My review of Richard Menary’s anthology, The Extended Mind, has been posted on Metapsychology Online Reviews (here). I want to thank the editor of Metapsychology, Christian Perring, for his patience while I finished the review. Between the fall-out at UNLV and the Nevada legislature shenanigans and moving to Oxford, Mississippi, I seemed to have forgotten about many of my professional obligations. This review fell through the cracks, along with other projects. I am just now picking up the pieces and moving forward.
Overall, I believe Menary’s book is a good anthology of work on extended cognition. But my gripes with the book outweigh the positive things I have to say. (1) I believe the editor could have included more recent work on the implications for extended cognition in areas like ethics and neuro-psychology. (2) I believe the book includes arguments that are not necessarily new and innovative; a lot of it rehashes old work. (3) Finally, critics of extended cognition are not well-represented in this anthology. It is not that the critics who appear in the anthology (i.e., Adams and Aizawa, and Read) do not provide good criticisms of the extended mind hypothesis; in fact, they do! It’s that the anthology appears to be very unbalanced. Only three of the 15 chapters are critical of the hypothesis.
So, I recommend Menary’s anthology, if only to have a sense of the debate’s landscape (not what is current and interesting about the debate).
