Manuel Heras Escribano, "The Philosophy of Affordances" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019)
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What is the main focus of Manuel Heras Escribano’s new book?
Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, and I'm co host of the channel along with Robert Talise, Alexis MacLeod, and Sarah Tyson. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Miguel Eras Escribano, research fellow at the University of the Basque Country. His new book, The Philosophy of Affordances, is just out from Palgrave Macmillan. Ecological psychology is one of a number of contemporary theories that explains the mind in terms of embodiment and environmental situatedness, rather than inner symbol manipulation by brains.
JJ Gibson, a founder of ecological psychology, coined the term affordance to express a core concept of the view. As embodied situated organisms, we do not perceive objects, but rather possibilities for action. That is, rather than simply seeing a chair or a tree, we perceive the object as something that is sit onable or climbable. In his new book, Eris Escribano elaborates the basic idea of affordances as directly perceived possibilities for action available to us in an environment, and considers the relation of affordances to values, the type of ecological information that we perceive, and The nature of agency from the ecological psychological perspective and a political dimension to affordances.
Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Manuel Eras Escribano. Welcome to New Books in Philosophy. Hi, Garby. So I'm really looking forward to talking about your new book, A Philosophy of Affordances. Before we get to the book itself, which is a lot to talk about, maybe you can give us a bit of background about yourself, how you came to philosophy, and how you came to write the book.
Well, um I studied my I did my undergraduate studies in philosophy at the University of Granada in Spain. And there uh I was uh really interested in in the philosophy of mind and con the cognitive sciences. So after my undergraduate studies I I studied uh two masters. One master in logic and philosophy of science at the University of Santiago de Compostela. Uh where I um um studied a lot of uh philosophy of mind and and philosophy of cognitive science and I realized that if I wanted to to delve into the philosophy of cognitive science I should ac acquire some training um in in science. So I studied a master in neurosciences at the medical school of the Autonomous University of Madrid. um which is uh in Spain at least it is quite strange for a humanities
Student to enroll into this kind of um medical um Сталіс And there I acquired this uh background and I started to study uh my PhD. uh back in Granada again at the University of Granada. And at the time I met um The Perception and Action Research Group А де факультіо психологи of the um autonomous university of Madrid. So and they are the only um research group on on ecological psychology in in Spain. So I was fascinated by ecological psychology and how um um the mind and cognition and experience is understood from that from that perspective. But at the same time I realized that somehow, although there are a lot of authors that try to to connect uh ecological psychology with uh the philosophy of mind, there were still some blind spots and there were still some questions that remain unanswered and connections that were not uh established.
uh among b between the two disciplines. So I talked to my To my uh PhD advisor Manuel de Pinedo at the University of Granada, if it was interesting to Um uh to pursue to to write uh a PhD thesis on um affordances and the philosophical aspects of affordances and he said that it for sure that was really interesty in real really interesting. So I I wrote my PhD on on the issue and it that was some kind of initial stage of the book we are going to talk about. Today. So that is quite my my history.
Yeah, very good. Um so you've you've mentioned ecological psychology.
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