EXCERPT ANTHONY MORGAN: Please can you start by saying a few things about the rise of embodiment within contemporary philosophy? It seems to me to be mainly used as a corrective against (i) the Cartesian notion of an immaterial mind, and (ii) the materialist tendency to place the mind in the brain. But what are the main positive claims that defenders of embodiment are making? PETER WOLFENDALE: I think that the meaning of the term ‘embodiment’ in philosophical circles is deceptively diverse, and that those who champion the concept are motivated by concerns that overlap less than is often appreciated. If they are unified by one thing, it is a rogues’ gallery of common enemies. Although Descartes is the most reviled of these, his errors are often traced back to some original sin perpetrated by Plato. However, in order to make sense of these conceptual crimes, it’s worth first distinguishing the explanatory concerns of cognitive science and artificial intelligence from the normative concerns of political and social theory, while acknowledging that both of these are downstream from more general metaphysical concerns regarding the difference and/or relation between matter and mind. So, although there are many purely metaphysical objections to the Platonic dualism of intelligible and sensible worlds and the Cartesian dualism of mental and physical substances, what really unites the embodiment paradigm is their objection to the outsized role that Plato, Descartes, and their inheritors give to ‘the life of the mind’ in explaining how we make our way in the world, and establishing which aspects of it we should value.…