Margus Ott

This book analyses some of the seminal texts of the Chinese tradition and shows how they exemplify aspects of embodiment theory: the Analects of Confucius, the Zhuangzi, and the Treatise on Music. Margus Ott also develops far-reaching possibilities of an embodied philosophy. The embodied understanding did not go unchallenged in Ancient China. There were important counter-currents, most notably the Mohists and the so-called Legalists. By using embodiment theory Ott demonstrates how these ideas can be seen as a decontextualizing tendency of thought that plays an important role in human affairs.

I discuss Extended Cognition theory in relation to Confucius’s Analects, the Mozi, and the Zhuangzi. Extendedness is treated as part of an approach that sees cognition as embodied, embedded, enacted, extended and affective. A common feature of extended cognition views is their resistance to the Cartesian split between extension and thinking and as squeezed between two other capacities that involve extension, namely perception and action. This creates the “classical sandwich”: extensive input —unextended symbolic processing —extensive output. In the Chinese tradition, an embodied understanding of knowledge is dominant. Yet, we can discern two directions for its development by thinkers, either towards contextualization and engagement, or towards decontextualization and disengagement. I shall illustrate the two positions using examples from the Analects and the Mozi. They imply two different directions in furthering or extending knowledge, towards intensity and towards extensity. In the final part, the Zhuangzi is presented as an excellent example of an embodied and extended view of cognition, but which at the same time also takes the decontextualising direction to the utmost.

While talking about comparative philosophy, we should presumably know what philosophy is. In this paper, the concepts of interpenetration, intensity, and juxtaposition are proposed as philosophical tools to analyse phenomena, including philosophy itself. The axis of interpenetration-juxtaposition is discussed in three domains: embodiment, speaking, and thinking. The role of philosophy is seen, on different levels of interpenetration, as redistribution of concepts, resonance of intensities, and thawing of actualities. In comparative philosophy involving texts from different traditions, these effects should be especially notable.