The overall goal of this target article is to demonstrate a mechanism for an embodied cognition. The particular vehicle is a much-studied, but still widely debated phenomenon seen in 7–12 month-old-infants. In Piaget's classic “A-not-B error,” infants who have successfully uncovered a toy at location “A” continue to reach to that location even after they watch the toy hidden in a nearby location “B.” Here, we question the traditional explanations of the error as an indicator of infants' concepts of objects (...) or other static mental structures. Instead, we demonstrate that the A-not-B error and its previously puzzling contextual variations can be understood by the coupled dynamics of the ordinary processes of goal-directed actions: looking, planning, reaching, and remembering. We offer a formal dynamic theory and model based on cognitive embodiment that both simulates the known A-not-B effects and offers novel predictions that match new experimental results. The demonstration supports an embodied view by casting the mental events involved in perception, planning, deciding, and remembering in the same analogic dynamic language as that used to describe bodily movement, so that they may be continuously meshed. We maintain that this mesh is a pre-eminently cognitive act of “knowing” not only in infancy but also in everyday activities throughout the life span. Key Words: cognitive development; dynamical systems theory; embodied cognition; infant development; motor control; motor planning; perception and action. (shrink)

Stoffregen & Bardy reject the likelihood that infants are sensitive to the global array, implying that intersensory integration is not possible in early development. We argue that infants are sensitive to unimodal arrays and are able to integrate them through the active participation of their nervous system and that the observed developmental changes are due to experience and brain development.

In this work, the philosopher Claus-Artur Scheier reconstructs the development from industrial modernity to media modernity, following its intertwined paths. This anthology collates his works on phenomenology, the philosophy of time and the philosophy of history, which were written over the last three decades; some are published here for the first time. Scheier’s protagonists range from Husserl to Derrida, from Simone Weil to Carl Schmitt, and prove that, as a renowned expert on the 19th century, he is an inspiring interpreter (...) of the 20th century, too. After all, that is his own century: this book has been published on the occasion of Scheier’s 80th birthday. The introduction by Nicole C. Karafyllis gives background information and collates biographical notes, which are supplemented with photographs of and personal texts by Scheier. (shrink)

Derrida’s discovery of „supplementary“ logic as the basis of Rousseau’s thinking is assessed in the historical contexts both of modern philosophy and metaphysics between Leibniz and Hegel. Rousseau’s supplementary proposition proves not to be identical with the modern propositional function, but with the „infinite proposition“ („das unendliche Urteil“) in Hegels Science of Logic. It is shown that this proposition structures Hegel’s concept of disunion („Entzweiung“) in the productive overcoming of Rousseau’s anthropological critique of representation as developed in the Phenomenology of (...) Spirit. (shrink)

The following analysis of the Protagoras intends: contrary to the traditional tendency to consider the dialogue comparatively amorphous and polythematic, to clarify its argumentative architectonic; contrary to the scholarly view accompanying this tendency that of concern is an early dialogue, to make plausible the genesis of this dialogue after the Symposium; and to lay the groundwork for a more detailed discussion of the thesis that Plato, in his “middle” dialogues, makes the transition from Eleatic logic in its Megarian refraction, which (...) forms the basis of the early dialogues as well as the Gorgias and incidentally also of the first book of the Republic, to that logic of the middle which is to be regarded as the immediate historical forerunner of Aristotelian syllogistic. Particular emphasis is placed in this context on the Protagoras insofar as Plato here not so much makes the discovery of the middle as he reflects it, a discovery which has after more than two thousand years of “classical logic” become inconspicuous to us, but which shattered his relation to the Megarian school and was the first to bury the fifth century logically. (shrink)

We argue that mentalistic constructs like the “object concept” are not substitutes for process explanations of cognition, and that it is impossible to prove the existence of such constructs with behavioral tasks. We defend the field theory as an appropriate level for modeling embodiment. Finally, we discuss the model's biological plausibility and its extensions to other tasks and other species.