Sensorimotor Life. An Enactive Proposal (the Book)

It has been some time now since we published this book. At the time I was too busy working at Barcelona City Council and could not publish a post on this blog. It is now time to do so.

Chapters 5 and 6 of the book are based on my PhD thesis and I am proud to see it published within the more ellaborate framework of this book.

From the official summary of the book: «Sensorimotor Life draws on current theoretical developments in the enactive approach to life and mind. It examines and expands the premises of the sciences of the human mind, while developing an alternative picture closer to people’s daily experiences. Enactive ideas are applied and extended, providing a theoretically rich, naturalistic account of meaning and agency. The book includes a dynamical systems description of different types of sensorimotor regularities or sensorimotor contingencies; a dynamical interpretation of Piaget’s theory of equilibration to ground the concept of sensorimotor mastery; and a theory of agency as organized networks of sensorimotor schemes, as well as its implications for embodied subjectivity.»

The book is available online in various formats. You can download a PDF version of «Sensorimotor Life. An Enactive Proposal» here.

The book has received the following reviews so far:

• Baggs, E. (2018). A psychology of the in between? Constructivist Foundations, 13(3), 395–397.
• Høffding, S. (2019). Review of Dan Hutto and Erik Myin, Evolving Enactivism (2017, MIT press); Shaun Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions (2017, Oxford University Press); Ezequiel Di Paolo, Thomas Buhrmann, and Xabier E. Barandiaran, Sensorimotor Life (2017, Oxford University Press). Philosophy, 94(3), 492–499. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819119000044
• Ramírez-Vizcaya, S. (2020). A world-involving theory of agency: Review of Sensorimotor Life: An Enactive Proposal by Ezequiel Di Paolo, Thomas Buhrmann, and Xabier Barandiaran. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017. Adaptive Behavior, 1059712320976676. https://doi.org/10.1177/1059712320976676
• Witherington, D. C. (2019). Embracing Agency in All of Its Explanatory Complexity. Human Development, 62(3), 165–170. https://doi.org/10.1159/000496138