Abstract

For this issue of the International Journal of Body, Nature, and Culture, I interviewed an American Philosopher, Shaun Gallagher. Professor Gallagher is the Lillian and Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence in Philosophy at the University of Memphis. His areas of research include phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, especially topics related to embodiment, self, agency, intersubjectivity, minds in skilled performance, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of psychopathology. The author of several books, including Performance/Art: The Venetian Lectures (2021), Action and Interaction (2020), Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind (2017), Phenomenology (2012), The Phenomenological Mind (2008; 2nd edition; 2012, 3rd edition 2021) (with Dan Zahavi), and How the Body Shapes the Mind (2005), he is also an editor of The Oxford Handbook of the Self (2011), and a co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of 4E-Cognition (2018).

Shaun Gallagher is one of the most representative scholars of today who endorses the notion of the embodied mind. Resisting the view of classical cognitivism which sees cognitive operations as computational calculations which begin with symbolic inputs and end with symbolically encoded outputs, he, as a robust advocate for Embodied cognition argues that cognition is the function of the cognizer’s brain, body, and environment. He is well known to have coined the term ‘4-E cognition’(embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted) which represents the diverse perspectives of embodied cognition (Rowlands 3). As a phenomenologist as well as a cognitive scientist, he has made notable contributions to many important related topics. He suggested the phenomenological distinction between body image and body schema and the socially extended mind.

In this interview, I asked Shaun three seemingly unrelated but closely related questions. The first question concerns the famous Dreyfus-McDowell debate which sparked lots of following discussions. In the heated debate, Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell presented apparently irreconcilable perspectives on the nature of the mind and rationality involved in skilled coping or action. The second and third questions are about the nature of the mind in skilled performance. The second question focuses on the various forms of the performative mind, and the third one especially concerns the so-called self-losing experience, which is alleged to be one of the most typical and salient aspects of Korean traditional performances.