Introduction

Abstract

For the last two decades, research in cognitive science has increasingly turned toward notions of embodiment and situatedness. Some approaches also foreground the relevance of personal experience and embodied action in forming the basis of sense-making. In particular, “enactivist” perspectives have started to make a profound change in the way we conceive our minds as animate and embodied, as opposed to brain-bound information processing architectures. Braiding phenomenology, cognitive science, and dynamical systems theory, enactivism offers a series of proposals for understanding the sensorimotor basis of cognition, and introduces the concept of sensorimotor life. This chapter presents the broad motivations for these proposals and situates them within their broader scientific and philosophical contexts.