Michelle Maiese & Robert Hanna will give a guest lecture about their recent book The Mind-Body Politic. Even though this event is mainly organized for our students, this is an open lecture and everyone is welcome to join.

When: June 4th, 16.00 to 18.00 (CEST).

Where: This is an online event. If you are interested, please sign up by sending me an e-mail to a.kalis@uu.nl so we can make sure you receive the Teams/Zoom link.

Abstract of the book: Building on contemporary research in embodied cognition, enactivism, and the extended mind, this book explores how social institutions in contemporary neoliberal nation-states systematically affect our thoughts, feelings, and agency. Human beings are, necessarily, social animals who create and belong to social institutions. But social institutions take on a life of their own, and literally shape the minds of all those who belong to them, for better or worse, usually without their being self-consciously aware of it. Indeed, in contemporary neoliberal societies, it is generally for the worse. In The Mind-Body Politic, Michelle Maiese and Robert Hanna work out a new critique of contemporary social institutions by deploying the special standpoint of the philosophy of mind—in particular, the special standpoint of the philosophy of what they call “essentially embodied minds”—and make a set of concrete, positive proposals for radically changing both these social institutions and also our essentially embodied lives for the better.