Barthold Heinrich Brockes and Distributed Cognition: The Delicate Flux of World and Spirit

2019 ◽  
pp. 40-52
Author(s):  
Charlotte Lee
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Distributed Cognition

This chapter discusses Barthold Heinrich Brockes, a prolific German poet of the eighteenth-century, as a precursor of theories of distributed cognition. It argues that developments in anti-dualist and radical Protestant thought around 1700, together with Brockes’ own commitment to the ‘mixed-science’ of physico-theology, cause his poetry to resonate with modern approaches to cognition. Through close readings of individual poems from the collection Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott, the chapter examines Brockes’ presentation of the flux between mind, body and world, and of the productive use which, through what we might call ‘epistemic engineering’, humankind can make of its environment. It also remarks on the compatibility of this religious work, geared towards the celebration of God, with modern, essentially secular understandings of our world.

Eighteenth-Century Antiquity: Extended, Embodied, Enacted

2019 ◽  
pp. 219-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Slaney
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
Extended Cognition ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Johann Gottfried Herder ◽  
Enactive Cognition ◽  
Tableaux Vivants ◽  
Physical Limitations ◽  
The Aesthetic

Sir William Hamilton’s Greek vase collection, assembled at Naples between the 1760s and 1790s, became a turning point in the reception of ancient material culture and hence in perceptions of classical antiquity. This chapter compares three angles of approach to the collection, each corresponding to a strand of distributed cognition. Extended cognition is represented by the catalogue which made the collection available to the reading public; embodied cognition is represented by the dance performances of Emma Hamilton, Sir William’s wife, who based her tableaux vivants of ancient life around the images represented on the vases; and enactive cognition by the aesthetic theory of the ‘feeling imagination’ developed by philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who visited the Hamiltons at Naples and commented unfavourably on Emma’s performances. I argue that Herder’s rejection of Emma’s kinetic reception of ancient artwork was predicated in part on his reluctance to place physical limitations on simulated movement.

The Literary Designer Environments of Eighteenth-Century Jesuit Poetics

2019 ◽  
pp. 187-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karin Kukkonen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Problem Solving ◽  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Cognitive Niche ◽  
Scaffolded Learning

This chapter revisits earlier accounts of distributed cognition in cultural environments and practices. It extends the notion of designer environment (i.e. spatial and procedural arrangements that amplify and scaffold cognition) beyond the usual focus on problem-solving and the task at hand. For outlining the complex capacities that come into play with the linguistic, cultural and literary contexts of literary designer environment, it draws on the critical and literary writings developed by Jesuits in eighteenth-century France. In particular, these literary designer environments enable fictional extensions of thought where immersive experience and abstract reflection can be combined. The article discusses individual literary texts and the larger intertextual net of literature in terms of the designer environment and suggests to broaden the perspectives from distributed cognition, the cognitive niche and scaffolded learning to include these.

Distributed Cognition in Enlightenment and Romantic Culture

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
Art Philosophy ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

This collection brings together eleven essays by international specialists in Romantic and Enlightenment culture and provides a general and a period-specific introduction to distributed cognition and the cognitive humanities. The essays revitalise our reading of Romantic and Enlightenment works in the fields of archaeology, history, drama, literature, art, philosophy, science and medicine, by bringing to bear recent insights in cognitive science and philosophy of mind on the ways in which cognition is distributed across brain, body and world. The volume makes evident the ways in which the particular range of sociocultural and technological contexts that existed during the long eighteenth century periods fostered and reflected particular notions of distributed cognition.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 18-39
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
Other Minds ◽  
Cognitive Aids ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a background to current research in Enlightenment and Romantic studies on topics related to distributed cognition. The first section of this introductory chapter by George Rousseau reflects on current research in Enlightenment and Romantic studies on topics related to distributed cognition, while the second section by Miranda Anderson considers how the various chapters in this volume advance work in this area. The thought-world of the long eighteenth century involves notions of flux between mind, body and world, mind-life and subject-object structural couplings, sympathetic circulations, mind metamorphoses and manacles, and texts, performances and artefacts as cognitive aids or modes of access to other minds and past phenomenologies.

Distributed Cognition and Women Writers’ Representation of Theatre in Eighteenth-Century England: ‘Thoroughly to unfold the labyrinths of the human mind’

2019 ◽  
pp. 170-186
Author(s):  
Ros Ballaster
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
Extended Mind ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sarah Fielding ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cognitive Experience ◽  
The Mind

Readers in the mid-eighteenth century were increasingly invited to translate their knowledge about the social extension of mind learned in the experience of theatre to ‘new’ prose forms of the periodical and the novel. Women writers in these forms found opportunity to present women as cognitive agents rather than affective vehicles. Four works by women serve to illustrate this case: Eliza Haywood’s The Dramatic Historiographer (1735), Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier’s The Cry: a new dramatic fable (1754), Charlotte Lennox’s Shakespeare Illustrated (1753-4), and Frances Brooke’s The Old Maid (1755-6). These printed prose works invoke memories of performance – the co-presence of the real bodies of audience and actors. But they often do so to claim the superior cognitive experience of the reader’s engagement through print with a fictional persona in the ‘mind’. The prose work is imagined as a repository of socially extended mind for its audience, an opportunity not only to recreate the experience of communal consumption of the artwork which theatre affords, but also to provide a more sophisticated form of narrative scaffolding. Distance and reflection are enabled by the absence of the performer’s body and the judicious authority of a framing narrator.

The Self in the History of Distributed Cognition: A View from the History of Reading

2019 ◽  
pp. 156-169
Author(s):  
Elspeth Jajdelska
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The Face ◽  
Diary Writing ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Self Formation

This chapter looks at relationships between reading and writing, decorous speech and self-formation in the eighteenth century. The process of self-formation is understood by psychologists today to be a fluid and dynamic one, with the potential to vary across environments. The chapter considers how increasingly novelised forms of diary writing produced a swift oscillation for eighteenth-century diarists between addressing the reader and being the reader. New conceptions of the relationship between writing and print, meanwhile, produced a split between the face to face encounters of lower class readers, and their self-conception as silent readers of political and other topics. These developments meant that self-formation could be distributed between human subjects and the books and documents which they read and wrote.

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