Michelle Maiese

Some feminist theorists have proposed that one way to combat commonplace sexist or racist conduct is to develop new terminology that “calls out” these oppressive behaviors. Drawing from enactivist accounts of language and the theoretical notion of “affordance” from ecological psychology, I examine how neologisms such as “sexual harassment” have the potential to promote epistemic familiarity and deepen agents’ recognitional capacities. They do so, in large part, by arousing bodily-affective feelings and prompting a specific sort of evaluative orientation. At the same time, these terms promote practical familiarity, reposition agents in relation to their sociomaterial world, and help them to engage effectively with a field of relevant affordances. This discussion reveals the way in which the epistemic, affective, and practical dimensions of familiarization are intertwined, and how the introduction of new terms sometimes proves to be emancipatory.

Instability appears to be a key symptomatic feature of borderline personality disorder (BPD); subjects commonly exhibit affective dysregulation, an unstable sense of self, and instability in their interpersonal relationships. To conceptualize how trauma plays a key role in generating instability, I propose that the persistent activation of 'traumatic imprints' involves distortions to central elements of what Shaun Gallagher (2024) terms 'the self-pattern'. Since music therapy can tap into the embodied, affective, prereflective, and cognitive processes that comprise the self-pattern, it holds great potential to foster a more stable sense of self. I examine how instrumental improvisation, in particular, can target narrative processes of the self-pattern by allowing subjects to explore their life story and make sense of painful memories. I then discuss how joint improvisation with a therapist has potential to target intersubjective processes of the self-pattern, which can help subjects with BPD to build their capacities for co-regulation and for navigating misattunements in social interaction.

According to Andy Clark’s Extended Mind Thesis, the operations that realize certain forms of human cognition do not do not stay neatly in the brain, but instead span brain, body, and world. While this thesis is best known as the hypothesis of extended cognition, Clark himself has wondered whether it also might be applied to affective states. What Colombetti and Roberts call the Hypothesis of Extended Affectivity says that a variety of occurrent and dispositional affective phenomena can extend. However, there are important reasons to reject this hypothesis. First, extended functionalism is in tension with the claim that affective states are essentially embodied. Second, these authors’ examples do not make a convincing case for extended affectivity. Third, their componential approach to occurrent emotions falls short given that they fail to establish that each of the components of emotion is not merely environmentally embedded, but also can extend.

Although borderline personality disorder can manifest in different ways, instability and dysregulation appear to be key symptomatic features; subjects commonly exhibit affective dysregulation, an unstable sense of self, and instability and their interpersonal relationships. To make sense of such instability, some theorists have argued that this condition centers around disruptions to self-narration and the absence of a unifying life story. If this account is roughly correct, it would support the use of narrative psychotherapy to treat BPD. However, because buried traces of childhood trauma can interfere with the formation of a coherent verbal narrative, psychotherapy on its own may not prove to be sufficient. To devise a more adequate treatment approach, I propose that we draw upon insights from enactivism and the notion of equilibration. Self-equilibration, as I understand it, is an ongoing process whereby an agent regulates and adjusts their sensorimotor and affective habits so that they become more well-integrated, coherent, and responsive to relevant considerations. In cases of BPD, trauma results in engrained, repetitive habits that keep subjects locked into defensive response patterns. Associated disruptions to self-equilibration manifest as affective instability, an unstable sense of self, and unstable interpersonal relationships. This account of BPD highlights the need for a bottom-up, body-oriented treatment approach that more directly targets implicit memories of trauma and helps subjects to modify habitual impulses. I propose that dance-movement therapy (used in conjunction with narrative psychotherapy) can help subjects with BPD to develop self-regulative capacities.

One characteristic feature of the truly malign effect of destructive, deforming institutions in contemporary neoliberal nation-states is that they systematically build up what we call cognitive walls. A cognitive wall is an entrenched or habitual belief, memory, stereotypical mental image, or emotion that acts as an effective screen against reality and truth. Well-attested cognitive phenomena like the persistence of false beliefs and the backfire effect, for example, show that cognitive walls are extremely difficult to correct, in part because they are self-reinforcing and fundamentally related to a person’s sense of identity. Insofar as people are embedded within collectively sociopathic social institutions, they pre-reflectively reproduce inflexible mental habits instead of reflectively adjusting their beliefs, affects, and actions by means of self-conscious critical thinking and feeling. We maintain that cognitive walls are a matter of someone’s being stuck in specific affective frames, and that concepts from dynamic systems theory can help us to make sense of the neurobiological dynamics involved. Dismantling these cognitive walls requires that the subject actively undertake a cognitive-affective revolution, that is, a dramatic shift in affective framing patterns. Although cognitive-affective revolution initially may seem frightening and unimaginable, nevertheless it is really possible to move toward real-world utopias, via transformative self-education and the creation of constructive, enabling institutions.

What we call political philosophy of mind fuses contemporary philosophy of mind and emancipatory political theory. On the philosophy of mind side, we draw from our own previous work on the essential embodiment theory and enactivism, together with work by Jan Slaby, John Dewey, Pierre Bourdieu, and J.J. Gibson. On the emancipatory political theory side, we draw from Kant, Schiller, Kierkegaard, early Marx, Kropotkin, Foucault, and Frankfurt School Critical Theory. We begin with the claim that human minds are necessarily and completely embodied, and inherently enactive, social, and environmentally embedded, and proceed from there to argue that social institutions partially determine and literally shape our essentially embodied minds, and thereby fundamentally affect our lives. Our focus is on social institutions in contemporary neoliberal societies, specifically higher education and mental health practice. We hold that although these social institutions shape our essentially embodied minds in a destructive, deforming, and enslaving way, it’s possible to create social institutions that are constructive, enabling, and emancipatory. According to our proposed enactive-transformative principle, enacting salient changes in the structure and complex dynamics of a social institution produces corresponding salient changes in the structure and complex dynamics of the essentially embodied minds of the people belonging to that institution.

By means of what we call reverse social engineering, one starts out with a vision of human life that actually satisfies true human needs and then, from the bottom-up, designs social institutions whose structure and dynamics promote the satisfaction of such needs. We propose that the best way to design a constructive, enabling institution is to reverse engineer it from the concept of enactive-transformative learning. Building on the work of Jack Mezirow and other transformative learning theorists, we argue that enactivism and the essential embodiment thesis jointly offer a new way to conceptualize the intended effects of such learning. From a phenomenological perspective, personal transformation can be understood as affective reframing; and from a neurobiological perspective, the development of new mental habits can be understood as the reconfiguration of highly integrated patterns of bodily engagement and response. This framework allows us to see enactive-transformative learning as a deep form of cognitive-affective change, one which alters students’ essentially embodied existential orientation. Moreover, an examination of transformative learning provides us with a general model for how to scaffold imaginative problem-solving, collective wisdom, and the development of flexible mental habits. Examples of strategies that afford affective reframing and emancipatory self-transformation include learning-centered pedagogy, activist pedagogy, and expressive arts.

According to the mind-shaping thesis, humans minds are necessarily and completely embodied; that is, they are neither merely brains, nor extended minds, yet all social institutions saliently frame and partially determine the social-dynamic patterns of essentially embodied consciousness and agency. Such literal mind-shaping is causal, partially determined by means of self-reflexive feedback loops, and irreducibly normative. According to the collective sociopathy thesis, many contemporary social institutions literally shape our essentially embodied minds and lives in destructive and deforming ways. Inside neoliberal social institutions, in particular, shared practices, enculturated expectations, and language work together to solicit habits of mind that impede human flourishing. Nevertheless, according to the collective wisdom thesis, some institutions are constructive and enabling in the sense that they make it really possible for us to self-realize, connect with others, liberate ourselves, and be deeply happy. To unpack these ideas, we look to insights from the enactivist approach in philosophy of mind and to the notions of affective framing, participatory sense-making, habit, and affordances. And on the emancipatory political theory side, we look to early Marx’s notion of social production and Ashley Taylor’s notion of robust solidarity.

Destructive, deforming social institutions are those that make it difficult or impossible for the people who belong to them to satisfy their true human needs. Drawing on Marcuse’s distinction between true human needs and false human needs, we argue that true human needs are universal across humanity and essentially bound up with human dignity in a Kantian sense. False human needs, in contrast, encompass anything that people desire, no matter how intensely or repeatedly, whose satisfaction represses, impedes, or outright destroys the satisfaction of true human needs. In contemporary neoliberal societies like the USA, people’s true human needs, both as individual and social beings, are systematically replaced by false human needs for money, property, and social status. Such collective sociopathy, we argue, can be understood as resulting from the systematic interplay of three factors: neoliberal ideology, a scientistic worldview, and coercive authoritarianism. What makes the social institutions within such societies destructive and deforming is that they centrally involve commodification, mechanization, coercion, the incentivization of desire, and false consciousness.

Although neoliberal social institutions shape the human mind in a destructive, deforming way, social institutions also have the power to help people break away from rigid mental habits. Indeed, some social institutions, working against the grain of dystopian social institutions in neoliberal societies, can make it really possible for us to self-realize, connect with others, and liberate ourselves. Constructive, enabling institutions, as we understand them, are mutually-aiding and real-world utopian in the sense that they guide the way toward progressive social activism and change in the present moment and in the actual world. Such institutions are self-realizing, organicist, dignitarian, integrative, and authenticating; and they also promote autonomy and critical consciousness. Drawing from philosophy of mind and the work of John Dewey, we also argue that constructive, enabling institutions are those that afford the development of flexible, essentially embodied mental habits. Key examples of such habits include empathy, curiosity, imagination, and humility, all of which foster collective altruism and help people to remain continually open to new insights. We point to various “disaster communities” and to social movements from the history of the American Left as real-world illustrations of such institutions.

We argue that neoliberal ideology has informed contemporary institutions of higher education in capitalist societies to such a great extent that our classical sense of education’s value and purpose has been negatively transformed and distorted into The Higher Commodification. Instead of scaffolding students’ capacities for engaged citizenry and autonomy, contemporary higher education encourages them to frame their academic pursuits in a wholly market-oriented, instrumental, self-interested way. Instead of supporting faculty members’ capacities for meaningful research, contemporary higher education trains them to view their research as a mere means to an end—keeping their job, getting promoted, or gaining professional prestige. Neoliberal values and norms thereby pervasively shape people’s habitual attitudes, behaviors, and shared expectations in ways that systematically distort and undermine authentic learning, research, and collaboration. Associated mental habits become so deeply entrenched that it becomes difficult to recognize the influence of this ideology or resist its destructive and deforming impact. Like most social institutions in neoliberal nation-states, higher education centrally involves commodification, mechanization, coercion, the incentivization of desire, and false consciousness. It therefore serves as a powerful example of collective sociopathy and of what Jan Slaby calls “mind invasion.”

Neoliberal ideology has infiltrated mental health practice and now guides the provision of mental health care. As a result, market values like individualism, self-reliance, and consumerism shape what is regarded as a rational, responsible, and “normal” mode of human agency. Mental health and illness are understood in relation to an ability to participate in society as a wage earner and consumer. We begin by discussing how the “disease model” of mental illness both reflects and advances a neoliberal agenda. We then examine how the logic of mental health practice, and its associated rhetoric of “responsibilization” and “resilience,” help to form a neoliberal mode of subjectivity. It does so by encouraging subjects to engage in self-regulation and self-governance, whereby they adjust their own affective framings so as to conform to social demands and shared expectations. This “medicalized,” over-individualized approach to mental health centrally involves commodification, mechanization, coercion, the incentivization of desire, and false consciousness. As a result, people are alienated from their true human needs and find it increasingly difficult to attain genuine mental health. Due to its destructive and deforming impact on patients and practitioners, and in view of the basic true human need for mental health, the social institution of mental health care qualifies as a fundamental example of collective sociopathy.

According to the enactivist view of the mind, there is close connection between being alive and being cognitive: to be alive is to be capable of cognitive engagements. The living organism does not passively receive and process stimuli from an external world, but rather helps to determine what counts as useful information on the basis of its structure, needs, and the way that it is structurally coupled with its surroundings. Sense-making is the process whereby it interprets environmental stimuli in reference to its survival needs. However, gauging meaning and significance in a complex social world such as ours goes well beyond mere survival and self-maintenance, and has much to do with adapting and faring well in a specific socio-cultural context. The achievement of human goals requires coordinated movement, which leads to the formation of built-up patterns of engagement and response. Over time, these characteristic patterns of movement and behavior become more engrained and come to comprise an individual’s habitual manner of sense-making. Learning and socialization play a significant role, and habits of mind are formed via interaction with values, cultural norms, and other people. Once habits form and become more engrained, there is a sense in which social norms are internalized and sedimented in the body. Cognition and affectivity therefore are best seen as socially embedded and heavily modulated by relationships and norms. This environmental influence can either (i) cultivate adaptive habits of mind that promote human flourishing, or (ii) contribute to maladaptive habits of mind that alienate people from deep-rooted human needs and interfere with overall well-being. One setting in which habits of mind are profoundly modulated is the college or university. Inside higher educational institutions guided by neoliberal ideology, individuals are habituated to toxic interaction patterns and modes of valuation. Rather than cultivating critical thinking and promoting self-realization, these institutions often undermine such capacities. College and university settings in contemporary neoliberal democracies such as the United States thereby give us a powerful example of how social institutions sometimes serve to cultivate habits of mind that impede human flourishing.

Theorists commonly maintain that addiction involves compulsion or diminished self-control. Some enactivist theorists have conceptualized this disruption to autonomous agency in terms of embodied habits that become overly rigid, so that an agent enacts this pattern of behavior even in circumstances that call for the activation of a very different set of habits. What is more, because addiction crowds out other goals and priorities, agents may become more one-dimensional and begin to lose a hold on values and commitments that are important to them. Rather than engaging in self-regulation to balance competing priorities and gain a better understanding of how different aspects of their identity relate to one another, agent’s lives become dominated by addictive behavior. I argue that enactivist notions of _habit_ and _self-equilibration_ can help to make sense of how the disruptions to autonomous agency characteristic of addiction are linked to diminished self-insight.

Theorists commonly maintain that addiction involves compulsion or diminished self-control. Some enactivist theorists have conceptualized this disruption to autonomous agency in terms of embodied habits that become overly rigid, so that an agent enacts this pattern of behavior even in circumstances that call for the activation of a very different set of habits. What is more, because addiction crowds out other goals and priorities, agents may become more one-dimensional and begin to lose a hold on values and commitments that are important to them. Rather than engaging in self-regulation to balance competing priorities and gain a better understanding of how different aspects of their identity relate to one another, agent’s lives become dominated by addictive behavior. I argue that enactivist notions of habit and self-equilibration can help to make sense of how the disruptions to autonomous agency characteristic of addiction are linked to diminished self-insight.

Enactive psychiatry challenges a traditional medical model and its guiding assumption that it is the source of mental disorder in the individual and their malfunctioning brain. Instead, it emphasizes that mental disorder is fully embodied and involves a disruption in the relationship between an agent and their world. Proponents have argued this enactive approach to psychiatry offers a way to view mental disorders in more holistic terms, recognize the role of social factors, and make psychiatric practices more just. However, critics have argued that this approach (1) remains overly individualistic, (2) does not provide us with the means of critiquing problematic social norms, and (3) ends up unduly pathologizing neurodiversity. To address the first criticism, I discuss how the enactivist notion of mindshaping helps to make sense of the way in which sense-making is deeply socially embedded. To address the second criticism, I argue that social norms themselves can be “unhealthy” in the sense that they lack “adaptive openness” and make it difficult for diverse forms of life to flourish. To address the third charge, I argue that although enactivism pushes us to challenge a social model of disability, it is fully consistent with the neurodiversity movement’s practical and political aims.

Relational trauma can be understood as a psychological injury that occurs in the context of abusive interpersonal relationships and appears to be correlated with a wide array of mental illnesses. However, one potential harm of trauma that has not received much attention from philosophers is the threat it poses to authenticity. To understand why relational trauma potentially creates impediments to authentic agency, we need to consider two other phenomena that are commonly associated with it: (i) dissociation, and (ii) diminished habitual trust. Whereas trauma-related dissociation commonly involves bodily alienation and detachment from the self, diminished habitual trust often leads to alienation from others. I maintain that dissociative detachment and diminished habitual trust often are mutually reinforcing and that, together, they can cause agents to become disconnected from themselves, others, and the reality of what has happened to them. What implications does this have for authentic agency among traumatized individuals? After outlining existing conceptions, I emphasize the important sense in which authenticity is relational and scaffolded by social connections. I also discuss several competencies that undergird authenticity and argue that the interplay between dissociative detachment and attenuated habitual trust can make it difficult for traumatized individuals to develop and sustain these competencies. Thus, the trauma they have experienced impedes their ability to conduct their lives in accordance with their genuine cares and desires.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Externalist Psychiatry, Mindshaping, and Embodied InjusticeMichelle Maiese, PhD (bio)Ongaro maintains that although enactivist approaches to psychiatry help to account for the integration of biological, psychological, and social factors, they gloss over an important distinction between patient-centered (bio and psycho) approaches and externalist (social) approaches to mental illness. The central problem is that they lack the means to account for the social causes of illness and do not specify how social determinants can be addressed in the clinic. Since much of an organism’s interaction with the external world is social in kind, the implementation of externalist psychiatry could make the enactivist model truly biopsychosocial and usher in novel forms of treatment.According to Ongaro, this externalist orientation gives rise to an important question about ontology: what are the social causes of psychiatric illness made of, and how can these be conveyed in the clinic to facilitate treatment? A “shared social etiology” would allow for a “rich explanatory framework” that accounts for the social causes of mental disorder. For example, by pointing to spirit affliction as the social cause of mental illness, the Akha transform amorphous pains (which are difficult to capture naturalistically) into meaningful and familiar experiences. Such an approach involves combining a realist understanding of biopsychosocial integration with an anti-realist, social constructivist outlook on social etiology. For them, an illness that is explained as a rupture of a human-spirit relationship is experienced as a ‘problem in living’ that affects the person in an immediate and meaningful way, and can be treated via ritual action.Ongaro then considers social causation in a more familiar context, one where social determinants of mental illness include factors such as employment. Losing one’s job is a significant life event because it signals a change in social status and prompts feelings of uselessness. Ongaro characterizes these feelings of low subjective status as “socially constructed experiences that depend on collectively ingrained ideas about status, value, and self-realization that a person accepts—one could say ‘believes in’—by virtue of living in a particular society.” Because social worlds differ and what counts as social defeat is culturally specific, [End Page 333] social determinants of illness such as unemployment are either negligible or non-applicable in Ahka (non-capitalist) society.To acknowledge the impact of these social constructions, Ongaro maintains, clinical psychiatry should abandon its commitment to naturalism and embrace methodological constructivism instead. Methodological naturalism treats social causes as ‘real’ and holds that the social causes of disorder should be investigated using the scientific method; research focuses on social determinants, social stressors, and social capital. However, despite acknowledging that declining mental health correlates significantly with political and economic factors, Ongaro maintains that methodological naturalism when it comes to social causes will be insufficient to bring about meaningful changes in clinical practice. For one thing, individual psychiatrists lack the political power and economic resources to bring about the sorts of societal changes that are needed to address social determinants of health. Second, social determinants are probabilistic factors rather than definitive causes of mental disorder; psychiatric illnesses often do not have a well-defined cause or a clear-cut social trigger. Third, an explanation that points to ‘lack of social capital’ does “not possess the immediacy, emotional charge, and embodied meaning that could make them therapeutically effective in the same way that Akha explanations for spirit afflictions are.”Philosophically, Ongaro’s embrace of ‘methodological constructivism’ when it comes to social etiology entails a commitment to antirealism about social causation and fictionalism more specifically. Wilkinson (2022) notes that the core tenet of psychiatric fictionalism is that “when we engage in psychiatric discourse... we are not attributing a robust, objective property, but are instead engaging with a useful, perhaps even an indispensable, fiction” (p. 91). For Ongaro, this fiction consists in a meaningful explanatory narrative about the social causes of illness. However, if we take the notion of integration seriously, and characterize this integration naturalistically (as Ongaro does), then questions arise as to how these fictional narratives about social causes can impact people both biologically and psychologically, and thereby have such a powerful impact.I argue that an enactivist approach to treatment will be...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Externalist Psychiatry, Mindshaping, and Embodied InjusticeMichelle Maiese, PhD (bio)Ongaro maintains that although enactivist approaches to psychiatry help to account for the integration of biological, psychological, and social factors, they gloss over an important distinction between patient-centered (bio and psycho) approaches and externalist (social) approaches to mental illness. The central problem is that they lack the means to account for the social causes of illness and do not specify how social determinants can be addressed in the clinic. Since much of an organism’s interaction with the external world is social in kind, the implementation of externalist psychiatry could make the enactivist model truly biopsychosocial and usher in novel forms of treatment.According to Ongaro, this externalist orientation gives rise to an important question about ontology: what are the social causes of psychiatric illness made of, and how can these be conveyed in the clinic to facilitate treatment? A “shared social etiology” would allow for a “rich explanatory framework” that accounts for the social causes of mental disorder. For example, by pointing to spirit affliction as the social cause of mental illness, the Akha transform amorphous pains (which are difficult to capture naturalistically) into meaningful and familiar experiences. Such an approach involves combining a realist understanding of biopsychosocial integration with an anti-realist, social constructivist outlook on social etiology. For them, an illness that is explained as a rupture of a human-spirit relationship is experienced as a ‘problem in living’ that affects the person in an immediate and meaningful way, and can be treated via ritual action.Ongaro then considers social causation in a more familiar context, one where social determinants of mental illness include factors such as employment. Losing one’s job is a significant life event because it signals a change in social status and prompts feelings of uselessness. Ongaro characterizes these feelings of low subjective status as “socially constructed experiences that depend on collectively ingrained ideas about status, value, and self-realization that a person accepts—one could say ‘believes in’—by virtue of living in a particular society.” Because social worlds differ and what counts as social defeat is culturally specific, [End Page 333] social determinants of illness such as unemployment are either negligible or non-applicable in Ahka (non-capitalist) society.To acknowledge the impact of these social constructions, Ongaro maintains, clinical psychiatry should abandon its commitment to naturalism and embrace methodological constructivism instead. Methodological naturalism treats social causes as ‘real’ and holds that the social causes of disorder should be investigated using the scientific method; research focuses on social determinants, social stressors, and social capital. However, despite acknowledging that declining mental health correlates significantly with political and economic factors, Ongaro maintains that methodological naturalism when it comes to social causes will be insufficient to bring about meaningful changes in clinical practice. For one thing, individual psychiatrists lack the political power and economic resources to bring about the sorts of societal changes that are needed to address social determinants of health. Second, social determinants are probabilistic factors rather than definitive causes of mental disorder; psychiatric illnesses often do not have a well-defined cause or a clear-cut social trigger. Third, an explanation that points to ‘lack of social capital’ does “not possess the immediacy, emotional charge, and embodied meaning that could make them therapeutically effective in the same way that Akha explanations for spirit afflictions are.”Philosophically, Ongaro’s embrace of ‘methodological constructivism’ when it comes to social etiology entails a commitment to antirealism about social causation and fictionalism more specifically. Wilkinson (2022) notes that the core tenet of psychiatric fictionalism is that “when we engage in psychiatric discourse... we are not attributing a robust, objective property, but are instead engaging with a useful, perhaps even an indispensable, fiction” (p. 91). For Ongaro, this fiction consists in a meaningful explanatory narrative about the social causes of illness. However, if we take the notion of integration seriously, and characterize this integration naturalistically (as Ongaro does), then questions arise as to how these fictional narratives about social causes can impact people both biologically and psychologically, and thereby have such a powerful impact.I argue that an enactivist approach to treatment will be...

Theorists commonly maintain that addiction involves compulsion or diminished self-control. Some enactivist theorists have conceptualized this disruption to autonomous agency in terms of embodied habits that become overly rigid, so that an agent enacts this pattern of behavior even in circumstances that call for the activation of a very different set of habits. What is more, because addiction crowds out other goals and priorities, agents may become more one-dimensional and begin to lose a hold on values and commitments that are important to them. Rather than engaging in self-regulation to balance competing priorities and gain a better understanding of how different aspects of their identity relate to one another, agent’s lives become dominated by addictive behavior. I argue that enactivist notions of habit and self-equilibration can help to make sense of how the disruptions to autonomous agency characteristic of addiction are linked to diminished self-insight.

In accordance with the constructive, enabling approach to responding to critical commentaries, we’ve identified eleven more-or-less distinct “worries” that the commentators have expressed about MBP, and have attributed each such worry to one or more of the commentators; correspondingly, we’ve responded to the worries one-by-one, by construing them as critical inputs to the work that we’ve been doing, both before and after the publication of MBP, for the purposes of grounding, elaborating, and extending that work toward The Shape of Lives to Come project. Then, we conclude by briefly describing The Shape of Lives To Come project and how our commentators’ worries have made creative contributions to this new work-in-progress, by shaping our philosophical thinking in organic, generative ways.

The Mind-Body Politic is a study in the new discipline of political philosophy of mind, that aims to develop an embodied and enactive theory of social institutions, building on our 2009 study of the mind-body relation and mental causation, Embodied Minds in Action. In this sequel, we distinguish between (i) destructive, deforming social institutions–characteristic of contemporary neoliberal nation-states, and (ii) constructive, enabling social institutions, and defend what we call the mindshaping thesis and the enactive-transformative principle. The upshot is an activist, transformative philosophical theory.

Although mental health professionals traditionally have been viewed as sole experts and decision-makers, there is increasing awareness that the experiential knowledge of former patients can make an important contribution to mental health practices. I argue that current patients likewise possess a kind of expertise, and that including them as active participants in diagnosis and treatment can strengthen their autonomy and allow them to build up important habits and skills. To make sense of these agential benefits and describe how patients might act as co-regulators of a therapeutic encounter, I look to the enactivist notion of “participatory sensemaking”.

Existing phenomenological accounts of anorexia nervosa suggest that various forms of bodily alienation and distorted bodily self-consciousness are common among subjects with this condition. Subjects often experience a sense of distance or estrangement from their body and its needs and demands. What is more, first-person reports and existing qualitative research reveal struggles with authenticity and a search for identity. Is there a connection between the two? I argue that to gain a fuller understanding of anorexia nervosa, how it is experienced by subjects, and why many of them express concerns about authenticity, we need to look more closely at their experiences of bodily alienation and the ways in which they encounter a diminished sense of bodily ownership. After presenting a general overview of the various sorts of bodily alienation that appear to be characteristic of anorexia nervosa, I outline three conceptions of authenticity and introduce some empirical evidence indicating that many subjects with this condition have concerns about identity and authenticity. Then, I examine how different sorts of bodily alienation have the potential to compromise authenticity at various stages of the disorder. Throughout, I draw from several first-person accounts of anorexia nervosa to illustrate and support my claims.

Open peer commentary on the article “Loving the Earth by Loving a Place: A Situated Approach to the Love of Nature” by Laura Candiotto. Abstract: Candiotto appeals to the panpsychist notion of “becoming native” and the enactivist notion of “loving sense-making” to develop a situated approach to the love of nature. Although I am fully on board with Candiotto’s claim that love of nature is of paramount importance and that community-based local interventions to preserve the Earth are urgently needed, I worry that an account that conceptualizes love of nature in terms of participatory sense-making is on shaky ground. The supposition that the Earth, localized in particular places, is a partner in a participatory process of creating meaning will strike many readers as implausible, and thus may prove to be inadequate in motivating interventions to preserve the Earth.

Mun’s proposed taxonomy of theories of emotions highlights important commonalities and differences among a wide range of philosophical and psychological accounts and provides an astute mapping of the theoretical landscape. My critical comments focus primarily on the metaphysical account of the mind-body relation that Mun presents, and the implications of this “semantic dualist” account for three of the book’s central topics: (1) conscious experience, (2) underived intentionality, and (3) what it means to provide an embodied cognitive theory of emotions.

A growing number of theorists have looked to the enactivist approach in philosophy of mind or the affordance-based approach from ecological psychology to make sense of a wide variety of phenomena; some theorists believe that these theoretical accounts can offer rich insights about the nature of mental disorders, their etiology, and their characteristic symptoms. I argue that theorists who adopt such approaches also should embrace the further claim that all mental disorders are affective disorders. First, enactivist accounts of mental disorder push us toward such a view insofar as they characterize such conditions in terms of disordered sense-making and conceptualize sense-making as fundamentally affective. Second, conceptions of mental disorder that emphasize affordance perception likewise motivate such a view insofar as they highlight the role that affectivity plays in the disclosure of action possibilities. What is more, both sense-making and affordance disclosure are best understood as processes of selective attention and responsiveness that rely heavily on affectivity. To illustrate and support these claims, I discuss how (a) language disturbances in schizophrenia and (b) “context blindness” in autism both result from disruptions to affectivity and selective attention that make it difficult for subjects to engage effectively with relevant affordances.

Existing research on the “weapons effect” indicates that simply seeing a weapon can prime aggressive thoughts and appraisals and increase aggressive behavior. But how and why does this happen? I begin by discussing prevailing explanations of the weapons effect and propose that these accounts tend to be over-intellectualistic insofar as they downplay or overlook the important role played by affectivity. In my view, insights from the fields of situated affectivity and enactivism help us to understand how cognitive and affective processes jointly contribute to the weapons effect. Insofar as the presence of weapons alters subject’s bodily-affective orientation and thereby brings about embodied mindshaping, it changes the way they engage with and understand their surroundings. To understand the weapons effect, we will need to examine the constitutive interdependency of appraisal and affectivity and the way in which they jointly motivate action. My proposed account emphasizes the role of affectivity in affordance perception and the way in which subjects gauge the meaning of an object according to its action-possibilities.

This book brings together insights from the enactivist approach in philosophy of mind and existing work on autonomous agency from both philosophy of action and feminist philosophy. It then utilizes this proposed account of autonomous agency to make sense of the impairments in agency that commonly occur in cases of dissociative identity disorder, mood disorders, and psychopathy. While much of the existing philosophical work on autonomy focuses on threats that come from outside the agent, this book addresses how inner conflict, instability of character, or motivational issues can disrupt agency. In the first half of the book, the author conceptualizes what it means to be self-governing and to exercise autonomous agency. In the second half, she investigates the extent to which agents with various forms of mental disorder are capable of exercising autonomy. In her view, many forms of mental disorder involve disruptions to self-governance, so that agents lack sufficient control over their intentional behavior or are unable to formulate and execute coherent action plans. However, this does not mean that they are utterly incapable of autonomous agency; rather, their ability to exercise this capacity is compromised in important respects. Understanding these agential impairments can help to deepen our understanding of what it means to exercise autonomy, and also devise more effective treatments that restore subjects' agency. Autonomy, Enactivism, and Mental Disorder will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, philosophy of psychiatry, and feminist philosophy.