Distributed Cognition in Classical Antiquity

This collection brings together twelve essays by international specialists in classical antiquity to create a period-specific interdisciplinary survey of distributed cognition and the cognitive humanities.
The essays look at the ways in which cognition is explicitly or implicitly conceived of as distributed across brain, body and world in Greek and Roman technology, science and medicine, material culture, philosophy and literary studies.

This exploratory work will be valuable across the humanities as it reveals the historical foundations of our theoretical and practical attempts to comprehend and optimise the distributed nature of human cognition.


Miranda Anderson is a Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Douglas Cairns is Professor of Classics in the University of Edinburgh. Mark Sprevak is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh.

List of illustrations; Series Preface; 1. Series Introduction: Distributed Cognition and the Humanities, Miranda Anderson, Michael Wheeler and Mark Sprevak; 2. Introduction: Distributed Cognition and the Classics, Douglas Cairns; 3. Physical Sciences: Ptolemy's Extended Mind, Courtney Roby; 4. Distributed Cognition and the Diffusion of Information Technologies in the Roman World, Andrew Riggsby; 5. Mask as Mind Tool: A Methodology of Material Engagement, Peter Meineck; 6. Embodied, Extended and Distributed Cognition in Roman Technical Practice, William Short; 7. Roman-period Theatres as Distributed Cognitive Micro-ecologies, Diana Y. Ng; 8. Cognition, Emotions and the Feeling Body in the Hippocratic Corpus, George Kazantidis; 9. Enactivism and Embodied Cognition in Stoicism and Plato's Timaeus, Christopher Gill; 10. Enargeia, Enactivism and the Ancient Readerly Imagination, Luuk Huitink; 11. Group Minds in Classical Athens? Chorus and Demos as Case Studies of Collective Cognition, Felix Budelmann; 12. One Soul in Two Bodies: Distributed Cognition and Ancient Greek Friendship, David Konstan; 13. Distributed Cognition and Its Discontents: Three Episodes from the Classical Tradition, Thomas Habinek and Hector Reyes; Notes on Contributors.