'From Egocentrism to Ecocentrism: 4E Cognition and the Ecological Mind in Contemporary World Fiction'

In her 2016 book Staying with the Trouble, the philosopher Donna Haraway claims that the Western philosophy of 'bounded individualism' is both scientifically and figuratively 'unthinkable' in our current era of ecological devastation. In a similar vein, philosophers of science such as Scott F. Gilbert and Helen E. Longino have identified the need for a cultural conception of a 'symbiotic' and 'interactive' view of life in light of the 'microbial turn' in biological science: instead of an individual unit, the model of the human body is now thought to be more like a multi-species consortium. This shift towards a more ecologically-embedded model of the human body has parallels in contemporary cognitive studies: the field of '4E cognition' considers the thinking self through the interactions of an embodied agent-environment system, in contrast to traditional cognitivism's internal, brain-bound representations of cognition. In the present context of rapid ecological degradation and climate change, the stakes for how humans cognitively and culturally understand and interact with their environments are high. The anthropologist Phillippe Descola has challenged the universalism of the modern West's naturalistic 'sense of nature', and explored how the diverse, non-dualistic ontologies of non-Western cultures might enable us in the West to see beyond a nature and culture dichotomy. While these proponents in the fields of anthropology, biology, philosophy and cognitive studies show an ecological shift in their investigations and understandings of human-nature relations, my thesis will investigate the ways in which contemporary literary studies can explore, examine and extend our understanding of what an 'ecological' worldview means.