Michelle Maiese

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.

Self-illness ambiguity involves difficulty distinguishing between patterns of thought, feeling, and action that are the ‘products’ of one's illness and those that are genuinely one's own. Bortolan maintains that the values, cares, and preferences that define someone’s personal identity are rooted in intentional emotions and non-intentional affects (i.e., existential feelings and moods). The uncertainty that comprises self-illness ambiguity results from the experience of moods or existential feelings that are in tension with ones that the patient experienced prior to the onset of illness. Building on these ideas, I examine how the notion of ‘affordance’ can shed further light on the dynamics and phenomenology of self-illness ambiguity. In my view, such ambiguity results from a lack of diachronic continuity and stability in a subject’s field of affordances.

Some critical philosophers of race have argued that whiteness can be understood as a technology of affect and that white supremacy is comprised partly of unconscious habits that result in racialized perception. In an effort to deepen our understanding of the affective and bodily dimensions of white supremacy and the ways in which affective habits are socially produced, I look to insights from situated affectivity. Theorists in this field maintain that affective experience is not simply a matter of felt inner states, but rather socially and environmentally embedded and fundamentally relational. Jan Slaby presents the concept of an ‘affective arrangement’ as a way to approach affectivity in terms of relational dynamics unfolding within a particular setting. Applying this concept to the societal level, Paul Schuetze introduces the notion of ‘affective milieu.’ I argue that these notions of ‘affective arrangement’ and ‘affective milieu,’ together with an organicist account of habit, can help to illuminate the workings of white supremacy in the United States. My proposed account highlights the extent to which white supremacy is an affective, bodily phenomenon and how racist habits are formed over the course of learning and ongoing affective engagement, in the context of various social settings. Crucially, these affective habits are fully bound up with habits of appraisal, interpretation, and judgment, and therefore inseparable from how subjects come to see and understand their world.

One of humans’ distinctive cognitive abilities is that they develop an array of capacities through an enculturation process. In “Cognition as a Social Skill,” Sally points to one of the dangers associated with enculturation: ideological oppression. To conceptualize how such oppression takes root, Haslanager appeals to notions of mindshaping and social coordination, whereby people participate in oppressive social practices unthinkingly or even willingly. Arguably, an appeal to mindshaping provides a new kind of argument, grounded in philosophy of mind, which supports the claims that feminist and anti-racist want to defend. However, some theorists worry that Haslanger’s account does not shed much light on how individuals could exert their agency to resist oppression. I argue that enactivist conceptions of mindshaping and habit can help us to make sense of the power of social influences and how they have the potential to both enable and undermine cognition and agency. This moves us toward increased understanding of the workings of social oppression—distinguishing between constructive and enabling forms of heteronomy, and overdetermining and pernicious modes that lead to atrophied moral cognition and a narrowing of the field of affordances.

In this insightful and well-argued article, Osler aims to provide a more fine-grained, phenomenological account of anorectic bodily experience. She notes that although anorexia nervosa often is understood in terms of a distorted body image, this approach does not exhaustively or accurately reflect many subjects' bodily experiences, and also unduly privileges a third-person perspective over first-person accounts. In addition, focusing primarily on body image gives rise to the impression that AN is a form of radical dieting gone wrong as a result of misperceiving or misjudging one's body size or shape. Osler emphasizes that AN is not a static disorder, but rather involves numerous stages. To account for the...

Work on situated cognition and affectivity holds that cognitive and affective processes always occur within, depend upon, and, perhaps, are even partially constituted by the surrounding social and environmental contexts. What some philosophers call a ‘mental institution’ consists of various tools and technologies that help people to solve a particular problem and scaffold their cognitive and affective processes in various ways. Examples include legal systems, scientific practice, and educational systems. I propose that insofar as it centers around technology and involves a particular set of rules, practices, and shared expectations, the online learning environment can be understood as a mental institution. It shapes not only what and how students learn, but also how they understand the value and fundamental aims of learning. I argue that insofar as this mental institution both reflects and perpetuates neoliberal aims and values, it is in danger of limiting students’ communicative abilities and soliciting them to view higher education in distorted, limiting ways.

In Embodied Minds in Action, Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese work out a unified treatment of three fundamental philosophical problems: the mind-body problem, the problem of mental causation, and the problem of action. This unified treatment rests on two basic claims. The first is that conscious, intentional minds like ours are essentially embodied. This entails that our minds are necessarily spread throughout our living, organismic bodies and belong to their complete neurobiological constitution. So minds like ours are necessarily alive. The second claim is that essentially embodied minds are self-organizing thermodynamic systems. This entails that our mental lives consist in the possibility and actuality of moving our own living organismic bodies through space and time, by means of our conscious desires. The upshot is that we are essentially minded animals who help to create the natural world through our own agency. This doctrine--the Essential Embodiment Theory--is a truly radical idea which subverts the traditionally opposed and seemingly exhaustive categories of Dualism and Materialism, and offers a new paradigm for contemporary mainstream research in the philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience

David Rosenthal’s higher-order thought theory says that for a mental state to be conscious, it must be accompanied by a higher-order thought about that state. One objection to Rosenthal’s account is that HOTs do not secure what Sydney Shoemaker has called ‘immunity to error through misidentification’. I will argue that Rosenthal’s discussion of dissociative identity order fails to salvage his account from this objection and that his thin immunity principle is in tension with cases of somatoparaphrenia. Rather than showing that self-awareness consists in identification, an examination of the delusions of disownership found in dissociative identity disorder and somatoparaphrenia lends support to IEM and highlights an important distinction between perspectival ownership and personal ownership.

Building on contemporary research in embodied cognition, enactivism, and the extended mind, this book explores how social institutions in contemporary neoliberal nation-states systematically affect our thoughts, feelings, and agency. Human beings are, necessarily, social animals who create and belong to social institutions. But social institutions take on a life of their own, and literally shape the minds of all those who belong to them, for better or worse, usually without their being self-consciously aware of it. Indeed, in contemporary neoliberal societies, it is generally for the worse. In The Mind-Body Politic, Michelle Maiese and Robert Hanna work out a new critique of contemporary social institutions by deploying the special standpoint of the philosophy of mind—in particular, the special standpoint of the philosophy of what they call essentially embodied minds—and make a set of concrete, positive proposals for radically changing both these social institutions and also our essentially embodied lives for the better.

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 of mind. We then discuss the significance of our view for understanding autistic habits of mind and consider why these embodied habits are sometimes a poor fit with neurotypical mental institutions. We conclude by considering how these insights highlight the two-way, extended nature of social impairments in autism, and how this extended picture might assist in constructing more inclusive mental institutions and intervention strategies.

This paper utilizes the enactivist notion of ‘sense-making’ to discuss the nature of depression and examine some implications for treatment. As I understand it, sensemaking is fully embodied, fundamentally affective, and thoroughly embedded in a social environment. I begin by presenting an enactivist conceptualization of affective intentionality and describing how this general mode of intentional directedness to the world is disrupted in cases of major depressive disorder. Next, I utilize this enactivist framework to unpack the notion of ‘temporal desituatedness,’ and maintain that the characteristic symptoms of depression result from a disruption to the future-directed structure of affective intentionality. This can be conceptualized as a loss of “online intelligence” and a shrinking of the field of affordances. Then, I argue that two of the standard modes of treatments for depression, medication and cognitive behavioral therapy, are not fully sufficient means of restoring online intelligence, and that these limitations stem partly from the approaches’ implicit commitment to a brain-bound, overly cognitivist view of the mind. I recommend expressive arts interventions such as dance-movement therapy and music therapy as important supplementary treatment methods that deserve further consideration. Insofar as they revitalize subjects’ bodies and emotions, cultivate an openness to the future, and promote self-insight and social synchrony, these treatment modes not only reflect key insights of enactivism, but also offer great potential for lasting healing.

About 75% of subjects diagnosed with schizophrenia experience auditory-verbal hallucination and report "hearing voices" that are not actually present. One notable feature of AVH is that it seems involuntary and not directly in the subject's control. With regard to content, these represented voices make utterances, typically commands and evaluations, and either are directed to the patient or speak about her in the third person. Voices may echo the subject's thoughts or comment on the subject's behavior and, in some cases, the voices seem to carry on conversations or even argue. Subjects often experience the voices as having pitch, timbre, and intensity, and as having a...

The DSM characterizes major depressive disorder partly in temporal terms: the depressive mood must last for at least two weeks, and also must impact the subject "most of the day, nearly every day." However, from the standpoint of phenomenological psychopathology, the long-lasting quality of the condition hardly captures the distinctiveness of depression. While the DSM refers to objective time as measured by clocks and calendars, what is especially striking about depression is the distortions to lived time that it involves. But is there any relation between a) these disruptions to temporal experience and b) the tendency for depressive symptoms to persist and endure? To explore the connection between lived time and objective time, I investigate the embodied and enactive nature of intentionality among subjects suffering from depression. What I call 'affective framing' is a spontaneous, pre-reflective way of filtering information that involves bodily attunement and allows subjects to focus their attention on what they feel is important. I will argue that affective framing ordinarily has a forward-looking temporal structure and a "teleological direction" that is rooted in our embodiment. However, depression involves a distortion in future-directed intentionality, so that a subject becomes temporally desituated and cut off from the future. This contributes to many of the characteristic features of depression, including apparent lack of motivation, inability to imagine future possibilities, alterations in lived time, and a sense that one is "stuck." To gain a better understanding of this disruption to the futuredirected structure of affective framing in cases of depression, I look to concepts from complex dynamic systems theory and the notion of 'habit.' My proposed account aims to shed light on how a disruption to future-directedness impacts bodily attunement and reinforces depression as a long-term condition.

The Feeling Body applies several ideas from the enactive approach to the field of affective science, with the aim of both developing enactivism as well as reconceptualizing various affective phenomena. The book is organized into six chapters that examine primordial affectivity (chapter 1), the nature of emotional episodes and moods (chapters 2 and 3), enactive appraisal (chapter 4), the bodily feelings associated with emotional experience (chapter 5), affective neuro-physio-phenomenology (chapter 6), and the affective dimension of intersubjectivity (chapter 7). Giovanna Colombetti’s discussion of these topics effectively integrates scientific research and phenomenological descriptions of lived experience. What results is an insightful and genuinely interdisciplinary discussion of emotion that will be of interest to affective scientists, emotion theorists, phenomenologists, and proponents of enactivism.The version of enactivism that Colombetti draws upon is the theory originally formula ..

I will argue that the asynchronous discussion format commonly used in online courses has little hope of bringing about transformative learning, and that this is because engaging with another as a person involves adopting a personal stance, comprised of affective and bodily relatedness (Ratcliffe 2007, 23). Interpersonal engagement ordinarily is fully embodied to the extent that communication relies heavily on individuals’ postures, gestures, and facial expressions. Subjects involved in face-to-face interaction can perceive others’ desires and feelings on the basis of their expressions and movements, to which they become attuned by way of bodily resonance. Moreover, social cognition is enactive in the sense that parties do not passively receive information from their environments, but instead actively participate in the generation of meaning. They do so not in isolation, but instead via ongoing engagement and coordination with their interaction partners, so that sense-making becomes a shared activity. This paves the way for what I will call ‘participatory sense-making.’ To the extent that it involves asynchronous discussion and disembodied social engagement, online learning severs these interactive links between students and makes this sort of participatory sense-making unlikely.

Education theorists have emphasized that transformative learning is not simply a matter of students gaining access to new knowledge and information, but instead centers upon personal transformation: it alters students’ perspectives, interpretations, and responses. How should learning that brings about this sort of self-transformation be understood from the perspectives of philosophy of mind and cognitive science? Jack Mezirow has described transformative learning primarily in terms of critical reflection, meta-cognitive reasoning, and the questioning of assumptions and beliefs. And within mainstream philosophy of mind, there has been a long-standing assumption that cognition and thought are brain-based, computational, disembodied processes that occur separately from emotion and affect. According to this view, selftransformation might be construed as the forging of new neural connections and the development of new cognitive “programs.” However, I will argue that the literature on embodiment and enactivism that has emerged in recent years offers us a different and more productive way to conceptualize the intended effects of transformative learning. From the standpoint of enactivism, the experience of transformative learning is thoroughly bound up with the cognitive shifts that it involves, and it also involves significant changes to the neurobiological dynamics of the living body. Moreover, personal transformation is not simply something that happens to subjects, but rather a process in which they are actively and dynamically engaged. In addition, this enactivist approach emphasizes that the learning process is fully embodied and fundamentally affective. From a phenomenological perspective, personal transformation can be understood as a pronounced alteration in cognitive-affective orientation; and from a neurobiological perspective, the development of new habits of mind can be understood as the formation of highly integrated patterns of bodily engagement and response. The upshot is that it is not just subjects’ brains that are altered over the course of transformative learning, but also their overall bodily and affective attunement to their surroundings.

Stephens and Graham maintain that in cases of thought insertion, the sense of ownership is preserved, but there is a defect in the sense of agency. However, these theorists overlook the possibility that subjectivity might be preserved despite a defect in the sense of ownership. The claim that schizophrenia centers upon a loss of a sense of ownership is supported by an examination of some of the other notable disownership symptoms of the disorder, such as bodily alienation and experiences of “unworlding.” Is there a way to make sense of the “underlying characteristic modification” that ties together the various symptoms of schizophrenia and disrupts subjects’ “hold” on their own bodies and surroundings? I will argue that what accounts for subjects’ usual sense of ownership are fully embodied processes of causal-contextual information integration, which are made possible by subjects’ affective framing patterns. Attenuated affective framings lead to a loss of a sense of ownership and cause subjects to lose their “grip” on bodily sensations and mental states, which ultimately can result in experiences of thought insertion. I will conclude with some brief remarks about implications for treatment, and point to several body-centered intervention methods that might help to restore subjects’ sense of ownership

Few theorists would challenge the idea that affect and emotion directly influence decision-making and moral judgment. There is good reason to think that they also significantly assist in decision-making and judgment, and in fact are necessary for fully effective moral cognition. However, they are not sufficient. Deliberation and more reflective thought processes likewise play a crucial role, and in fact are inseparable from affective processes. I will argue that while the dual-process account of moral judgment set forth by Craigie (2011) has great merit, it fails to appreciate fully the extent to which affective and reflective processes are not only integrated, but also mutually interdependent. Evidence from psychopathy indicates that when reflective processes are not assisted adequately by what I will call ?affective framing?, and moral cognition is of the ?cooler,? less emotionally-informed variety, what results is not effective cognitive functioning, but rather psychopathology. My proposed account of affective framing aims to make sense of the way in which affect plays a strictly necessary and integral role not just in intuitive moral responses, but also in reflective moral judgments, so that moral cognition is accomplished by the joint operation of affective processes and reflective reasoning processes.

This paper examines two influential theoretical frameworks, set forth by Russell Barkley (1997) and Thomas Brown (2005), and argues that important headway in understanding attention deficit hyperactivity disorder can be made if we acknowledge the way in which human cognition and action are essentially embodied and enactive. The way in which we actively make sense of the world is structured by our bodily dynamics and our sensorimotor engagement with our surroundings. These bodily dynamics are linked to an individual's concerns and felt needs, so that what she attends to in perception, decision-making, and action is partially constituted by her cares and concerns. What I call ?affective framing? engages the whole living body, and ordinarily contributes to attentional focusing, working memory, goal-formulation, and action-monitoring. However, due to affective framing deficits, subjects with ADHD find it difficult to focus their attention, kindle their motivation, and systematically simplify cognitive procedures according to considerations of relevance, salience, and context. Thus, what is impaired in ADHD is not simply a set of executive brain functions, but rather a range of bodily dynamics through which subjects engage with their world. For this reason, intensive behavioral intervention that engages the whole living body may be the most effective, lasting treatment for ADHD