The Embodied and Situated Nature of Moods

The embodied and situated nature of computer game play

Computer games are being approached from a wide range of perspectives, but the activity of playing games, with the player and her actions in focus has, so far, not received much attention in academic research. Approaching games from a cognitive science perspective, however, it is argued in this paper that theories on embodied and situated cognition provide a strong basis for research on this pa...

Embodied and Situated Cognition

An Aesthetics of Nature Consequences of Merleau-Ponty’s embodied ontology

In his courses on Nature, the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty clearly does not agree with Kant's antropocentrism. In particular the Kantian notion of the disinterestedness of aesthetic perception is untenable in an aesthetics of nature which is inspired by Merleau-Ponty's thought. Nature and human embodiment are seen as separated in this Kantian tradition. In Merleau-Ponty’s pheno...

The situated nature of concepts.

For decades the importance of background situations has been documented across all areas of cognition. Nevertheless, theories of concepts generally ignore background situations, focusing largely on bottom-up, stimulus-based processing. Furthermore, empirical research on concepts typically ignores background situations, not incorporating them into experimental designs. A selective review of rele...

Toward a Situated, Embodied Realism1

Situated, embodied cognitive science is all the rage these days. Some (including the present author) have argued that situated, embodied cognitive science is incompatible with realism (metaphysical and scientific). In this paper, I argue that this is a mistake: there is no reason one cannot be both a proponent of situated, embodied cognitive science and a realist. To show this, I point to flaws...