The Peripheral Mind (OUP, 2013) now on pre-sale

My debut book, The Peripheral Mind. Philosophy of Mind and the Peripheral Nervous System (OUP, 2013) now on pre-sale. Check out the official FB page of the book for all the relevant links. The cover art by Alex Robciuc, as well as advance praise by Shaun Gallagher are pasted below. Enjoy!

I. Aranyosi, The Peripheral Mind, forthcoming at OUP

An excerpt from the preface:

My approach in this monograph could easily be classified as part of the currently burgeoning “embodied mind” school or trend in contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Where it differs from most other works in this field is, I would say, in that (a) it offers a somewhat more focused view of embodiment via offering a conceptual role to the PNS as such in analyzing mental phenomena rather than keeping the discourse at the level of notions like “body” or “action”, (b) it interprets the idea of the embodied mind not as most other philosophers, namely, representationally, as the body in the mind , but literally, namely, the mind as truly distributed over the body (in this sense, viz. of distinguishing it from most other popular approaches, I would rather call my approach “enminded body” than “embodied mind”), and (c) it relies a lot more on first-personal, phenomenological reflection when evaluating various theories about how things stand with the mind, without ending up in purely a priori conceptual analysis, but taking a lot of inspiration from empirical science (almost exclusively from neuroscience). Although most arguments I offer, and even the problems I raise in the book are, to my knowledge, new, the general points enumerated above, (a) to (c) are not totally absent from the current literature. I would especially like to express my intellectual debt to Shaun Gallagher’s work, whose methodology and general approach to various issues was a great inspiration, even if the particular issues and debates he has been involved with are not present in this work.

(cover design: I. Aranyosi, own body PET scan)