Distributed Cognition in Enlightenment and Romantic Culture

12 international specialists look at how cognition was attributed to brain, body or world in the long 18th century

Revitalising our reading of 18th century works specifically in the fields of the history of the book, literary studies, material culture, art history, philosophy, technology, science and medicine, this volume brings recent insights in cognitive science and philosophy of mind to bear on the distributed nature of cognition. Collectively, the essays show how the particular range of sociocultural and technological contexts of the time fostered and reflected particular notions of distributed cognition.

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).

George Rousseau is a Cultural Historian and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He taught at Harvard for many years, was Professor at UCLA, Regius Professor at King's College Aberdeen and was Co-Director of the Centre for the History of Childhood at the University of Oxford until 2013. His books centre chronologically in the Enlightenment and usually include medicine, science and sex as primary to their concerns.

Michael Wheeler is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Stirling. He is the author of Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step (MIT, 2005). He is co-editor of Heidegger and Cognitive Science (Palgrave, 2012) and The Mechanical Mind in History (MIT, 2008).