05/06/2026
📌課程名稱：【心靈與物質－陰暗面： 壓迫性的事物、敵對的框架和不適應的生態位】/ Mind and Materiality⎯The Dark Side: Oppressive Things, Hostile Scaffolding, and Maladaptive Niches
近年心靈哲學逐漸強調，心智並非只存在於大腦之中。我們的記憶、思考、情感與決策，往往仰賴各種外在事物的支持：筆記本、手機、照片、藝術作品，以及我們所處的社會與文化環境。
然而，這些環境不一定總是對我們有益。它們也可能限制我們的選擇、操控我們的注意力、加劇焦慮與壓力，甚至形成壓迫性的生活條件。
這門課將聚焦於心靈與物質互動的「陰暗面」，探討物質環境、社會制度與科技如何影響我們的認知與情感生活。我們也將進一步思考：當環境成為心靈的一部分時，什麼樣的環境能幫助我們活得更好？而什麼樣的環境正在悄悄地傷害我們？
透過當代心靈哲學與跨領域研究，這門課將帶你重新認識自己與周遭世界之間密不可分的關係。
🧑🦱授課老師：Christopher Jude McCarroll (游尚愷)
課程簡介：
Humans are embedded in material environments. From the objects and artefacts that surround us, to the people we share our lives with, and the places we inhabit. We live in material worlds. Situated or distributed approaches to the mind argue that these material things⎯bodies, artefacts, social practices, photographs, works of literature and art, and other aspects of the external environment⎯contribute in important ways to our cognitive and affective lives (Sutton 2006; Robbins & Aydede 2009; Menary 2018). The external world offers cognitive and affective support and can shape and scaffold our minds in important ways (Sterelny 2010; Heersmink 2018).
In this kind of view, humans and their environments can be seen as extended or distributed cognitive and affective systems. If an external resource (like a notebook or smartphone) functions in the same way as internal memory or reasoning—being reliably available, automatically used, and trusted—then it should count as part of the mind, and the subject coupled with the artifact can be seen as a distributed cognitive system (Clark & Chalmers 1998). Another aspect of the mind that has been the target of situated approaches is the way in which our affective lives interact with the environments we inhabit (Krueger 2014; Krueger & Szanto 2016; Piredda 2020). In this view, emotions should be viewed not merely as internal states that provide a subject with information about a certain situation, but rather as complex affective events, developed in interaction with the physical and the social environment (Griffiths & Scarantino 2009). We can regulate, organize, and maintain our affective life by manipulating everyday artifacts and spaces (Colombetti et al. 2018).
In many cases, this scaffolding of the mind is seen to be something that contributes positively to our cognitive economies. We scaffold the mind and it improves our cognition, positively regulates our emotions: “we feel, remember, reason, and plan more accurately, quickly or efficiently than we would without scaffolding” (Spurrett et al. 2025, p. 345). Nonetheless, scaffolding can also be bad for the mind (Sutton 2024). Scaffolding can also hinder or hamper our (mental) lives in some cases. Material things can be “oppressive”, leading to forms of injustice (Liao & Huebner 2021); we construct environmental niches to support our cognition but this can sometimes be “maladaptive” or “oppressive” (Coninx 2023; Fabry 2025); indeed, scaffolding can sometimes be “hostile”, in which there might be deliberate manipulations of our cognitive and affective openness (Timms & Spurrett 2023).
This course investigates this dark side of the way that minds and material interact. It examines how cognitive and affective states and processes can be affected in detrimental or maladaptive ways by the material and social environments, and discovers ways of improving this kind of bad scaffolding.
#研究所課程
🔗詳細課程資訊，請右轉心哲所網頁 https://phil.nycu.edu.tw/courseslist/
