Mark Johnson selected for OHC Faculty Research Fellowship
Mark Johnson, Professor of Philosophy and Philip H. Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences, was selected to receive an Oregon Humanities Center Faculty Research Fellowship, the Provost’s Senior Humanist Fellowship, to be used during Winter 2016 for his work on Embodying Philosophy: Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Value.
Johnson’s project “is to explore some of the more significant implications of embodied cognition for how we think about mind, self, meaning, reason, morality, and art.
The relevant evidence supports a number of important claims, such as that
- (1) there is no substantial unchanging self,
- (2) concepts are embodied, rather than being fixed, purely intellectual ideas,
- (3) there is no radical separation of thought and feeling,
- (4) mind emerges from a complex ongoing process of organism-environment interactions,
- (5) moral values arise within that very embodied process, and
- (6) this whole range of meaning-making activity is basically an aesthetic process.
In other words, I want to examine why our embodiment does, and should, matter to us as we try to figure out our lives.”