The Philosopher's Path to San Jose

This dissertation aims to contribute to, and expand upon, two emergent movements in philosophy and cognitive science. The first is the move in the Western world to study non-Western and non-canonical philosophical traditions in a comparative and cross-cultural context. The second is the shift in contemporary cognitive science toward phenomenological approaches in embodied cognition, including 4E (embodied, enacted, extended, & embedded) cognition, ecological psychology, distributed languaging, and enactivism. This intersection promises to be especially fruitful because it is relatively unexplored, there is resonance between the many perspectives of embodiment around the world and problems faced by each movement are complementary. Instead of looking to this work for a single path toward a genuine cross-cultural cognitive science without borders, it should be understood as an invitation to consider how each tradition fits within the same world and then to reconsider our places within it.