Distributed Cognition in Classical Antiquity

This collection explores how cognition is explicitly or implicitly conceived of as distributed across brain, body and world in Greek and Roman technology, science, medicine, material culture, philosophy and literary studies.

A range of models emerge, which vary both in terms of whether cognition is just embodied or involves tools or objects in the world. As many of the texts and practices discussed have influenced Western European society and culture, this collection reveals the historical foundations of our theoretical and practical attempts to comprehend the distributed nature of human cognition.

Miranda Anderson is Research Fellow at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on cognitive approaches to literature and culture. She is the author of The Extended Renaissance Mind (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and editor of The Book of the Mirror: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays on the Cultural Story of the Mirror (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007).

Douglas Cairns is Professor of Classics in the University of Edinburgh. He has published widely on Greek literature, society and thought, especially the emotions. He is the author of Sophocles: Antigone (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), Bacchylides: Five Epinician Odes (Francis Cairns, 2010), and Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature (OUP, 1993).

Mark Sprevak is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on distributed cognition and computational models of the mind. 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).