Distributed Cognition in Classical Antiquity: (The Edinburgh History of Distributed Cognition)

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.

Table of Contents:
List of illustrations Notes on contributors Series Preface 1.Series Introduction: Distributed Cognition and the HumanitiesMiranda Anderson, Michael Wheeler and Mark Sprevak 2. Introduction: Distributed Cognition and the ClassicsDouglas Cairns 3. Physical Sciences: Ptolemy’s Extended MindCourtney Roby 4. Distributed Cognition and the Diffusion of Information Technologies in the Roman WorldAndrew Riggsby 5. Mask as Mind Tool: A Methodology of Material EngagementPeter Meineck 6. Embodied, Extended and Distributed Cognition in Roman Technical PracticeWilliam Short 7. Roman-period Theatres as Distributed Cognitive Micro-ecologiesDiana Y. Ng 8. Cognition, Emotions and the Feeling Body in the Hippocratic CorpusGeorge Kazantidis 9. Enactivism and Embodied Cognition in Stoicism and Plato’s TimaeusChristopher Gill 10. Enargeia, Enactivism and the Ancient Readerly ImaginationLuuk Huitink 11. Group Minds in Classical Athens? Chorus and Dēmos as Case Studies of Collective CognitionFelix Budelmann 12. One Soul in Two Bodies: Distributed Cognition and Ancient Greek FriendshipDavid Konstan 13. Distributed Cognition and Its Discontents: Three Episodes from the Classical TraditionThomas Habinek and Hector Reyes

About the Author :
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).

Review :
This is a fascinating volume that often reveals surprising analogies between contemporary accounts of distributed cognition and the views of several classical thinkers. It refreshingly goes beyond the contemporary focus on cognition as computation to consider the many ways in which body and world scaffold our psychic life, including its affective and conscious dimensions. Once we look for it, distributed cognition is ubiquitous in classical antiquity. This book is a fascinating examination of the tools that made thinking easier and of the complex boundaries between the individual mind and the group.