Michelle Maiese

• PhD
• Professor at Emmanuel College - Massachusetts

In his discussion of "marginalized bodies," Leder maintains that members of oppressed social groups encounter not just discriminatory treatment and limited access to societal resources, but also "em-bodied injustice". Such injustice occurs when an "inferior group" is not only identified with the body as such, but also labeled as "having the wrong k...

Theorists commonly maintain that addiction involves compulsion or diminished self-control. Some enactivist theorists have conceptualized this disruption to autonomous agency in terms of embodied habits that become overly rigid, so that an agent enacts this pattern of behavior even in circumstances that call for the activation of a very different se...

The Mind-Body Politic is a study in the new discipline of political philosophy of mind, that aims to develop an embodied and enactive theory of social institutions, building on our 2009 study of the mind-body relation and mental causation, Embodied Minds in Action. In this sequel, we distinguish between (i) destructive, deforming social institution...

In accordance with the constructive, enabling approach to responding to critical commentaries, we’ve identified eleven more-or-less distinct “worries” that the commentators have expressed about MBP, and have attributed each such worry to one or more of the commentators; correspondingly, we’ve responded to the worries one-by-one, by construing them...

Relational trauma can be understood as a psychological injury that occurs in the context of abusive interpersonal relationships and appears to be correlated with a wide array of mental illnesses. However, one potential harm of trauma that has not received much attention from philosophers is the threat it poses to authenticity. To understand why rel...

Theorists commonly maintain that addiction involves compulsion or diminished self-control. Some enactivist theorists have conceptualized this disruption to autonomous agency in terms of embodied habits that become overly rigid, so that an agent enacts this pattern of behavior even in circumstances that call for the activation of a very different se...

Although mental health professionals traditionally have been viewed as sole experts and decision-makers, there is increasing awareness that the experiential knowledge of former patients can make an important contribution to mental health practices. I argue that current patients likewise possess a kind of expertise, and that including them as active...

Existing phenomenological accounts of anorexia nervosa suggest that various forms of bodily alienation and distorted bodily self-consciousness are common among subjects with this condition. Subjects often experience a sense of distance or estrangement from their body and its needs and demands. What is more, first-person reports and existing qualita...

In Embodied Minds in Action, Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese work out a unified treatment of three fundamental philosophical problems: the mind-body problem, the problem of mental causation, and the problem of action. This unified treatment rests on two basic claims. The first is that conscious, intentional minds like ours are essentially embodied...

Delusions of Thought Insertion (TI) are considered as one of the most complex psychotic experiences. More prevalent in schizophrenia, TI involves subjects reporting that entities of different nature have introduced thoughts or ideas into their minds. The particularity of this phenomenon is not that patients have been just caused to have certain unu...

Mun’s proposed taxonomy of theories of emotions highlights important commonalities and differences among a wide range of philosophical and psychological accounts and provides an astute mapping of the theoretical landscape. My critical comments focus primarily on the metaphysical account of the mind-body relation that Mun presents, and the implicati...

A growing number of theorists have looked to the enactivist approach in philosophy of mind or the affordance-based approach from ecological psychology to make sense of a wide variety of phenomena; some theorists believe that these theoretical accounts can offer rich insights about the nature of mental disorders, their etiology, and their characteri...

Existing research on the “weapons effect” indicates that simply seeing a weapon can prime aggressive thoughts and appraisals and increase aggressive behavior. But how and why does this happen? I begin by discussing prevailing explanations of the weapons effect and propose that these accounts tend to be over-intellectualistic insofar as they downpla...

Self-illness ambiguity involves difficulty distinguishing between patterns of thought, feeling, and action that are the ‘products’ of one's illness and those that are genuinely one's own. Bortolan maintains that the values, cares, and preferences that define someone’s personal identity are rooted in intentional emotions and non-intentional affects...

Theorists such as Charles Mills have argued that racism and white supremacy are pernicious, in part, because they result in an “epistemology of ignorance” whereby white people come to know the world in systematically distorted ways. Drawing upon insights from the enactivist approach and associated notions of habit and mindshaping, I argue that so-c...

Some critical philosophers of race have argued that whiteness can be understood as a technology of affect and that white supremacy is comprised partly of unconscious habits that result in racialized perception. In an effort to deepen our understanding of the affective and bodily dimensions of white supremacy and the ways in which affective habits a...

This book brings together insights from the enactivist approach in philosophy of mind and existing work on autonomous agency from both philosophy of action and feminist philosophy. It then utilizes this proposed account of autonomous agency to make sense of the impairments in agency that commonly occur in cases of dissociative identity disorder, mo...

One of humans’ distinctive cognitive abilities is that they develop an array of capacities through an enculturation process. In “Cognition as a Social Skill,” Sally (Haslanger, Australas Philos Rev 3:5–25, 2019) points to one of the dangers associated with enculturation: ideological oppression. To conceptualize how such oppression takes root, Hasla...

In 2017, the Departments of Health and Education in the United Kingdom initiated a national mental health agenda that includes new curriculum interventions and mandatory training courses for teachers. While the stated goal is to support children and young people with mental health difficulties, there are deeper economic and political forces driving...

Forthcoming in volume on "Embodied, Extended, and Ignorant Minds"

According to the medical model that prevails in the Western world, mental disorder is a form of illness, parallel to bodily illness, which can be diagnosed by a doctor on the basis of symptoms and administered treatments designed to “cure” it. However, it seems clear that how we understand “disorder” is influenced by cultural norms and values. Theo...

Most philosophical discussions of psychopathy have centered around its significance in relation to empathy, moral cognition, or moral responsibility. However, related questions about the extent to which psychopaths are capable of exercising autonomous agency have remained underexplored. Two central conditions for autonomous agency that are highligh...

The notion of affordance is a theoretical concept introduced by Gibson (1979) that emphasizes the complementarity of the animal and the environment. To make sense of the relational nature of affordances and the way in which they cut across the subjective-objective dichotomy, some theorists have looked to enactivism. While Gibsons formulation treats...

Work on situated cognition and affectivity holds that cognitive and affective processes always occur within, depend upon, and, perhaps, are even partially constituted by the surrounding social and environmental contexts. What some philosophers call a ‘mental institution’ consists of various toolsand technologies that help people to solve a particul...

This paper utilizes the enactivist notion of ‘sense-making’ to discuss the nature of depression and examine some implications for treatment. As I understand it, sensemaking is fully embodied, fundamentally affective, and thoroughly embedded in a social environment. I begin by presenting an enactivist conceptualization of affective intentionality an...

Although neoliberal social institutions shape the human mind in a destructive, deforming way, social institutions also have the power to help people break away from rigid mental habits. Indeed, some social institutions, working against the grain of dystopian social institutions in neoliberal societies, can make it really possible for us to self-rea...

One characteristic feature of the truly malign effect of destructive, deforming institutions in contemporary neoliberal nation-states is that they systematically build up what we call cognitive walls. A cognitive wall is an entrenched or habitual belief, memory, stereotypical mental image, or emotion that acts as an effective screen against reality...

According to the mind-shaping thesis, humans minds are necessarily and completely embodied; that is, they are neither merely brains, nor extended minds, yet all social institutions saliently frame and partially determine the social-dynamic patterns of essentially embodied consciousness and agency. Such literal mind-shaping is causal, partially dete...

Neoliberal ideology has infiltrated mental health practice and now guides the provision of mental health care. As a result, market values like individualism, self-reliance, and consumerism shape what is regarded as a rational, responsible, and “normal” mode of human agency. Mental health and illness are understood in relation to an ability to parti...

Destructive, deforming social institutions are those that make it difficult or impossible for the people who belong to them to satisfy their true human needs. Drawing on Marcuse’s distinction between true human needs and false human needs, we argue that true human needs are universal across humanity and essentially bound up with human dignity in a...

What we call political philosophy of mind fuses contemporary philosophy of mind and emancipatory political theory. On the philosophy of mind side, we draw from our own previous work on the essential embodiment theory and enactivism, together with work by Jan Slaby, John Dewey, Pierre Bourdieu, and J.J. Gibson. On the emancipatory political theory s...

We argue that neoliberal ideology has informed contemporary institutions of higher education in capitalist societies to such a great extent that our classical sense of education’s value and purpose has been negatively transformed and distorted into The Higher Commodification. Instead of scaffolding students’ capacities for engaged citizenry and aut...

By means of what we call reverse social engineering, one starts out with a vision of human life that actually satisfies true human needs and then, from the bottom-up, designs social institutions whose structure and dynamics promote the satisfaction of such needs. We propose that the best way to design a constructive, enabling institution is to reve...

According to Andy Clark’s Extended Mind Thesis, the operations that realize certain forms of human cognition do not do not stay neatly in the brain, but instead span brain, body, and world. While this thesis is best known as the hypothesis of extended cognition, Clark himself has wondered whether it also might be applied to affective states. What C...

David Rosenthal’s higher-order thought (HOT) theory says that for a mental state to be conscious, it must be accompanied by a higher-order thought about that state. One objection to Rosenthal’s account is that HOTs do not secure what Sydney Shoemaker has called ‘immunity to error through misidentification’ (IEM). I will argue that Rosenthal’s discu...

We argue that the notion of "mental institutions"-discussed in recent debates about extended cognition-can help better understand the origin and character of social impairments in autism, and also help illuminate the extent to which some mechanisms of autistic dysfunction extend across both internal and external factors (i.e., they do not just resi...

What Kyselo calls the “body-social problem” concerns whether to individuate the human self in terms of its bodily aspects or social aspects. In her view, either approach risks privileging one dimension while reducing the other to a mere contextual element. However, she proposes that principles from enactivism can help us to find a middle ground and...

Building on contemporary research in embodied cognition, enactivism, and the extended mind, this book explores how social institutions in contemporary neoliberal nation-states systematically affect our thoughts, feelings, and agency. Human beings are, necessarily, social animals who create and belong to social institutions. But social institutions...

The DSM characterizes major depressive disorder partly in temporal terms: the depressive mood must last for at least two weeks, and also must impact the subject "most of the day, nearly every day." However, from the standpoint of phenomenological psychopathology, the long-lasting quality of the condition hardly captures the distinctiveness of depre...

About 75% of subjects diagnosed with schizophrenia experience auditory-verbal hallucination (AVH) and report “hearing voices” that are not actually present. Wu maintains that AVHs should be understood as aberrant auditory experiences. However, his account is unable to make sense of a full range of AVH experiences and mistakenly treats AVH as an iso...

According to the enactivist view of the mind, there is close connection between being alive and being cognitive: to be alive is to be capable of cognitive engagements. The living organism does not passively receive and process stimuli from an external world, but rather helps to determine what counts as useful information on the basis of its structu...

According to the enactivist view of the mind, there is close connection between being alive and being cognitive: to be alive is to be capable of cognitive engagements. The living organism does not passively receive and process stimuli from an external world, but rather helps to determine what counts as useful information on the basis of its structu...

In recent years, a growing number of thinkers have begun to challenge the long-held view that the mind is neurally realized. One strand of critique comes from work on extended cognition, a second comes from research on embodied cognition, and a third comes from enactivism. I argue that theorists who embrace the claim that the mind is fully embodied...

Education theorists have emphasized that transformative learning is not simply a matter of students gaining access to new knowledge and information, but instead centers upon personal transformation: it alters students’ perspectives, interpretations, and responses. How should learning that brings about this sort of self-transformation be understood...

If someone with dissociative identity disorder (DID) commits a wrongful act, is she responsible? If one adopts the Multiple Persons Thesis, it may seem that one alter cannot be responsible for the actions of another alter. Conversely, if one regards the subject as a single person, it may seem that she is responsible for any actions she performs. I...

While many theorists have argued that dissociative identity disorder (DID) is a case of multiple selves or persons in a single body, I maintain that DID instead should be understood as involving a single self who suffers from significant disruptions to self-consciousness. Evidence of overlapping abilities and memories, as well as the very logic of...

Some theorists have argued that elements of the surrounding world play a crucial role in sustaining and amplifying both cognition and emotion. Such insights raise an interesting question about the relationship between cognitive and affective scaffolding: in addition to enabling the realization of specific affective states, can an affective niche al...

Reason and emotion have long been regarded as separate faculties or functions of the mind, and this dichotomy, in turn, has been associated with binary constructions of gender difference. Throughout the history of Philosophy, men have tended to be viewed as more active, intellectual, and rational, whereas women have tended to be viewed as more pass...

Our most basic way of being acquainted with ourselves is not through reflection, introspection, or higher-order thought; nor is it plausible to suppose that minimal self-consciousness requires that one possess a self-concept or have the ability to form beliefs or explicit judgments about oneself. Instead, according to the Essentially Embodied Self...

Embodied Selves and Divided Minds examines how research in embodied cognition and enactivism can contribute to our understanding of the nature of self-consciousness, the metaphysics of personal identity, and the disruptions to self-awareness that occur in cases of psychopathology. It begins with the assumption that if we take embodiment seriously a...

The long-standing debate between cognitive and feeling theories of emotion stems, in part, from the assumption that cognition and thought are abstract, intellectual, disembodied processes, and that bodily feelings are non-intentional and have no representational content. Working with this assumption has led many emotions theorists to neglect the wa...

Few theorists would challenge the idea that affect and emotion directly influence decision-making and moral judgment. There is good reason to think that they also significantly assist in decision-making and judgment, and in fact are necessary for fully effective moral cognition. However, they are not sufficient. Deliberation and more reflective tho...

Stephens and Graham (2000) maintain that in cases of thought insertion, the sense of ownership is preserved, but there is a defect in the sense of agency (i.e. the sense that one is the author or initiator of the thought). However, these theorists overlook the possibility that subjectivity might be preserved despite a defect in the sense of ownersh...

Stephens and Graham maintain that in cases of thought insertion, the sense of ownership is preserved, but there is a defect in the sense of agency (i.e. the sense that one is the author or initiator of the thought). However, these theorists overlook the possibility that subjectivity might be preserved despite a defect in the sense of ownership. The...

I will argue that the asynchronous discussion format commonly used in online courses has little hope of bringing about transformative learning, and that this is because engaging with another as a person involves adopting a personal stance, comprised of affec-tive and bodily relatedness (Ratcliffe 2007, 23). Interpersonal engagement ordinarily is fu...

This paper examines two influential theoretical frameworks, set forth by Russell Barkley (19971. Barkley , RA . 1997. ADHD and the nature of self-control, New York: Guilford Press. View all references) and Thomas Brown (20052. Brown, T. (2005). Attention deficit disorder: The unfocused mind in children and adults. New Haven: Yale University Press...

In the previous chapters, I have argued that our essentially embodied desire-based emotions and affective framing processes constitute essential parts of the necessary foundation for our sense of self, our ability to engage in moral evaluation, and our capacity for social cognition. It follows naturally from this account that impaired affective fra...

The guiding thesis of this book is that conscious, intentional creatures like us are essentially embodied, and that one fundamental manifestation of our essential embodiment is our experience of emotion. Insofar as the body is the place where we feel affected by the world, and through which we engage and seek to alter our surroundings or situation,...

In Chapter 2, I argued that, in order for us to make sense of the world’s meaning and significance, some parts of our surroundings must assume greater importance than others. As Pirsig (1974) writes in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: All the time we are aware of millions of things around us …d not possibly be conscious of these things an...

I have argued that decision-making and moral evaluation depend constitutively on affective framing, and also that these cognitive processes should be understood as enactive and essentially embodied. In this chapter, I will maintain that social cognition and interpersonal interaction likewise are a matter of emotional engagement, and that our abilit...

Many philosophers approach the issue of personal identity by seeking to address how it is that an individual can remain the same person over time despite various qualitative physical and psychological changes. Often such discussions raise questions about whether there is such a thing as a ‘person’ or ‘self’ that persists through time, and some phil...

Many philosophers of mind and mainstream neuroscientists remain committed to the broadly Cartesian notion that there is a ‘thing’ inside us which allows us to think and feel and is responsible for the wide range of conscious states we experience. While Descartes identifies this ‘thing’ as a non-material substance that exists independently of the bo...

Series Editors' Preface Acknowledgements Introduction The Essential Embodiment Thesis Essentially Embodied, Desire-Based Emotions Sense of Self, Embodiment, and Desire-Based Emotions The Role of Emotion in Decision and Moral Evaluation Essentially Embodied, Emotive, Enactive Social Cognition Breakdowns in Embodied Emotive Cognition Conclusion Notes...

In Embodied Minds in Action, Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese work out a unified treatment of three fundamental philosophical problems: the mind-body problem, the problem of mental causation, and the problem of action. This unified treatment rests on two basic claims. The first is that conscious, intentional minds like ours are essentially embodied...

In Embodied Minds in Action, Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese work out a unified treatment of three fundamental philosophical problems: the mind-body problem, the problem of mental causation, and the problem of action. This unified treatment rests on two basic claims. The first is that conscious, intentional minds like ours are essentially embodied...

In Embodied Minds in Action, Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese work out a unified treatment of three fundamental philosophical problems: the mind-body problem, the problem of mental causation, and the problem of action. This unified treatment rests on two basic claims. The first is that conscious, intentional minds like ours are essentially embodied...

In Embodied Minds in Action, Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese work out a unified treatment of three fundamental philosophical problems: the mind-body problem, the problem of mental causation, and the problem of action. This unified treatment rests on two basic claims. The first is that conscious, intentional minds like ours are essentially embodied...

In Embodied Minds in Action, Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese work out a unified treatment of three fundamental philosophical problems: the mind-body problem, the problem of mental causation, and the problem of action. This unified treatment rests on two basic claims. The first is that conscious, intentional minds like ours are essentially embodied...

In Embodied Minds in Action, Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese work out a unified treatment of three fundamental philosophical problems: the mind-body problem, the problem of mental causation, and the problem of action. This unified treatment rests on two basic claims. The first is that conscious, intentional minds like ours are essentially embodied...

In Embodied Minds in Action, Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese work out a unified treatment of three fundamental philosophical problems: the mind-body problem, the problem of mental causation, and the problem of action. This unified treatment rests on two basic claims. The first is that conscious, intentional minds like ours are essentially embodied...

In Embodied Minds in Action, Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese work out a unified treatment of three fundamental philosophical problems: the mind-body problem, the problem of mental causation, and the problem of action. This unified treatment rests on two basic claims. The first is that conscious, intentional minds like ours are essentially embodied...

In Embodied Minds in Action, Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese work out a unified treatment of three fundamental philosophical problems: the mind-body problem, the problem of mental causation, and the problem of action. This unified treatment rests on two basic claims. The first is that conscious, intentional minds like ours are essentially embodied...

In Embodied Minds in Action, Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese work out a unified treatment of three fundamental philosophical problems: the mind-body problem, the problem of mental causation, and the problem of action. This unified treatment rests on two basic claims. The first is that conscious, intentional minds like ours are essentially embodied...

In Embodied Minds in Action, Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese work out a unified treatment of three fundamental philosophical problems: the mind-body problem, the problem of mental causation, and the problem of action. This unified treatment rests on two basic claims. The first is that conscious, intentional minds like ours are essentially embodied...

Given that emotion plays a central role in driving intractable Conflict, it is important to develop Conflict intervention strategies that acknowledge and address the emotional side of Conflict. This article explores ritual, art, and joking as indirect, symbolic activities that facilitate emotional reappraisal and create a space where new understand...