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: I argue that Candiotto’s account of loving presumes participating-with a system, rather than acting-with a system. I explore the implication of this: that to love a place we must understand places as agents.

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: I suggest that Candiotto’s situated approach to the love of nature can be enriched by Tetsuroˉ Watsuji’s analysis of fuˉdo (“climate and culture”) and aidagara (“betweenness. I briefly introduce these ideas and indicate how they might fit with Candiotto’s project.

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: I expand on the implications that Candiotto’s enactive and situated account of love has for scientific research. In particular, I focus on curiosity as a common denominator of the strategies that Candiotto suggests in order to maintain desirable distance and loving relations with the concrete others that make up our world. Staying close to Candiotto’s arguments around the importance of difference and distance for the development of loving (learning) relations, as well as the central role she ascribes to prolonged and attentive engagement with environmental others (inhabiting place), I offer resources and research questions to strengthen curiosity about self and other in scientific environments.

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: Can our relationship with nature be loving and reciprocal? The claim is hard to sustain when nature is taken to encompass polluted and urban places. The notion of reciprocity loses its force, and the lovability of these places is put into question. Also, the demand of love may obscure the ethical demand in our relationship with nature: to be responsible in our meaning-making practices.

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: I reflect on the significance of our relationships with a natural place from the perspective of animal and environmental ethics. Connecting Candiotto’s article with other environmental thinkers, I explore the importance of particularity and of problematizing anthropocentrism, and end by raising three questions about the broader application of one’s love for a particular place.

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 elaborates a down-to-earth enactive epistemology and applies it to environmental ethics. I comment on the timeliness of her intervention and the challenges for an enactive account of place. I concur with her exhortation to a participatory loving of place by becoming native, but notice that the conditions for enacting it are inaccessible for most. Some healing is needed first.

Abstract: The first set of topics is dedicated to the theoretical framework I employ in my target article. I will explain (a) why sense-making is participatory from the beginning and (b) how a personal communication with a place is possible. The second set of topics tackles my proposal’s ethical and political significance. I will consider (c) the objection on how it is possible to love the unlovable and (d) the question of what should change for us to love nature.

Context: The current state of extended-mind research involves different frameworks, predictive processing and enactivism, among others. It is unclear to what degree these two frameworks converge toward a unified conception of the extended mind. Problem: The third wave of extended-mind research expands the scope of what has been acknowledged as a legitimate case of extended mind under the parity principle and complementarity principle of the first two waves. The two central commitments of the third wave are: (a) That extended cognitive agents exhibit plasticity (b) that extended cognitive systems may not be organism-centered. I explore a general notion of boundary that might accommodate those two claims and provide a general criterion of what constitutes a case of extended mind. Method: I employ the method of conceptual analysis. I explore several conceptions of mental boundary and plasticity with regard to the context of the wider conceptual frameworks within which they are embedded, namely predictive processing and enactivism. I confront the two frameworks with regard to how the notions they provide fare against the issues of third-wave extended-mind research. Results: a) I confront the notion of boundary of cognitive agents based on the Markov-blanket formalism with the enactivist notion of mental boundary based on operational closure and argue for the latter approach. (b) I argue that plasticity of mental boundaries exhibits two fundamental facets that can be distinguished and accounted for by recourse to Ashby’s conception of ultrastability and the notion of perceptual inference as employed by the free-energy principle, if the two notions are integrated into the enactivist framework. Implications: Predictive processing and enactivism cannot be reconciled regarding their respective notions of boundary of cognitive agents. In this regard, enactivism provides a better point of departure for the third wave of extended-mind research. Notions of active and perceptual inference based on the free-energy principle might nevertheless provide insights that enrich the enactivist position and lead to a more nuanced perspective on the extended mind. Constructivist content: Constructivist epistemology forms the theoretical background of some key notions, utilized throughout the article, namely the conception of mind as autonomous and self-organizing.

Key words: Enactivism, extended mind, free-energy principle, Markov blanket, predictive processing.

Open peer commentary on the article “A Moving Boundary, a Plastic Core: A Contribution to the Third Wave of Extended-Mind Research” by Timotej Prosen. Abstract: Prosen states that third-wave extended minds should have plastic boundaries. I question the current literature’s focus on locating the boundaries of the mind and discuss whether the current literature falls prey to a metaphysics of domestication. I reassess Prosen’s two desiderata for a third-wave extended mind and argue that third-wave extended mind theories are better off abandoning the “containment metaphor” altogether.

Open peer commentary on the article “A Moving Boundary, a Plastic Core: A Contribution to the Third Wave of Extended-Mind Research” by Timotej Prosen. Abstract: I sympathize with Prosen’s conviction in integrating enactivism, the free-energy principle, and the extended-mind hypothesis. However, I show that he uses the concept of “boundary” ambiguously. By disambiguating it, I suggest that we can keep both Markov blankets and operational closure as ways of drawing the boundaries of a cognitive system. Nevertheless, from an enactive perspective, neither of those boundaries is a “cognitive” boundary.