'From Egocentrism to Ecocentrism: 4E Cognition and the Ecological Mind in Contemporary World Fiction'

哲学家唐娜·哈拉威（Donna Haraway）在2016年出版的《与麻烦同在》（Staying with the Trouble）一书中声称，在我们当前这个生态破坏的时代，西方的“有限个人主义”哲学在科学上和比喻上都是“不可想象的”。类似地，科学哲学家，如斯科特·f·吉尔伯特和海伦·e·朗吉诺，根据生物科学中的“微生物转向”，已经确定了一种“共生”和“互动”生命观的文化概念的必要性：人体模型现在被认为更像是一个多物种联合体，而不是一个个体单位。这种向更加生态嵌入的人体模型的转变在当代认知研究中也有相似之处：“4E认知”领域通过具体化的主体-环境系统的相互作用来考虑思维自我，与传统认知主义的内部、大脑约束的认知表征形成鲜明对比。在当前生态迅速退化和气候变化的背景下，人类如何在认知和文化上理解其环境并与之互动的风险很高。人类学家菲利普·德斯科拉（philippe Descola）挑战了现代西方自然主义“自然感”的普遍主义，并探索了非西方文化的多样性、非二元论的本体论如何使我们西方人能够超越自然和文化的二分法。虽然人类学、生物学、哲学和认知研究领域的这些支持者在他们对人与自然关系的调查和理解方面表现出生态转变，但我的论文将调查当代文学研究可以探索、检查和扩展我们对“生态”世界观含义的理解的方式。

In her 2016 book Staying with the Trouble, the philosopher Donna Haraway claims that the Western philosophy of 'bounded individualism' is both scientifically and figuratively 'unthinkable' in our current era of ecological devastation. In a similar vein, philosophers of science such as Scott F. Gilbert and Helen E. Longino have identified the need for a cultural conception of a 'symbiotic' and 'interactive' view of life in light of the 'microbial turn' in biological science: instead of an individual unit, the model of the human body is now thought to be more like a multi-species consortium. This shift towards a more ecologically-embedded model of the human body has parallels in contemporary cognitive studies: the field of '4E cognition' considers the thinking self through the interactions of an embodied agent-environment system, in contrast to traditional cognitivism's internal, brain-bound representations of cognition. In the present context of rapid ecological degradation and climate change, the stakes for how humans cognitively and culturally understand and interact with their environments are high. The anthropologist Phillippe Descola has challenged the universalism of the modern West's naturalistic 'sense of nature', and explored how the diverse, non-dualistic ontologies of non-Western cultures might enable us in the West to see beyond a nature and culture dichotomy. While these proponents in the fields of anthropology, biology, philosophy and cognitive studies show an ecological shift in their investigations and understandings of human-nature relations, my thesis will investigate the ways in which contemporary literary studies can explore, examine and extend our understanding of what an 'ecological' worldview means.