Embodied Cognition - Philosophy

Philosophy

In his pre-critical period, philosopher Immanuel Kant advocated a similar embodied view of the mind-body problem that was part of his Universal Natural History and Theory of Heaven (1755). José Ortega y Gasset, George Santayana, Miguel de Unamuno, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger and others in the broadly existential tradition have proposed philosophies of mind influencing the development of the modern 'embodiment' thesis.

The embodiment movement in AI has fueled the embodiment argument in Philosophy, see in particular Andy Clark (1997, 1998, 2008) and Hendriks-Jansen (1996). It has also given emotions a new status in philosophy of mind as an indispensable constituent, not a non-essential addition to rational intellectual thought. In Philosophy of Mind, the idea that cognition is embodied is sympathetic with other views of cognition such as situated cognition or externalism. This is a radical move towards a total re-localization of mental processes out of the neural domain. It is important to stress that these views are forms of physicalism. They maintain that the mind is identical with physical processes, though such processes are outside the nervous system.