The notion of bodily awareness is at the crossroads of philosophical debates on the self, action and space. The way we relate to our body, including the way we perceive it, control it and affectively react to what happens to it, is unlike the way we relate to other objects. Our body may be the object we know the best, from which we constantly receive a flow of information from vision, touch, pr...

Can an embodied approach to social cognition accommodate mindreading, our ability to attribute mental states to another person? Prima facie it might not. Mindreading has been conceived in terms of what Susan Hurley calls the classical sandwich picture of the mind. On this view, perception corresponds to input from world to mind, action to output from mind to world, and cognition as sandwiched i...

The role of the body in the generation of behavior is a topic that has sparked the attention of many fields from philosophy to science and more recently robotics. We address the question of how an embodied agent should be modeled in order to change the traditional dualist approach of creating embodied agents. By looking at behavior generation as a shared process between mind and body, we are ab...

“While many have begun making the case for ‘embodied cognition’—resituating the mind in the body—Derek Melser takes the next step: resituating the embodied mind in its social milieu. Cognition is argued to be something that people do, and is thus publicly observable in their interactions rather than hidden away inside their heads. The Act of Thinking is a pivotal book and a significant contribu...