1 PHI 8710-002: Extended Mind Fall 2016 CRN: 22280 Time: W 6:00 – 8:30 pm Location: SAC 110 Instructor: Georg Theiner Email: georg.theiner@villanova.edu Phone: (610) 519-3286 Office Hours: MW 10:00 – 11:00 in SAC 172 (or by appointment) COURSE DESCRIPTION To many people, it seems natural to conceive of the mind as a kind of ‘sandwich’ (Hurley) with cognition as the inner filling, wedged between action and perception. According to this model, mental states and activities are intimately tied to what’s going on inside the head, but only indirectly related to our bodies, our interactions with other people, and the world around us. In this course, we consider a loosely knit family of alternative approaches which study human agency and cognition as embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted (‘4E’) phenomena. In particular, we take as our focal point the ‘extended mind’ thesis, which asserts that our minds are ‘hybrid’ entities that emerge from the dynamic interplay between brains, bodies, and environmental resources such as symbols, tools, artifacts, cultural practices, norms, group structures, and social institutions. In the first part of the course, we take our cue from Clark’s (2008) flagship presentation of the ‘extended mind’ thesis. By comparing Clark’s thesis with related developments, we explore its implications for understanding human cognition, affect, knowledge, rationality, and education. In the second part of the course, we examine Malafouris’s (2013) cross- disciplinary framework (‘material engagement theory’) for studying the human predisposition to reconfigure our bodies and minds by means of artifacts, tools, and material culture. Importantly, technologies are not simply ‘neutral instruments’ that facilitate our existence, but actively give shape to what we do, how we experience the world, and how we live our