We are Intertwined Creatures - A Conversation with Prof. Tony Chemero
If you think about which verbs dominate formal education you’ll probably come up with a list like learning, thinking, reasoning, remembering, knowing, and maybe behaving. Now think about what images come to mind when you consider those verbs, or do a google image search and see what you get! I’m willing to bet that the most common images coming up are of individual heads, maybe with a visible brain or cogs, doing the thinking, the reasoning, the learning, the cognition. And to emphasise the point further, when we want to highlight that it’s more than one thinker or reasoner doing the work, we have to put clarifying adjectives or nouns in front, like group cognition, collective learning or collaborative problem solving. But the fact is, we are actually already “intertwined creatures” in our entanglement with each other and the world. We think, learn and reason all the time with and through each other and the objects we interact with, and the places we are in. My guest this week, Professor Tony Chemero, has been a major proponent of ‘radical embodied cognition’ for his whole career as a professor of philosophy and psychology. His latest book, brilliantly titled, ‘Intertwined Creatures: The Embodied Cognitive Science of Self and Other’ is an amazing articulation of just how interconnected we are as creatures and learners in the world. Tony is a Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Cincinnati, and a primary member of both the Center for Cognition, Action, and Perception[1] and the Strange Tools Research Lab.
As well as many academic articles, he is the author of:
Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (2009, MIT Press) - https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516471/radical-embodied-cognitive-science/
Phenomenology, with Stephan Käufer (2015, Polity Press; second edition, 2021) - https://www.wiley.com/en-be/Phenomenology%3A+An+Introduction%2C+2nd+Edition-p-9781509540662
Intertwined Creatures: The Embodied Cognitive Science of Self and Other (2026, Columbia University Press) - https://cup.columbia.edu/book/intertwined-creatures/9780231223195/
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