Distributed Cognition in Classical Antiquity

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).

• List of illustrationsNotes on contributorsSeries Preface1.Series Introduction: Distributed Cognition and the HumanitiesMiranda Anderson, Michael Wheeler and Mark Sprevak2. Introduction: Distributed Cognition and the ClassicsDouglas Cairns 3. Physical Sciences: Ptolemy’s Extended MindCourtney Roby4. Distributed Cognition and the Diffusion of Information Technologies in the Roman WorldAndrew Riggsby5. Mask as Mind Tool: A Methodology of Material EngagementPeter Meineck6. Embodied, Extended and Distributed Cognition in Roman Technical PracticeWilliam Short7. Roman-period Theatres as Distributed Cognitive Micro-ecologiesDiana Y. Ng8. Cognition, Emotions and the Feeling Body in the Hippocratic CorpusGeorge Kazantidis9. Enactivism and Embodied Cognition in Stoicism and Plato’s TimaeusChristopher Gill10. Enargeia, Enactivism and the Ancient Readerly ImaginationLuuk Huitink11. Group Minds in Classical Athens? Chorus and Dēmos as Case Studies of Collective CognitionFelix Budelmann12. One Soul in Two Bodies: Distributed Cognition and Ancient Greek FriendshipDavid Konstan13. Distributed Cognition and Its Discontents: Three Episodes from the Classical TraditionThomas Habinek and Hector Reyes

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.