Sarah Bro Trasmundi is Associate Professor at the Department of Culture and Language at the University of Southern Denmark. Her research interests include cognitive ethnography and anthropology, embodied imagination, distributed cognition and language, reading, healthcare, psychotherapy, dance, cognitive event analysis. In her work, she combines her background as a cognitive ethnographer with theory of radical embodied cognition and interaction. She has also analyzed reading in the age of digitalisation and how media shape the reader’s thinking. Her recent publications include “Aisthesis, Aesthetics and Cognition: Embodiments in Reading” (2024), “Becoming a Reader: Dwelling Within the Page” (2024), and “Dialogical Cognition” (2024).
Shaun Gallagher is the Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Excellence at the University of Memphis. His areas of research include phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, especially topics related to embodiment, self, agency and intersubjectivity, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of time. Dr. Gallagher has a secondary research appointment at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He has held Honorary Professorships at the University of Copenhagen, Durham University (UK) and the University of Tromsø, and visiting positions at Cambridge, Copenhagen, Paris, Lyon, Berlin, Oxford, and Rome. His recent books include The Self and its Disorders (2024, Oxford university Press) and Embodied and Enactive Approaches to Cognition (2023, Cambridge University Press).
Sara Heinämaa is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä. Her areas of expertise include phenomenology, philosophy of emotion, philosophy of mind, feminist philosophy, existentialism, and history of philosophy. She has published extensively on phenomenology of embodiment, intersubjectivity and normativity. Her work has also focused on topics such as gender, expressivity, values, and the political role of emotions. Professor Heinämaa’s recent publications include "Merleau-Ponty’s parallel between art and philosophy" (2024) and “Simone de Beauvoir: Encroachment, agency, and Embodiment” (2024), as well as the books Contemporary Phenomenologies of Normativity: Norms, Goals, and Values (2022) and Phenomenology as Critique: Why Method Matters? (2022).
Miriam Kyselo is Professor of Philosophy at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her research area is the philosophy of mind and cognition, philosophy of psychology, and interdisciplinary research in embodied cognitive science. She is interested in the self, the social body, interpersonal affordances and what happens when self and sociality are at stake. More recently, she wonders about commonalities between different types of no-self experience and how to navigate our conceptual and pre-conceptual grasp on them. Her most recent publication is “What Self in Self-Organization? Engaging Varela`s Epistemology for the Co-Embodied Self (2023)”.
Alva Noë is Professor of Philosophy, and Chair of the Department of Philosophy, at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Center for New Media, the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, and the Program in Critical Theory. Until the end of 2024, he is also an Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Free University in Berlin. He is the author of Action in Perception (MIT Press, 2004), Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (2009), Varieties of Presence (2012), Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (2015), Infinite Baseball (2019), and Learning To Look: Dispatches from the Art World (2022). His latest book is The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are (2023). He is currently at work on the topics of love, painting, and machine minds.
Merja Polvinen is Senior Lecturer in English and Docent in Comparative Literature at the University of Helsinki. She was part of the original steering group of the Cognitive Futures in the Arts and Humanities network and currently serves on the Executive Council of the International Society for the Study of Narrative. Dr. Polvinen’s work has focused on interdisciplinary literary studies – from complex systems dynamics in her PhD to her current work on cognitive approaches to literature. Her book Self-Reflective Fiction and 4E Cognition: An Enactive Approach to Literary Artifice came out in 2023 the Routledge series on Cognitive Humanities.
Tiina Pyykkinen is a Finnish visual artist whose works are centered on the act of seeing. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in 2014, and she was selected as Young Artist of the Year 2017. Pyykkinen’s work has been exhibited in several solo and group exhibitions in Finland, Germany and the UK, and her works can be found in the collections of Finnish art foundations and museums. Currently Pyykkinen's works can be seen in the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma which is part of the Finnish National Gallery. She is particularly interested in the refraction of light and the illusions that can be created by combinations of matt and glossy paint.
Erik Rietveld is Socrates Professor, Senior Researcher at the University of Amsterdam, and a Founding Partner of RAAAF, a multidisciplinary and experimental studio that makes site-specific art installations at the crossroads of visual art, architecture and philosophy. He previously was a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley and Fellow in Philosophy at Harvard University. Professor Rietveld is a philosopher of enactive or embodied cognition and skilled action. His current work also focuses on embodied making, the affordances of art, and coordinated collective action in times of climate crisis. Last year RAAAF was awarded the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture, under the patronage of UNESCO. His recent publications include “The Causal Mind: An affordance-based account of causal engagement” (2023), Reflective Situated Normativity (2021).
Andreas Roepstorff is a Professor in Cognition, Communication, and Culture at Aarhus University, in the department of Clinical Medicine and School of Culture and Society. He is also the Founding Director of the Interacting Minds Center at Aarhus University, and the co-founder of Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting (EER) with Olafur Eliasson. He works at the intersection of anthropology and clinical medicine. Professor Roepstorff’s recent publications include Biosocial Worlds. Anthropology of Health Environments beyond Determinism (2020, edited with Jens Seeberg and Lotte Meinert), “Concepts in Interaction: Social Engagement and Inner Experiences” (2023, with Borghi et al.) and “Studying the experience of meditation through micro-phenomenology” (2019, with Petitmengin et al.)
Jussi Saarinen is an Academy of Finland Research Fellow from the University of Jyväskylä. His research interests include situated/4E theories of mind, cognition, and emotion; philosophy of art and artistic creativity, and psychoanalysis. Saarinen’s current research project Situated Mind and Artistic Creativity focuses on the question: how does the creative mind work in making art? His recent publications discuss affective scaffolding and affective niche construction, existential feelings, and experiences of painting. They include articles such as “Making Space for Creativity: Niche Construction and the Artist’s Studio” (2022) and “How Museums Make Us Feel” (2021,) and the book Affect in Artistic Creativity: Painting to Feel (2021).
Marya Schechtman is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her main areas of interest are personal identity, practical reasoning, and bioethics. In her work, she has developed narrative and anthropological accounts of personal identity. Professor Schechtman has published widely on these topics and lectured around the world. Her recent articles include “Self-narrative, literary narrative, and self-understanding” (2024), “Personal Identity and Mental Time Travel” (2024), and “The View from Everywhere: Temporal Self-Experience and the Good Life” (2022). She is also the author of the books The Constitution of Selves (1996) and Staying Alive: Personal Identity, Practical Concerns, and the Unity of a Life (2014).
Evan Thompson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He works on the nature of the mind, the self, and human experience. His work combines philosophy of mind and cognitive science, especially embodied cognition and the neuroscience of consciousness, phenomenology, and Asian philosophical traditions. He has published several books, such as Waking, Dreaming, Being (2015); Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (2007), and The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (1991) (with Francisco Varela and Eleanor Rosch) that has become the centerpiece of enactivist theory. His most recent book is The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience, co-authored with Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser.