to work, in tandem, and address the problem of the embodied social self.1 Both Watsuji and Levinas share important commonalities with respect to the embodied nature of intersubjectivity —commonalities that, moreover, put both thin…Read more
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469Dimensions of bodily subjectivityPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 8 (3): 279-283. 2009.
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701Losing social space: Phenomenological disruptions of spatiality and embodiment in Moebius Syndrome and SchizophreniaIn Jack Reynolds & Ricky Sebold (eds.), Phenomenology and Science, Palgracve Macmillan. forthcoming.We argue that a phenomenological approach to social space, as well as its relation to embodiment and affectivity, is crucial for understanding how the social world shows up as social in the first place—that is, as affording different forms of sharing, connection, and relatedness. We explore this idea by considering two cases where social space is experientially disrupted: Moebius Syndrome and schizophrenia. We show how this altered sense of social space emerges from subtle disruptions of embodim…Read more
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1984Seeing mind in actionPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 11 (2): 149-173. 2012.Much recent work on empathy in philosophy of mind and cognitive science has been guided by the assumption that minds are composed of intracranial phenomena, perceptually inaccessible and thus unobservable to everyone but their owners. I challenge this claim. I defend the view that at least some mental states and processes—or at least some parts of some mental states and processes—are at times visible, capable of being directly perceived by others. I further argue that, despite its initial implau…Read more
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435Empathy beyond the head: Comment on "Music, empathy, and cultural understanding"Physics of Life Reviews 15 92-93. 2015.
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988Enacting Musical ExperienceJournal of Consciousness Studies 16 (2-3): 98-123. 2009.I argue for an enactive account of musical experience — that is, the experience of listening ‘deeply’(i.e., sensitively and understandingly) to a piece of music. The guiding question is: what do we do when we listen ‘deeply’to music? I argue that these music listening episodes are, in fact, doings. They are instances of active perceiving, robust sensorimotor engagements with and manipulations of sonic structures within musical pieces. Music is thus experiential art, and in Nietzsche’s words, ‘we…Read more
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476A Daoist Critique of Searle on Mind and ActionIn Bo Mou (ed.), Searle’s Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy: Constructive Engagement, Brill Academic Publishers. pp. 97-123. 2008.
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541James Austin's Selfless Insight: Zen and the Meditative Transformations of Consciousness (review)Journal of Consciousness Studies 17 (9-10): 240-244. 2010.
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240Phenomenology and the visibility of the mentalAnnual Review of the Phenomenological Association of Japan 29 13-25. 2013.
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446Interdisciplinary approaches to the phenomenology of auditory verbal hallucinationsSchizophrenia Bulletin 40. 2014.Despite the recent proliferation of scientific, clinical, and narrative accounts of auditory verbal hallucinations, the phenomenology of voice hearing remains opaque and undertheorized. In this article, we outline an interdisciplinary approach to understanding hallucinatory experiences which seeks to demonstrate the value of the humanities and social sciences to advancing knowledge in clinical research and practice. We argue that an interdisciplinary approach to the phenomenology of AVH utilizes…Read more
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1202The Who and the How of ExperienceIn Mark Siderits, Evan Thompson & Dan Zahavi (eds.), Self, no self?: perspectives from analytical, phenomenological, and Indian traditions, Oxford University Press. pp. 27-55. 2011.
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462Gestural coupling and social cognition: Moebius Syndrome as a case studyFrontiers in Human Neuroscience 6. 2012.Social cognition researchers have become increasingly interested in the ways that behavioral, physiological, and neural coupling facilitate social interaction and interpersonal understanding. We distinguish two ways of conceptualizing the role of such coupling processes in social cognition: strong and moderate interactionism. According to strong interactionism (SI), low-level coupling processes are alternatives to higher-level individual cognitive processes; the former at least sometimes render …Read more
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1217Merleau-Ponty on shared emotions and the joint ownership thesisContinental Philosophy Review 46 (4): 509-531. 2013.In “The Child’s Relations with Others,” Merleau-Ponty argues that certain early experiences are jointly owned in that they are numerically single experiences that are nevertheless given to more than one subject (e.g., the infant and caregiver). Call this the “joint ownership thesis” (JT). Drawing upon both Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological analysis, as well as studies of exogenous attention and mutual affect regulation in developmental psychology, I motivate the plausibility of JT. I argue that t…Read more
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340EmpathyIn Byron Kaldis (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences, Sage Publications. 2013.
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1047Empathy and the extended mindZygon 44 (3): 675-698. 2009.I draw upon the conceptual resources of the extended mind thesis to analyze empathy and interpersonal understanding. Against the dominant mentalistic paradigm, I argue that empathy is fundamentally an extended bodily activity and that much of our social understanding happens outside of the head. First, I look at how the two dominant models of interpersonal understanding, theory theory and simulation theory, portray the cognitive link between folk psychology and empathy. Next, I challenge their i…Read more
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852William James and Kitaro Nishida on “Pure Experience”, Consciousness, and Moral PsychologyDissertation, Purdue University. 2007.The question “What is the nature of experience?” is of perennial philosophical concern. It deals not only with the nature of experience qua experience, but additionally with related questions about the experiencing subject and that which is experienced. In other words, to speak of the philosophical problem of experience, one must also address questions about mind, world, and the various relations that link them together. Both William James and Kitarō Nishida were deeply concerned with these issu…Read more
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616Musicing, Materiality, and the Emotional NicheAction, 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
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627The Open BodyIn 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
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921Stream of ConsciousnessIn John Lachs & Robert Talisse (eds.), Encyclopedia of American Philosophy, Routledge. 2007.
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1808Extended emotionsPhilosophy 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
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685James on Experience and the Extended MindContemporary 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
Exeter, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Interest
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Japanese Philosophy |
William James |
John Dewey |
Asian Philosophy |
American Pragmatism, Misc |
Musical Experience |