I’m happy to report that Explorations in Media Ecology, the journal of the Media Ecology Association, will publish my article “Media Ecology and Bios Theoretikos: Philosophy as Extended Cognition.” I’m told the issue will be published sometime in June. I’ll post a link here when the essay is available. The abstract is below.

Media Ecology and Bios Theoretikos: Philosophy as Extended Cognition

In this article, I take a media ecology perspective on philosophy. This approach supports the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s (2013) claim that first philosophy is not metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, or epistemology but rather practice (askēsis). Sloterdijk’s practice-centered view of philosophy is shared by Pierre Hadot (2004) and Michael McGhee (2000), both of whom give askēsis a central role in philosophy. I draw on the work of these philosophers to show that philosophy is best conceived as an act of extended cognition performed amidst different media ecologies (Clark and Chalmers, 1998). To make this point, I start not with humans and our practices, but with spiders and theirs. When philosophy is seen as an instance of extended cognition, I argue, one can draw parallels between our practices and those of nonhuman species, who like us build artifacts to deepen their perception and understanding of their environments. To this end, I explore the settings that enable philosophical training. Philosophy on this view is facilitated by an ecology of affordance spaces (Gibson, 2015)—academies, libraries, monasteries, and more—whose design helps the philosopher perform certain maneuvers in thought, maneuvers that make apparent the conditions required for the bios theoretikos (the life of contemplation).