Students gain insight into recent developments at the intersection of embodied approaches to cognition and the arts and humanities: what does this approach to cognition have to offer to the arts and the humanities? How can insights from the arts and humanities contribute to understanding the role of the body in cognition? What new types of research are emerging at the intersection between cognition and the arts and humanities?
With regard to academic skills, students gain experience with interdisciplinary modes of working, with building connections between theoretical approaches and case studies, and with the use of theoretical texts for analysis, interpretation and critical reflection. The two main academic skills central to this course are reading, discussing, processing, and presenting high-level texts, and composing case study analysis.
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Priority rules apply to this course. Make sure you register for this course before 14 June 12.00 noon to be considered for enrollment.
The following students are guaranteed a place:
- BA TCS or LAS;
- students who are registered for the minor Brains and Bodies;
- pre-master’s students;
- exchange students.
Other students will be placed by means of random selection.
This course examines the role of the body in human cognition, through what has come to be known as the 4E (embodied, enactive embedded and extended) approach to cognition. Traditional theories in cognitive psychology tend to place all the responsibility for how we perceive, make sense and behave on the brain, which is understood as a symbolic processing machine akin to a computer. These theories tend to view the body as merely a receptacle, a passive container carrying the brain that plays
no role in the higher domains of human thinking. More recently, many researchers have started to examine the role of the body in what previously has been treated as purely mental states and activities.
4E cognition theories are radically opposed to dualism – the binary division between mind and body, prominent over millennia of Western philosophy – and view the currently dominant computational models of cognition as problematically preserving some aspects of it. From this perspective, the brain is now understood as a part of a broader system: physical, embodied interaction with our environment is a crucial and inseparable part of how thought and meaning-making take place.
Embodied approaches to cognition see thought, perception, and action as interwoven. They suggest an innovative approach to cognition as a dynamic process, emerging from the interaction between human minded-bodies (or bodyminds) and their lived environments. In addition to embodied and enactive, the mind is thus treated as extended beyond the brain and embedded in relationality to the outside world. Thinking is not something purely abstract that occurs with new ‘sense data’ entering the closed
system of our heads, interpreted there and expressed in our behaviour: it is a constant, multi-layered process, keenly involving our bodies and the world we inhabit, that is enacted in our consciousness and perceptual experience.
This perspective has paved the way for new intersections and collaborations between cognitive science and the arts and humanities. 4E approaches shed new light on questions of experience and understanding in the arts and humanities, and vice versa: newly emerging collaborations between the arts and humanities and cognitive studies contribute to further understanding of the role of the body in how we experience, make sense and think.
Art has long been a field where meaning is communicated, experienced, and explored through tangible images, bodies, objects, environments and movements, where understanding and inspiration are not purely mental and abstract but take place through embodied encounters with the world. Art is, therefore, of immense potential value for furthering our understanding of embodied aspects of the mind. In this course we will discuss case studies from different forms of art and media as gateways to concretize and better grasp this theoretical perspective through.
The Thinking Body is part of the interdisciplinary minor Brains & Bodies: Cognitie en emotie in de geesteswetenschappen but can also be taken as an independent course.
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Early Exit option for international exchange students (5 ECTS)
Exchange students who are required to return to their home university before January, are allowed to choose an Early Exit option for this course. The Early Exit option means that students can finish the course before Christmas break, receiving 5 ECTS for the course. Students must make arrangements with the course coordinator at the start of the course.
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