Kursinformation

An increasingly popular trend in the sciences of the mind is to emphasize the ways in which cognition is embodied, embedded, situated, extended, distributed, enactive, ecological, etc. This course combines lectures and seminars to provide an introduction to these and other approaches that fall under the umbrella of "embodied cognitive science." The first part of the course will be based on lectures and related discussion sessions, and will focus on the history and the theoretical and methodological foundations of embodied cognitive science. Having covered the basic concepts and approaches, in the second part we will turn to discussion-based seminars on cutting-edge topics in embodied cognitive science.

Foundational topics discussed include:  behaviorism and the cognitive revolution; the phenomenological and pragmatist traditions; the computational theory of mind and criticisms of classical computationalism; connectionism and its philosophical implications.

Topics within embodied cognitive science include: conceptual and motor grounding; distributed cognition, wide computationalism, and the extended mind; anti-representationalism in evolutionary robotics and dynamical systems theory; the enactive approach and central elements such as autonomy, sense-making and autopoiesis; ecological psychology and central elements such as its theory of direct perception and affordances.

 

Course structure and student work:

During Part 1 of the course (lecture series), students will be responsible for:

• Watching weekly online lectures (asynchronous, pre-recorded)

• Reading assigned texts

• Taking a brief online quiz about the lecture and reading materials

• Attending and participating in online discussion session (synchronous, live video: on Tuesdays at 14:00 sharp)

During Part 2 of the course (seminar series), students will be responsible for:

• Reading assigned texts

• Attending and participating in discussion-based seminar meetings online (synchronous, live video: on Tuesdays at 14:00 sharp)

• Making one short presentation (approx. 20 minutes) about one of the assigned texts, which will be followed by group discussion

To earn credit for the course, in addition to completing written quizzes in part 1 and making an oral presentation in part 2, students will submit a short essay of 2500-3500 words on the topic of the course (detailed instructions to be announced).

Feel free to contact me at sanchessanchez@tu-berlin.de if you have questions.