Miranda Anderson

More Than Enough

The Renaissance Extended Mind explores the parallels and contrasts between current philosophical notions of the mind as extended across brain, body and world, and analogous notions in literary, philosophical, and scientific texts circulating between the fifteenth century and early-seventeenth century.

The Renaissance Extended Mind

This collection brings together 14 essays by international specialists in Medieval and Renaissance culture to bring recent insights from cognitive science and philosophy of mind to bear on how cognition was seen as distributed across brain, body and world between the 9th and 17th centuries.

Distributed Cognition in Medieval and Renaissance Culture

The essays in this book are gathered together from the realms of art, literature, history, archaeology, philosophy and science. Together they weave a picture that gives us new insights into the mirror as a material object and as an image in art and texts. This interdisciplinary and innovative book raises important issues about the material life of an object and its intimate interrelations with socio-cultural imagery. Perceptions of the workings of our cognitive processes and of our subjectivity are shown to be dynamically interwoven with the technological and socio-cultural matrices of particular periods, whilst longer term continuities in the understanding and employment of the mirror reflect underlying continuities in the capacities and constraints of mirrors and of human subjects. This book demonstrates the active role imagery and technologies have always played in our thoughts, lives and worlds.

An Interdisciplinary Collection Exploring the Cultural History of the Mirror

The Book of the Mirror

Mark Sprevak

Douglas Cairns

12 essays by international experts look at how cognition is explicitly or implicitly conceived of as distributed across brain, body and world in Greek and Roman technology, science, medicine, material culture, philosophy and literary studies. A range of models emerge, which vary both in terms of whether cognition is just embodied or involves tools or objects in the world. As many of the texts and practices discussed have influenced Western European society and culture, this collection reveals the historical foundations of our theoretical and practical attempts to comprehend the distributed nature of human cognition.

Distributed Cognition in Classical Antiquity

The Renaissance Extended Mind explores the parallels and contrasts between current philosophical notions of the mind as extended across brain, body and world, and analogous notions in literary, philosophical and scientific texts circulating between the fifteenth century and early-seventeenth century. This perspective illuminates Renaissance texts and aims to inspire a more general reevaluation in the humanities of what constitutes cognition. Anderson begins with an overview of research and debates surrounding notions of the mind and subjectivity as extended in current cognitive scientific and philosophical research. This invites a reconsideration of other theories concerned with the relationship between brain, body and world, including psychoanalytical and literary theories. The book then explores Renaissance notions of the mind and subjectivity, in terms of the use of one's body, words, objects and other people as extensions of the mind and subject. It concludes by focusing on Shakespeare's literary and dramatic works. The Renaissance Extended Mind reveals the interdisciplinary potential and wider relevance of the notion of the extended mind: it establishes its capacity to contribute to a rethinking of the history of ideas and that it holds repercussions for literary methodologies, as well as offering a means to richer readings of literary texts.

Miranda Anderson

Books

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