Strike while the iron is

Michael Wheeler opens his book with the following half-apology: “striking while the iron is lukewarm is sometimes the best strategy in philosophy” (Preface, p. x). He is referring to the fact that the main task of this book—to ferret out and critically assess the Cartesian legacy in contemporary cognitive science, replacing it (or at least altering it to better conform) with a philosophy of mind emphasizing the biological, embodied and embedded aspects of intelligence— was one he set for himself more than ten years ago. The work then culminated in his dissertation, completed in 1996. It is not a coincidence that this is the very same year my own dissertation was finished, on the very same subject. He is right that this topic was much on people’s minds at the time, and also right that it is less so now. The iron has indeed cooled. The apology is misleading, however, in suggesting that the time for useful work on the topic has nearly passed. The fight over embodied cognition in the 1990s was less about forging philosophically sound foundations for a new kind of cognitive science than it was about creating institutional space to allow such work to occur. For this purpose the arguments for the new paradigm, and against the old, only had to be convincing; they didn’t have to be right. The current flourishing of embodied and situated approaches to AI, cognitive science and robotics has shown that the arguments from that period were indeed convincing to many, but time and reflection has in fact cast doubt on whether they were right. This is precisely the situation that most calls out for philosophical reflection. Indeed, if Socrates is any guide, the temperature of the iron is inversely proportional to the need (and, as he discovered in the most distressing way, the general desire) for disruptive reflections of the sort in which philosophers specialize. Philosophers strike while the iron is, and very often, annoyingly, while other people are using it. As you will have figured out by now, Reconstructing the Cognitive World is a book by a philosopher and—although the author might wish otherwise—primarily for philosophers. There is much of interest here for the cognitive scientist, but any scientist who picks up this book must be willing not just to (re-)consider the foundations of her chosen field (a requirement that already narrows the candidate readers, albeit further than it probably should), but to do so by way of a heavy-duty, technical exegesis of a particular thread in the history of philosophy. The backbone of this work consists of a careful reading of Descartes’ philosophy of mind and nature, paired with an exegesis of Heidegger’s critique of, and alternative to, the Cartesian view. This is familiar territory to veterans of the fights between classical and embodied cognitive science, but, removed now from the battles of a decade ago, Wheeler cares less about whether Heidegger won, and more about whether he was right. Thus, Wheeler spends more than half of the book trying to figure out