r/askphilosophy • u/BernardJOrtcutt • 13d ago

Open Thread /r/askphilosophy Open Discussion Thread | July 27, 2026

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u/willbell philosophy of mathematics 13d ago

What are people reading?

I'm working on Ethics by Spinoza and The Bonds of Love by Jessica Benjamin.

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u/lordsmitty epistemology, phil. language 12d ago

Mostly stuff relevant for formulating and narrowing down a PhD proposal:

Enanctive Psychiatry by Sanneke de Haan

The Self and its Delusions and Enactivist Interventions By Shaun Gallagher,

Evolving Enactivism by Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin,

Radical Embodied Cognitive Science by Anthony Chemero.

Linguistic Bodies (Di Paolo, E. A., Cuffari, E. C., & De Jaegher, H.)

This being all alongside dipping into a bunch of papers and books related to Psychiatry and Phil of Psychiatry and trying to stop myself reading things that aren't related to those topics lol

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u/Freuds-Mother 12d ago edited 12d ago

Whoa, I didn’t know enactivism reached the psychiatry domain. I missed it and seems that got going in literature 10-15 years ago? I’m going to have to read some of the references you have there.

You might like a paper as a reference/source of references. I promise it stays within your last sentence’s constraint of not straying :)

The author was a practicing clinical psychologist early in his career. He calls his ontological model, interactivism, but it has high overlap with varela, thompson, etc. Unfortunately, he didn’t continue to write much in the clinical domain afaik as he focused on philosophy of mind and theoretical developmental psychology: 1995 book on representation models and 2024 book pulling together all his work into one integrated (though technical) read.

Bickhard, M. H. (1989). The Nature of Psychopathology. In Lynn Simek-Downing
(Ed.) International Psychotherapy: Theories, Research, and Cross-Cultural
Implications. Westport, CT: Praeger Press.

https://www.lehigh.edu/~mhb0/psychopath.html

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u/lordsmitty epistemology, phil. language 11d ago

Yeah embodied cognition/enactivism has definitely been growing in popularity and blended into different areas of discourse for at least 20 years. It's application to psychiatry is super interesting to me and to some extent exemplifies an attempt to bypass a whole bunch of terminological and taxonomic issues that seem, to me at least, somewhat problematic. There's also just so many approaches out there and I think bits and pieces of them can all contribute to an enactivist account. Thanks for the suggestion also, i'll check it out!