Edinburgh University Press Merleau-Ponty, Embodied Cognition and Enactivism: Between Phenomenology and the Life Sciences (Intersections in Continental and Analytic Philosophy)

Updates Merleau-Ponty’s relevance for contemporary and intersecting discussions about enactivism, the life sciences and cognitive neuroscience Offers new interpretations of Merleau-Ponty’s work across much of his career, ranging from Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception, to his Nature course notes and The Visible and the Invisible Explores “4e” cognition by linking enactivism and embodied cognition to Merleau-Ponty's thought alongside contemporary biological research (postgenomics, epigenetics, microbiomics) and the cognitive sciences (illusionism, predictive processing and active inference accounts of mind) to offer a new understanding of mind and life Addresses a range of epistemological and metaphysical issues in 4e cognition including new responses to the problem of “higher order” cognition, as well as detailed engagement with emergentism, naturalism, and the epistemology of “mutual constraint” in empirically-minded phenomenology Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological work on embodiment and perception, Jack Reynolds develops a novel account of many of the recent debates in enactivism and embodied cognition, engaging specifically with the epistemological and metaphysical aspects of these views. Reynolds sets out a Merleau-Ponty inspired view of enactive cognition, arguing that it presents the best overall explanation of both phenomenological considerations and a range of scientific evidence concerning life and mind. He defends the view against a variety of alternative positions across the putative analytic-continental divide, including predictive processing, illusionism and computationalism.