Overview

This collection brings together 14 essays by international specialists in Medieval and Renaissance culture and provides a general and a period-specific introduction to distributed cognition and the cognitive humanities. The essays bring recent insights in cognitive science and philosophy of mind to bear on how cognition is seen as distributed across brain, body and world. The volume includes essays on law, history, drama, literature, art, music, philosophy, science and medicine, covering topics such as the mind, life and soul; the body and environment; the emotions; language and linguistic theories; theory of mind and interaction theory; the self and subjectivity; social, material and conceptual environments; the memory arts, orality and literacy; and literature and the arts.

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9781474438131

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Reviews

"This original book should command the attention of scholars far beyond the set who subscribe to the 'distributed cognition' philosophy. It stimulates questions about analogous ideas of a dynamic mind-brain-body-world relation in the medieval and Renaissance periods - in philosophy, literature, drama, and medicine - and about ways in which thinking was constrained and enabled by tools.-- ""David d'Avray, University College London"" This volume is part of a larger and extraordinarily rich project that involves applying principles of distributed cognition to areas of the humanities. It's an excellent example of how one can use distributed cognition as a method to provide nuanced insights into issues that have remained obscure or dark from other perspectives. Can 21st-century science of the mind throw light on medieval and Renaissance minds? Can medieval and Renaissance texts, artworks, performances and practices contribute a deeper understanding of mind more generally as it manifests across material and epistemic environments, social relations and cultural institutions? This volume answers in the affirmative and in detail and it promises to push the arts and sciences of mind to new highs.-- ""Shaun Gallagher, The University of Memphis"""

Author Information

Miranda Anderson is an Anniversary Fellow at the University of Stirling and an Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on cognitive approaches to literature and culture. She is the author of The Renaissance Extended Mind (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Michael Wheeler is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Stirling. He is the author of Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step (MIT, 2005). He is co-editor of Heidegger and Cognitive Science (Palgrave, 2012) and The Mechanical Mind in History (MIT, 2008).

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