Distributed cognition in Enlightenment and Romantic studies

This volume brings together eleven chapters by international specialists working in the period between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth century in the fields of literature, philosophy, art, material culture and history of science and medicine. The chapters revitalise our understanding of the long eighteenth century by bringing to bear recent insights in cognitive science and philosophy of mind on the distributed nature of cognition. Distributed cognition claims that cognition does not occur just through sociocultural forces or disembodied information flow, nor merely in our brains as some distilled miniature of our situation in the world. Instead, cognition occurs through brain-body-world interactions. The first section of this introductory chapter has provided a background to current research in Enlightenment and Romantic studies on topics related to distributed cognition, while this second section considers how the various chapters in this volume represent, reflect and advance work in this area.