Automata, man-machines and embodiment: deflating or inflating Life?

In A. Radman & H. Sohn (eds.), Critical and Clinical Cartographies; Embodiment /Technology /Care /Design. 010 (forthcoming)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Early modern automata, understood as efforts to ‘model’ life, to grasp its singular properties and/or to unveil and demystify its seeming inaccessibility and mystery, are not just fascinating liminal, boundary, hybrid, crossover or go-between objects, while they are all of those of course. They also pose a direct challenge to some of our common conceptions about mechanism and embodiment. They challenge the simplicity of the distinction between a purported ‘mechanistic’ worldpicture, its ontology and its goals, and on the other hand an attempt to understand ourselves and animals more broadly as flesh-and-blood, affective entities (that is, not just breathing and perspiring, but also desiring and ‘sanguine’ machines, as La Mettrie might have put it). In what follows I reflect on the complexity of early modern mechanism faced with the (living) body, and its mirror image, contemporary theories of embodiment. At times, embodiment theory seems to be governed by a fascination with what the Artificial Life researcher Ezequiel Di Paolo has called ‘biochauvinism’ (Di Paolo, “Extended Life”): an unquestioned belief that ‘living bodies are special’. Yet how does the theorist define this special status? The question is apparently a simple one, or at least promptly yields an aporia which appears simple: to borrow a provocative phrase from Terry Eagleton, embodiment theory is obsessed by the body but terrified of biology. Yet at the same time, at least since Hubert Dreyfus and Andy Clark’s groundbreaking works, embodiment has been a legit part of cognitive science, yielding the even more recently emerged field of ‘embodied cognition’ (see the work of Larry Shapiro), which seeks to depart from traditional cognitive science, especially the latter’s understanding of cognition as computational, in order to instead underscore “the significance of an organism’s body in how and what the organism thinks,” in Shapiro’s words.

Links

PhilArchive

External links

  • This entry has no external links. Add one.
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Locked-in syndrome: a challenge for embodied cognitive science.Miriam Kyselo & Ezequiel Di Paolo - 2015 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 14 (3):517-542.
The Meaning of Embodiment.Julian Kiverstein - 2012 - Topics in Cognitive Science 4 (4):740-758.
Embodiment, ownership and disownership.Frédérique de Vignemont - 2011 - Consciousness and Cognition 20 (1):1-12.
Toward a Cognitive Model of the Sense of Embodiment in a (Rubber) Hand.Glenn Carruthers - 2013 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 20 (3-4):3 - 4.
Reclaiming Christ’s Body : Embodiment of God’s Gospel in Paul’s Letters.Yung Suk Kim - 2013 - Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 67 (1):20-29.
Types of body representation and the sense of embodiment.Glenn Carruthers - 2008 - Consciousness and Cognition 17 (4):1316.
Embodiment in language-based memory: Some qualifications.Manuel de Vega - 1997 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 20 (1):22-23.

Analytics

Added to PP
2016-08-16

Downloads
456 (#38,367)

6 months
71 (#54,531)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Charles T. Wolfe
Université de Toulouse Jean-Jaurès

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Rethinking mechanistic explanation.Stuart Glennan - 2002 - Proceedings of the Philosophy of Science Association 2002 (3):S342-353.
Rethinking Mechanistic Explanation.Stuart Glennan - 2002 - Philosophy of Science 69 (S3):S342-S353.
Extended life.Ezequiel Di Paolo - 2008 - Topoi 28 (1):9-21.
The Organism.Kurt Goldstein - 1995 - Princeton University Press.
Pressing the flesh: A tension in the study of the embodied, embedded mind.Andy Clark - 2008 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76 (1):37–59.

View all 11 references / Add more references