Autopoietic enactivism (AE) has over the last two decades undoubtedly been at the forefront of the “embodiment revolution” in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. It has developed a “radical” and influential account of embodiment which maintains that cognition is constitutively dependent on the living body. AE presents a naturalist but non-reductive framework in which the body can be understood both as an autonomous system and subjective sense-making agent. According to AE this account should serve as the core basis from which to develop a truly embodied cognition paradigm worthy of challenging traditional cognitivism. The paper will present AE’s account of the body in order to examine and critically evaluate it. This evaluation will explore certain conceptual ambiguities and theoretical incongruences which are at the root of two difficulties for AE’s account: (i) it highlights a potential anthropocentric and anthropomorphic bias; and (ii) it is too abstract, synchronic, and does not pay sufficient attention to the historical, sociocultural dimension of embodiment. The paper concludes by drawing from recent work in the sociology of the body to both support this reading of AE and also as a possible means to improve on it.

Key words: anthropomorphism, enactivism, embodied cognitive science, embodiment, sense-making, the body multiple.

Excerpt: The goals of this paper are to show that mainstream approaches to studying decision-making – accepting assumptions of traditional cognitive science and research practices – provide a very limited account of decision-making, and to outline a better starting point for understanding and researching decision-making.

In the past two decades, the notion of embodiment has been quickly gaining currency in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. Although virtually unknown at the beginning of the 1990's, it has now become, in the guise of embodied and enactive cognitive science, a serious contender against the classical (cognitivist) conceptions of mind, cognition, and consciousness. By drawing on the thematizations of the body found in Husserl and MerleauPonty, especially on the distinction between body as lived body (Leib) – a prereflective bodily awareness that shapes our experiential landscape –, and body as physical body (Körper) – a thematic experience of the body as an object –, it is maintained that mind and cognition are embodied in a twofold sense: (i) structurally, i.e., in the sense of being constituted by extracranial (neural, bodily, environmental, and social) processes, and (ii) phenomenologically, i.e., in the sense of including the experience of oneself as a bodily agent situated in the world. It is contended that this Janus-faced nature of corporeality, divided between “being a body” (Leibsein) and “having a body” (Körperhaben), may help undermine some of the age-old dualities (mind-body, interiorityexteriority, etc.) and thereby help anchor experience in materiality and materiality in experience. The main focus of the volume at hand is to analyze, evaluate, and critically reflect upon, what might be termed “horizons of embodiment.” First, it purports to examine the scope and applicability of the notion of embodiment in relation to not only human, but also animal, vegetative, and perhaps even artificial life. Specifically, it aims to investigate to what extent, if at all, different construals of embodiment might contribute to a better understanding of different life forms – of their unique, if tentative, modes of being, cognizing, and experiencing. Second, it purports to examine, from both practical and theoretical perspectives, possibilities for a “fusion of horizons” (Horizontverschmelzung) between structural and phenomenological approaches to embodiment: How can objective (third-person) and experiential (first-person) aspects of corporeality be combined so as to provide efficient means for the study of the living? Both perspectives wish to enrich and broaden our grasp of different grades, modes and dimensions of embodiment, bringing forth their tentative limitations and paving ways for their overcoming.

Key words: Phenomenology, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, embodiment, body.