Uncategorized – EZEQUIEL A. DI PAOLO

A QBism/Enactivism dialogue

Science writer Amanda Gefter has organised a meeting between Christopher Fuchs (UMass, Boston), one of the founders of QBist interpretation of quantum mechanics, and Hanne De Jaegher and myself (Feb. 2023). Lots of resonances and complementarities, particularly regarding questions of agency, ontology, engaged epistemology, philosophy of probability, the universe in becoming, volleyball …

Enaction and Dialectics I and II (with Turkish translation)

A two-part post introducing the relations between the enactive approach and dialectics, published on the site Dialectical Systems.

Enaction and Dialectics – Part I

Enaction and Dialectics – Part II

Both these longish posts have also appeared in Turkish translation on the CogIST site.

Enaksiyon ve Diyalektik (1. Bölüm)

Enaksiyon ve Diyalektik (2. Bölüm)

Dialectics of the abstract and the concrete in the enactive approach

Video of a keynote presentation at the Future & Ideals Symposium on Evald Ilyenkov’s Philosophy of Development, London, 11–12, November, 2022.

Two new online seminars and an interview (2021)

May 2021. Seminar given as part of the series on the Life and Work of Francisco Varela | Ouroboros Seminars 2021 | Varela 20/30. (19/05/2021).

May 2021. A talk in Spanish on “El concepto enactivo de agencia”, part of a seminar series called “Cultura material, agencia y prácticas” from the Departamento de Filosofía, Facultad de Humanidades, Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Argentina. (13/05/2021)

April 2021. An interview on the enactive mind by the Department of Education at PUC-Rio, Brazil.

New Book: Sensorimotor Life

Sensorimotor Life: An Enactive Proposal

Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, Thomas Buhrmann, Xabier E. Barandiaran, 2017, Oxford University Press.

Coming out in May 2017.

Interviews during my visit to Mexico

Some interviews made during my short visit to the IIMAS institute at UNAM (Mexico City) and the XV Alife conference (Cancun).

“Ciencia, práctica y filosofía, pilares para entender la Naturaleza y sus complejidades”: Ezequiel Di Paolo. Interview in Crónica (México), 7/7/2016. (pdf)

Claves para entender la vida artificial. Interview in El Economista (México), 5/7/2016. (pdf)

Ciencia debe tener balance con filosofía y práctica. Interview in Terra (México), 5/7/2016. (pdf)

Insta Di Paolo a mejorar humanoides. Interview in La Reforma (México), 4/7/2016. (pdf)

Frontiers ebook

Towards an Embodied Science of Intersubjectivity: Widening the Scope of Social Understanding Research, edited by Ezequiel A. Di Paolo and Hanne De Jaegher, Lausanne: Frontiers Media, 2015.

A Frontiers in Psychology open access ebook based on the 42 contributions to a Research Topic.

An important amount of research effort in psychology and neuroscience over the past decades has focused on the problem of social cognition. This problem is understood as how we figure out other minds, relying only on indirect manifestations of other people’s intentional states, which are assumed to be hidden, private and internal. Research on this question has mostly investigated how individual cognitive mechanisms achieve this task. A shift in the internalist assumptions regarding intentional states has expanded the research focus with hypotheses that explore the role of interactive phenomena and interpersonal histories and their implications for understanding individual cognitive processes.

This interactive expansion of the conceptual and methodological toolkit for investigating social cognition, we now propose, can be followed by an expansion into wider and deeply-related research questions, beyond (but including) that of social cognition narrowly construed.

Our social lives are populated by different kinds of cognitive and affective phenomena that are related to but not exhausted by the question of how we figure out other minds. These phenomena include acting and perceiving together, verbal and non-verbal engagement, experiences of (dis-)connection, management of relations in a group, joint meaning- making, intimacy, trust, conflict, negotiation, asymmetric relations, material mediation of social interaction, collective action, contextual engagement with socio-cultural norms, structures and roles, etc. These phenomena are often characterized by a strong participation by the cognitive agent in contrast with the spectatorial stance typical of social cognition research. We use the broader notion of embodied intersubjectivity to refer to this wider set of phenomena.

This Research Topic aims to investigate relations between these different issues, to help lay strong foundations for a science of intersubjectivity – the social mind writ large.

To contribute to this goal, we encouraged contributions in psychology, neuroscience, psychopathology, philosophy, and cognitive science that address this wider scope of intersubjectivity by extending the range of explanatory factors from purely individual to interactive, from observational to participatory.