My latest book, Mind in Nature: John Dewey, Cognitive Science, and a Naturalistic Philosophy for Living (MIT Press, 2023), has three major themes: (1) That Dewey’s Experience and Nature is the greatest philosophy book of the 20^th Century; (2) that recent cognitive science and neuroscience research supports many of Dewey’s key claims, deepens and enriches many of his claims, and occasionally criticizes some of them; and (3) that Dewey’s gives us an existentially profound naturalistic philosophy for living. We defend and give neuroscience evidence for Dewey’s notion of experience and empirical method. In successive chapters, we emphasize the need for a non-dualistic, embodied, scientifically responsible theory of meaning, mind, consciousness, self, thought, knowing, and values. Dewey understood the central role of aesthetic dimensions in everything we experience, think, and do.  This includes the central role of feelings, moods, and emotions, as well as the pervasiveness of body-based values in our developing selfhood. A naturalistic philosophy reveals our proper place in the world, and shows us who we are (i.e., what our nature is), what we can know (and how), how we should live, and how we can cultivate a meaningful life in the natural world.

Out of the Cave: A Natural Philosophy of Mind and Knowing (MIT Press, 2021) argues that mind is a process, an activity, shaped by our ongoing evolutionary history and our individual cognitive and affective development over the course of our lives. From the perspective of current biology, psychology, neuroscience, and embodied cognition theory, knowing is not a fixed representation of a mind-independent world, but rather an activity for the re-making of experience under the influence of our basic values and our interactions with our physical, interpersonal, and cultural environments. The result is a pragmatist non-dualistic account of the self-in-process that is both scientifically supported and also existentially meaningful for our lives.

The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought: The Bodily Roots of Philosophy, Science, Morality, and Art (University of Chicago Press, 2018) presents a series of my recent essays that deal with the need to rethink aesthetics so that it takes into account the central role of body-based meaning. Viewed in this way, the arts can give us profound insights into the processes of meaning-making that underlie our conceptual systems and cultural practices. I show how our embodiment shapes our philosophy, science, morality, and art; what emerges is a view of humans as aesthetic, meaning-making creatures who draw on their deepest physical processes to make sense of the world around them.

Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason: How Our Bodies Give Rise to Understanding (University of Chicago Press, 2017) brings together a selection of essays from the past two decades that argue for the central importance of our bodies in everything we experience, mean, think, say, value, and do. This embodied conception of mind shows how meaning and thought are profoundly shaped and constituted by our bodily perception, action, and feeling. By constructing a positive account of human meaning-making that draws on the cognitive science of the embodied mind, I challenge some of the fundamental assumption of analytic philosophy and early cognitive science.