Distributed Cognition in Classical Antiquity

308 Pages·2022·5.52 MB·English

by  Anderson, M., Cairns, D. & Sprevak, M.

Distributed Cognition in Classical Antiquity
Distributed Cognition in
Classical Antiquity
Edited by Miranda Anderson, Douglas Cairns
and Mark Sprevak
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© editorial matter and organisation Miranda Anderson, Douglas Cairns and Mark Sprevak, 2019
© the chapters their several authors, 2019
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ISBN 978 1 4744 2977 1 (epub)
The right of Miranda Anderson, Douglas Cairns and Mark Sprevak to be identified as the editors of
this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and
the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
Contents
List of Illustrations v
Series Preface vi
1. Distributed Cognition and the Humanities 1
Miranda Anderson, Michael Wheeler and Mark Sprevak
2. Distributed Cognition and the Classics 18
Douglas Cairns
3. Physical Sciences: Ptolemy’s Extended Mind 37
Courtney Roby
4. Distributed Cognition and the Diffusion of Information Technologies in
the Roman World 57
Andrew M. Riggsby
5. Mask as Mind Tool: A Methodology of Material Engagement 71
Peter Meineck
6. Embodied, Extended and Distributed Cognition in Roman Technical
Practice 92
William Michael Short
7. Roman-period Theatres as Distributed Cognitive Micro-ecologies 117
Diana Y. Ng
8. Cognition, Emotions and the Feeling Body in the Hippocratic Corpus 132
George Kazantzidis
9. Enactivism and Embodied Cognition in Stoicism and Plato’s Timaeus 150
Christopher Gill
10. Enargeia, Enactivism and the Ancient Readerly Imagination 169
Luuk Huitink
iv contents
11. Group Minds in Classical Athens? Chorus and Dēmos as Case Studies of
Collective Cognition 190
Felix Budelmann
12. One Soul in Two Bodies: Distributed Cognition and Ancient Greek
Friendship 209
David Konstan
13. Distributed Cognition and its Discontents: A Dialogue across History
and Artistic Genre 225
Thomas Habinek and Hector Reyes
Notes on Contributors 240
Bibliography 243
Index 287
List of Illustrations
Figure 6.1 Detail after an artist’s rendition of the Darius Vase (South Italian
red-figure vase found at Canosa, Puglia, dating to about 340 to 320 bce,
now housed at the Museo Archaeologico Nazionale in Naples, Italy). The
seated calculator manipulates a mounted counting board while holding a
writing tablet. 105
Figure 6.2 Schematic images metaphorically underlying Latin’s expressions
of mental activity. 111
The plate section can be found between pages 70 and 71.
Plate 1 Detail from the Pronomos Vase. Attic red-figured volute krater by
the Pronomos Painter, c. 420–400 bce (Naples, NM 81673). Credit: akg-
images/Album/Oronoz.
Plate 2 Red-figure chous or oinochoe fragment, c. 430 bce. American
School of Classical Studies at Athens: Agora Excavations (P. 32870).
Plate 3 Raphael, School of Athens, Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican Palace.
Photo credit: Erich Lessing/ART RESOURCE, New York.
Plate 4 Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with Numa Pompilius and the Nymph Egeria,
Musée Condé, Chantilly. Photo credit: Harry Bréjat/RMN-Grand Palais
(Domaine de Chantilly).
Series Preface
This book, like the series of which it is part, explores the notion that the mind is
spread out across brain, body and world, for which we have adopted ‘distributed
cognition’ as the most comprehensive term. Distributed cognition primarily draws
evidence from philosophy, cognitive science, psychology, linguistics and neurosci-
ence. Distributed cognition covers an intertwined group of theories, which include
enactivism and embodied, embedded and extended cognition, and which are also
together known as ‘4E cognition’. An overview and explanation of the various
strands of distributed cognition are provided in the general introduction.
Distributed cognition can be used as a methodology through which to pursue
study of the humanities and is also evident in past practices and thought. Our
series considers a wide range of works from classical antiquity to modernism in
order to explore ways in which the humanities benefits from thinking of cognition
as distributed via objects, language and social, technological and natural resources
and environments, and to examine earlier notions that cognition is distributed.
Theories of distributed cognition are transformative in terms of how we understand
human nature and the humanities: they enable a different way of perceiving our
interactions in the world, highlighting the significant role of texts and other cultural
artefacts as part of a biologically based and environmentally grounded account of
the mind. Theories of distributed cognition offer an opportunity to integrate the
humanities and the sciences through an account that combines biologically and
culturally situated aspects of the mind. The series illuminates the ways in which past
ideas and practices of distributed cognition are historically and culturally inflected
and highlights the cognitive significance of material, linguistic and other sociocul-
tural developments. This evidence has the potential to feed back into cognitive sci-
ence and philosophy of mind, casting new light on current definitions and debates.
Each volume provides a general and a period-specific introduction. The general
introduction, which is replicated across all four volumes, aims to orientate read-
ers unfamiliar with this area of research. It provides an overview of the different
approaches within distributed cognition and discussion of the value of a distributed
cognitive approach to the humanities. The period-specific introductions provide a
more detailed analysis of work in the cognitive humanities in the period covered
series preface vii
by the volume, before going on to reflect on how the essays in the volume advance
understanding in the humanities via distributed cognition.
The project from which this series emerged provided participants with an online
seminar series by philosophers working on various aspects of distributed cogni-
tion. These seminars are publicly available on the project’s website (http://www.
hdc.ed.ac.uk/seminars). The seminars aim to help researchers in the humanities
think about how ideas in distributed cognition could inform, and be informed by,
their work. Four workshops were held in the summer of 2015 at the University of
Edinburgh and were attended by nearly all the volume contributors. The work-
shops brought participants together to collaborate in ways that contributed not
just to the making of this series but to the development of this approach to the
humanities. From the springboard of the seminar series, through the gathering
together of scholars from across a range of disciplines and by ongoing interaction
with the editorial team during the production of the final essays, the aim has been
to provide a set of rigorous analyses of historical notions of distributed cognition.
The series is deliberately exploratory: the areas covered by the essays are indica-
tive of the benefits of the general approach of using distributed cognition to inform
cultural interpretations. The first four volumes of the series concentrate primarily
on Western Europe; however, we envisage further future volumes that will expand
the scope of the series. If distributed cognition is understood as we contend, then
this understanding has the potential to be valuable across the humanities as part
of a new type of intellectual history. The four volumes are arranged chronologi-
cally and each of the volumes is edited by a period specialist (Cairns, Anderson,
Rousseau, Garratt), a philosopher (Wheeler or Sprevak), and Anderson, whose
central involvement in all four volumes ensured overall consistency in approach
and style. At the very moment when modern-day technological innovations reveal
the extent to which cognition is not just all in the head, this series demonstrates
that, just as humans have always relied on bodily and external resources, we have
always developed theories, models and metaphors to make sense of the ways in
which thought is dependent on being in the world.
Acknowledgements
This series emerged from the project ‘A History of Distributed Cognition’ (2014–
18), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), whom we
should like to thank most warmly for their support. The idea for the project first
came about in 2010. Miranda Anderson realised that the resonances she was
exploring between recent ideas on distributed cognition and Renaissance notions
of the mind were not just a matter of a correlation between two points in time, but
reflected an important aspect of the mind in history that has been neglected, one
that, fittingly, might be best explored through a collaborative project. Our interdis-
ciplinary team has worked closely together developing the project, the monograph
series and this general approach to the humanities: ours has been an intellectual
endeavour akin to Hutchins’s description of a ship’s crew successfully navigating
viii series preface
by means of collective computation (1995). With Douglas Cairns as Principal
Investigator and the core project team of Miranda Anderson, Mark Sprevak and
Michael Wheeler, we have collaborated closely both between ourselves and with
other scholars. For volumes 3 and 4 respectively, the editorial team were joined
by period specialists George Rousseau and Peter Garratt, who helped shape these
volumes. Boleslaw Czarnecki, research assistant on the project during 2016–17,
helped liaise with contributors and with the organisation of public engagement
activities during this time. We were fortunate to have had two excellent audi-
tors, in the shape of Terence Cave and Tim Crane, who used their years of
accumulated experience and wisdom to help monitor our progress. Our advisory
board offered expertise from across a wide spectrum of academic disciplines: Andy
Clark, Giovanna Colombetti, Christopher Gill, David Konstan, Karin Kukkonen,
Duncan Pritchard, Andrew Michael Roberts and Patricia Waugh. We are very
grateful to the philosophers who came on board to provide us with the online
seminars and joined us in online discussion: Andy Clark, Giovanna Colombetti,
Shaun Gallagher, John Sutton, Deb Tollefsen, Dave Ward, Dan Zahavi, as well
as our own Michael Wheeler. The editors would also like to thank those scholars
(John Bintliff, Orazio Capello, Nick Lowe, Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas and Lisa
Sherbakova) who made valuable contributions to the project workshops but whose
papers could not for various reasons be included in the final volume.
The editorial team is especially grateful to Duncan Pritchard and Eidyn, the
University of Edinburgh’s Philosophy Research Centre, for their support of a
pilot of this project in 2012–13. The Balzan Project, ‘Literature as an Object of
Knowledge’, led by Terence Cave, also kindly supported the project, providing
funds for the images on our website. The project has benefited from the involve-
ment of many of the participants from the Balzan Project in our workshops and vol-
umes including Guillemette Bolens, Terence Cave, Mary Crane, Karin Kukkonen,
Raphael Lyne, Emily Troscianko, and our own Miranda Anderson. Meanwhile,
the AHRC-funded Cognitive Futures in the Humanities Network (2012–14),
co-led by Peter Garratt, with Michael Wheeler as a founding s teering-committee
member, has also fostered further productive interactions and cross-fertilisation.
We warmly thank the National Gallery of Scotland for helping us to source and
secure our website images. The National Museum of Scotland (NMS) was our
supportive project partner, and NMS staff met with the team to discuss and assist
with the development of public engagement activities. These activities included
a series of recorded public lectures, during which museum curators and academ-
ics provided their perspective on the cognitive implications of museum artefacts.
Malcolm Knight, the multitalented man behind the Scottish Mask and Puppet
Centre, illustrated the cognitive dimensions of masks and puppets and provided
much entertainment during one of the NMS lectures. NMS also provided us with
their classrooms for our school workshops. Lisa Hannah Thompson was an invalu-
able contributor to the development of our ideas on how best to shape the material
and the programme for children in order to connect in fun and effective ways.
series preface ix
Editorial Notes
Contributors have been allowed to follow their own preferences with regard to
the use of subscript versus adscript iotas, as well as in the use of direct translitera-
tion (versus the tradition anglicised or latinised forms) in rendering ancient Greek
proper names. In following this policy the editors have sought to impose consist-
ency within rather than between chapters.
The Edinburgh History of Distributed Cognition
Series Editors: Miranda Anderson and Douglas Cairns
Scholars from across the disciplinary spectrum track the notions of distributed
cognition in a wide range of historical, cultural and literary contexts from
antiquity through to the twentieth century.
Distributed Cognition in Classical Antiquity
Edited by Miranda Anderson, Douglas Cairns and Mark Sprevak
Distributed Cognition in Medieval and Renaissance Culture
Edited by Miranda Anderson and Michael Wheeler
Distributed Cognition in Enlightenment and Romantic Culture
Edited by Miranda Anderson, George Rousseau and Michael Wheeler
Distributed Cognition in Victorian Culture and Modernism
Edited by Miranda Anderson, Peter Garratt and Mark Sprevak
Visit the series website at edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ehdc