Social Cognition and the Enactive Approach

Social Cognition and the Enactive Approach

Overview

Hanne De Jaegher, a philosopher who works in the Enactive tradition of Francisco Varela, speaks about how human cognition is based, at the most fundamental level, on loving and is eminently social in nature. Focusing on intersubjectivity, or the space in-between, in human interactions, she explores the tension of how we are at once the same, as His Holiness aptly reminds us, while also being very different. It is her contention that this difference—which contains the ambiguity and complexity of human experience—can in fact be generative, provided that we take an ethical approach to human relationship.

  • Conversation 2
    6 sessions
  • October 13, 2022
    Dharamsala, Himachal Pradesh, India
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Speakers

Hanne De Jaegher

Hanne De Jaegher is a philosopher, a cognitive scientist, and a leading thinker of the enactive approach to cognition. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Basque Country and is known for her precise and moving writings on embodied human subjectivity and inter-subjectivity, guided by questions about how knowing and love relate. Her theory of participatory sense-making is being applied and studied across academic and practical disciplines, such as neuroscience, psychiatry, law, education, various forms of therapy, and the arts. She co-directs Dialogica UK, a social enterprise to advance neurodiversity. Together with Ezequiel Di Paolo and Elena Cuffari, she co-authored Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity between Life and Language (2018).