The following courses are (or have been) offered to TU Berlin students at the master’s and PhD level. Get in touch with Gui if you want to enroll for credit or if you are interested in auditing as an external student.
Advanced Topics in Embodied Cognitive Science: Embodied Cognition and Scientific Practice (summer semester 2024, online)
Seminar exploring how the concepts, tools and methods of embodied cognitive science can be applied for making sense of science, scientific knowledge and scientific practices. We will focus on topics such as: extended views of mind and the distribution of epistemic labor in science; situated views of cognition and the role of material engagement and affordances in scientific creativity, imagination and problem solving; and the potential of enactive and ecological approaches to inform a post-representationalist outlook not only about cognition/mind but also about scientific knowledge.
Introduction to Embodied Cognitive Science (winter semester 2023/2024, online)
A two-part course, starting with a lecture series on the historical, theoretical and methodological foundations of “embodied cognition” research in its different versions, followed by a seminar series with student presentations and group discussions focusing on recent developments in radical, enactive and ecological approaches to mind, brain and behavior.
Advanced Topics in Embodied Cognitive Science: Mind, Life, and Complexity (summer semester 2022, online)
Seminar exploring how ideas about complexity and nonlinear dynamics inform views about the nature of cognition (key terms: self-organization, autocatakinetics and autopoiesis) and about the relation between cognition and life (key term: the life-mind continuity thesis) as well as other biological phenomena occurring at different spatiotemporal scales, including (a) the timescales of behavior (i.e., seconds, minutes and hours), development (i.e., an agent’s lifespan) and evolution (i.e., the entire history of a species), and (b) the spatial scales going from the single cell, through entire organisms and organism-environment systems, up to the whole planet (Gaia hypothesis).