Technics and Enaction

Providing an innovative approach to conceptualising imagination or creativity

This book offers an alternative concept of imagination to the classical internalist and representationalist theory.

Émilien Dereclenne argues that contemporary conceptions of imagination and creativity in the field of cognitive science are guilty of a kind of dualism between mind and technics. Combining enacted, embodied, ecological, extended, embedded (5e) cognitive theories with material anthropology and the French philosophy of technics and imagination, Dereclenne challenges this approach. Instead, he highlights the role of technical and socio-material engagement in imaginative and creative processes. In doing so, he brings enactive philosophers like Lambros Malafouris, Shaun Gallagher, and Ezequiel Di Paolo into dialogue with the philosophy of André Leroi Gourhan, Gilbert Simondon, and Bernard Stiegler in order to showcase how French philosophers of technics can help 5E cognitive sciences further explore their theories of imagination.