Prof Giovanna Colombetti

Giovanna Colombetti is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, Philosophy, and Anthropology of the University of Exeter. She studied Philosophy and Cognitive Science in Florence, Birmingham (UK), and Sussex, and held postdocs at the universities of York (Canada), Trento, and Harvard. In 2010-2014 she has been Principal Investigator of a Starting Grant funded by the European Research Council (ERC), titled “Emoting the Embodied Mind”. As part of this project she has looked at the implications of the “4E” approach in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science (in particular the “enactive” approach) for a variety of affective phenomena.  Her book The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind (2014, MIT Press), synthesises many of the ideas developed during this project. She is currently working on the “extended-mind” thesis and its potential applications to the affective domain. She is particularly interested in the notion of the “scaffolded-mind”, and in how work in material culture and technology studies can be used to illustrate the scaffolded nature of a variety of affective phenomena.