12 essays by international experts look at how cognition is explicitly or implicitly conceived of as distributed across brain, body and world in Greek and Roman technology, science, medicine, material culture, philosophy and literary studies. A range of models emerge, which vary both in terms of whether cognition is just embodied or involves tools or objects in the world. As many of the texts and practices discussed have influenced Western European society and culture, this collection reveals the historical foundations of our theoretical and practical attempts to comprehend the distributed nature of human cognition.
Miranda Anderson is an Anniversary Fellow at the University of Stirling and an Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on cognitive approaches to literature and culture. She is the author of The Renaissance Extended Mind (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
Douglas Cairns (FRSE, FBA, MAE) is Professor of Classics in the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Aidôs: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature (1993), Bacchylides: Five Epinician Odes (2010) and Sophocles: Antigone (2016). His most recent edited volumes include A Cultural History of the Emotions in Antiquity (2019), Emotions through Time: From Antiquity to Byzantium (with M. Hinterberger, A. Pizzone and M. Zaccarini, 2022), Contempt, Ancient and Modern (2023), and In the Mind, in the Body, in the World: Emotions in Early China and Ancient Greece (with C. Virág, 2024).
Mark Sprevak is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He is the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook to the Computational Mind (Routledge, 2018), The Turing Guide: Life, Work, Legacy (OUP, 2017) and New Waves in Philosophy of Mind (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).