Reading Kafka Enactively

I argue that understanding cognition as enactive-that is, as constituted of physical interaction between embodied minds and the environment-can illuminate the opening of Kafka's novel Der Proceβ (The Trial), revealing it as cognitively realistic in this respect. I show how enactivism is relevant to this passage in several ways: in terms of enactive vision and imagination (based on the sensorimotor account of vision), enactive language (with a focus on basic-level categorization and readers' motor responses), and enactive emotion (drawing on appraisal theory). I also suggest that these cognitively realistic features might result in ambivalent reactions on the reader's part. © Edinburgh University Press

Nec Cogitare Sed Facere: The Paradox of Fiction at the Tribunal of Ancient Poetics.

The place of emotions in aesthetic response has long been a topic in contemporary philo- sophical theorizing. One aspect of the debate in particular seems to have become a recalcitrant problem: when experiencing fiction, we experience emotional reactions towards what we know not to exist. Is this rational? In fact, is it even possible? This article deals with the so-called \u201cparadox of fiction\u201d from the viewpoint of ancient poetics. In the first section, I survey some of the main arguments proposed to (dis)solve the paradox in analytic philosophy. In the second and the third sections, I address what I consider two problematic assumptions of existing analytic approaches: their prescriptive, \u201cessentialist\u201d attitude and their exclusive focus on matters of content. By offer- ing a brief sketch of the ancient principles of \u201clikelihood\u201d and \u201cvividness\u201d, I argue that they pro- vide a direct and cognitively realistic answer to the paradox insofar as they account for the neutralization of doxastic features in imaginative acts and ground affective responses to fiction in the phenomenon of \u201caesthetic immersion\u201d, explained in experiential, rather than representational, terms