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Although the scientific study of the mind
has developed rapidly in recent years, it has devoted little
attention to human cognition understood as everyday lived
experience. The Embodied Mind corrects this imbalance
within cognitive science by providing a deep and sophisticated
treatment of the spontaneous and reflective dimensions of
human experience. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch argue that
it is only by having a sense of common ground between mind
in science and mind in experience that our understanding
of cognition can be more complete. To create this common
ground, they develop a dialogue between cognitive science
and Buddhist meditative psychology and situate this dialogue
in relation to other traditions, such as phenomenology and
psychoanalysis.
The dialogue proceeds in five parts. The
first introduces the two partners and explains how the dialogue
will develop. The second presents the computational model
of mind that gave rise to cognitive science in its classical
form. The authors show how this model implies that the self
is fundamentally fragmented and introduce the complementary
Buddhist concept of a nonunified, decentralized self. The
third shows how cognitive science and Buddhist psychology
provide the resources for understanding how the phenomena
usually attributed to a self could arise without an actual
self. The fourth presents the authors' own view of cognition
as embodied action and discuss the relevance of this view
for cognitive science and evolutionary theory. The fifth
considers the philosophical and experiential implications
of the view that cognition has no foundation or ground beyond
its history of embodiment and explores these implications
in relation to contemporary Western critiques of objectivism
and the nonfoundationalist tradition of Buddhist philosophy.
Francisco Varela is Director of Research
at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique and Professor
of Cognitive Science and Epistemology, CREA, at the Ecole
Polytechnique in Paris. Even Thompson is Assistant Professor
of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, Ontario. Eleanor
Rosch is Professor of Psychology at the University of California,
Berkeley.
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