Home – Home – Jornals – Philosophy of Sciences 2018 number 2

The enactivist approach, whose main principles were formulated in the 1990-s, has its origins in the phenomenological tradition. The authors of the approach sought to combine the scientific view of consciousness with philosophy of subjectivity, the carrier of which is always the bodily living being. In accordance with the phenomenological tradition, it is stated that consciousness, the body and the world cannot be considered in isolation from each other, since they are a unified system. In the philosophical aspect, enactivism follows phenomenology of M. Merleau-Ponty, who regarded the active living body as a basis of cognition. The peculiarity of the approach is a synthesis of phenomenology and data of modern neurophysiology. The paper characterizes the basic theoretical principles of the enactivist approach and gives examples of its supporters’ arguments.