Abstrakt
The central argument of my talk is the claim that in his work the US novelist William Faulkner (re)presents the human mind in alignment with the view of the human mind that contemporary cognitive science and philosophy of mind advance. In other words, the concepts that have been emerging within the cognitive sciences in the past several decades are present in Fualkners novels formulated in narrative terms some sixty years before the so called "second cognitive revolution".
This "revolution" challenges the Cartesian view of the mind, the view identifying mind with the brain in the effort to situate the mind within the network of brain, body and world: it sees the mind as embodied, embedded in the environment, enacted in the moment, and extended beyond the skin. As an example of Faulkners view of the mind as embodied I look at the novel As I Lay Dying and its "language of the eyes" which serves as a basic process of theory of mind, or mindreading.
Theory of mind is a cognitive ability for understanding reasons for action, mental states and emotions of others.based on their behavior. Faulkner presents the human mind as fundatmentally embodied in a novel that has been seen as positing a dualistic account of mind and body by the critics so far.